Tonight at 8:30PM, Nuroa and Highgrowth Partners will sponsor TechCrunch Barcelona Meetup with Mike Butcher. We organized the event on very short notice, but it looks like it will be a success, with more than 100 people signed up to attend. Of course, there’s often some variation between the number of people that sign up and the number that actually attend, but in either case, we’ve pretty happy. And nuroa got mentioned in TechCrunch, which is always cool.

The event will be at a cool new hotel, Granados 83, which came highly recommended by my friend and fellow entrepreneur Santiago Porrero, who also helped put us touch with the public relations and reservations department.

All in all, no complaints. They were able to offer us a really cool option on very short notice and at a very good price - an open bar of wine and cava (Spanish champagne), plus some light snacks for 100 on their rooftop terrace with views of the Eixample.

I’m not sure if it’s the open bar, the views, or the chance to network with other entrepreneurs and with Mike, but in any case, the response has been surprisingly encouraging.

I hope to see you there tonight! And if not, I’ll be sure to post pics from the event in tomorrow’s post.

Happy San Jordi’s Day! I’ve gotten neither a book nor a rose, which kind of sucks, but I’m trying to keep upbeat.

For those you outside of Catalunya, Sant Jordi (”Saint George’s Day” for English speakers) is a special day, similar to Valentine’s Day, but not quite as commercial. All around the streets of Catalunya, there are small vendors with small, folding tables selling roses and books for a few euros so that couples (or friends or even bosses) can express their love for and appreciation of one another. Women walk around town with roses, men show off their books and everyone enjoys the beautiful springtime weather.

Sant Jordi’s Day is the Day of the Book and the Rose in Catalunya, and celebrates a martyred Roman soldier who was decapitated when he refused to kill Christians. There are popular stories of San Jordi and a dragon. Through a random lottery, the king’s daughter was chosen to be given as a sacrifice to a dragon that was terrorizing the village of Montblanc, but San Jordi arrived just in time to kill the dragon and save the beautiful princess.

Giving roses in celebration of San Jordi has been done at least since the Rose Fair began in the 15th century. The book part came into effect around 1930. April 23 was chosen as the official day in Catalonia, because it was the day on which Cervantes and Shakespeare, among others, died. Quite logically, it’s also the accepted date on which San Jordi died in 303 AD.

Speaking of love, Mariah Carey is the queen of the love song, and I’m really loving her new hit, Touch My Body. It explains what happens after you’ve given your partner the rose or book for San Jordi’s day. Touch My Body was the number one song in the US for the last couple of weeks, only recently replaced by Leona Lewis’s Bleeding Love. In addition to the mellow beat and sweet vocals, I like the reference to a web 2.0 start-up. It gives me something to which I can aspire.

First, Mariah tells her lover how she feels about him:

I know that you’ve been waiting for it
I’m waiting too
In my imagination I’d be all up on you
I know you got that fever for me
102
And boy I know I feel the same
My temperature’s through the roof

But then being the paparazzi-stalked star that she is (when she’s not begging for media attention, that is), she warns her lover not to try to embarass her on the Internet:

If there’s a camera up in here
Then it’s gonna leave with me
When I do (I do)
If there’s a camera up in here
Then I’d best not catch this flick
On YouTube (YouTube)

That’s when you know that you’ve hit the bigtime. Not when you get paid $1.65 billion for your not even 2-year old start-up. Not when important bloggers and analysts note that you dominate your category more than Google dominates search. It’s when a superstar like Mariah Carey name-checks you in her number 1 song without even asking to get paid for it or having to explain who you are. That’s when you know you have become an important part of popular culture.

With all of the commotion about Expofinques’s seeking bankruptcy protection and continuing signs of a real estate crisis, I almost forgot to mention that nuroa has reached an agreement with Spain’s leading real estate group, Metrovacesa, to open up a new homes section to our property search engine.

I have to say that I really admire Metrovacesa’s approach. We first got in touch with them, when they invited Victor (the author of our Spanish blog “Sin Techo“) to a meeting to talk about their aggressive new Internet strategy. A lot of real estate groups are just starting to bet aggressively on advertising online, but Metrovacesa is already one step ahead; they’re not just trying to advertise properties, they want to complete the transaction online.

They’ve got cojones, and we admire that. And since we like to think that we also have cojones, we figured they’d make ideal partners.

I’d like to think that this is just the first of many such deals. After all, Metrovacesa is Spain’s leading real estate group, so convincing them was a pretty big test for us. Metrovacesa is one of the only listed Spanish real estate companies whose share price continues to increase, even as all of the other real estate groups struggle to withstand very brutal attacks on their share prices, or simply struggle to stay out of bankruptcy court.

They obviously have a clue as to what they’re doing. And it’s always exciting to know that market-leading companies have confidence in our project.

By the way, thanks to all of the journalists, bloggers and press services that wrote about the story, including:

• Javier Martín from Loogic
• Carmen López from OjoInternet
• Cinco Dias
• Yahoo Finanzas
• El Economista
• Finanzas.com,
• Carlos Mantero,
• Victor Aloi (Sin Techo), and
• Europa Press.

In our effort to stay cutting edge and try out new things, we’ve launched our own video channel at nuroa.es and nuroa.de called “NuroaTV“. I think that this makes us the property search engine to delve seriously into videos.

And no, we’re not trying to be YouTube II, but we do think that video is just another format for presenting our users with relevant information and feedback from other consumers. I think that the results — that is, the video below — speaks for itself!

In any case, last weekend a bunch of us (along with our young video director, Xesc Estapé and his production team) hung out in the centre of Barcelona to see what average people thought about various issues, one of which was the effect of the real estate “crisis” on the Spanish elections, which will take place this Sunday. We thought that it was timely given that even the New York Times had written a story about real estate and the Spanish elections.

Our series is called: “¿y tú qué piensas? (so what do you think?)“, and it fits into our strategy of offering hyperlocal content that keeps real estate consumers well informed about current market conditions. For the moment, the video is on a separate page on Nuroa’s website, but we will soon integrate our videos directly into the search results page.

For this first video, we went to the streets of Barcelona to see what the Spanish public really thought about José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Socialist prime minister, and his conservative rival, Mariano Rajoy in the context of the housing crisis. Let’s just say that people were generally pissed about the current situation.

But don’t take my word for it. Take a look for yourself! And please let me know what you think about the video. (Warning: The video is in Spanish, but there are still quite a few very funny images that can be understood no matter what language you speak!)

Last week Sophie and I went to Paris for the Le Web event. Whereas ETRE probably has the best networking and is over-the-top elegant, and DEMO Germany is a must for anyone wanting to enter the German market, Le Web is easily the coolest tech event that I’ve ever attended (Essential Web is probably second).

By cool, I mean that it felt like I was at a cool, exclusive party — kind of like when my friends and I snuck into Puff Daddy’s VIP Party when the MTV Awards came to Barcelona. But that’s another story . . .

At ETRE, the guests are important but not really focused on being cool. It’s more like being invited to a world summit where you can actually meet and interact with world leaders. At DEMO, you have all of the German VCs available to you. At Le Web, the speakers and other guests are cool, public figures but probably not the main attraction. Some of them gave 20-minute extracts of what should really be much larger discussions. In fact, in a world where almost everyone has a blog and has posted his or her best presentations on YouTube, you usually don’t learn anything new at large conferences geared to general-interest audiences full of non-entrepreneurs. If you want to participate in longer, more substantive conversations with entire micro-communities of commentators, analysts and entrepreneurs, go read your favorite entrepreneur or VC’s blog or become one of her “friends” on Facebook or search for her presentations on YouTube. There are a lot of options that are cheaper than paying the hefty entrance fees and travel expenses to go to a conference.

But if you do go to a conference, it’s nice to feel welcomed, as if you are a VIP guest. And that’s what Le Web excels at. It’s clear that they spent lots of time designed to make the event feel special and singular — making it comfortable and elegant, as opposed to just functional and boring.

A few highlights:

• The networking lounge was full of modern art work and live artists drawing while entrepreneurs networked on comfortable couches and/or watched the main conference on large plasma TVs.
• There was the Michelin-star type lunch, with chefs preparing foie, shrimp, fondues, raclettes and other great meals, and other waiters serving wine, cocktails or whatever beverage might capture your attention.
• Each guest was introduced with electronica / house music, which certainly woke me up at 9AM in the morning
• Loïc Le Meur graciously introduced himself to each guest at the party, smiling broadly and being a good host, even when Phillipe Starck spoke about 1 hour more than his allotted time.
• Kevin Rose had a very intimate and personal conversation with a Business Week journalist, who asked him about Digg’s groupies.
• Most of the presentators cursed and spoke in a lot more “vulgar” terms. It was surprising on the one hand, but it lent to the atmosphere that the audience was being allowed to hear open and honest conversations between influential Internet opinon-makers. No bullshitting. Just the real deal with lots of cursing.
• Most of the attendees were dressed stylishly and intelligently, as if we were all part of an exclusive Rive Gauche soiree.
• And, of course, there was the fact that so many people went. Bloggers. VCs. Tech analysts. Entrepreneurs. It seems that we all go to the same conferences, but people seemed a lot happier and cheerful at this one. Various blogs had speculated that there’d be 2000 people attending (clever, aggressive marketing). At the event, however, Loïc mentioned that 800 people would attend, and it seemed to me that there were fewer than that. A good showing, but fewer than 1000 people in the same room at the same time. And a lot of the tickets seem like they were comped — i.e., free for friends of friends of Loïc and certain bloggers.

That being said, it was definitely a very cool event. The coolest, most elegant tech event around by far.

A Wall Street Journal reporter interviews Dan Nye of LinkedIn (CEO of LinkedIn since Feb. 2007) to find out:

• How they differentiate themselves from Facebook and MySpace;
• Whether they have an inferiority complex since they “only” have 18 million users; and
• How they’ve grown over the last year (now over 200 employees).

It’s an interesting example of product differentiation and amping up a start-up.

Le Web 3 is now over. It was an awesome conference, about which I’ll write later.

The one comment that you get a lot at these conferences, however, is: “Wow! There certainly seems to be a lot going on in Barcelona these days.” I hung out a bit with Nicole Simon, formerly of Blognation Germany, and she told me that she thought it’d be cool to do a conference in Barcelona, given that Germans and French bloggers want to know more about what’s going on in the Spanish tech scene (and I suppose, in Spain more generally).

Well, now that should be a lot easier. Javier of Loogic has just launched Loogic in English. Loogic is kind of like Spain’s TechCrunch. I try to read it every day to see what’s going on in the Spanish tech scence. Javier is also a really nice guy and often willing to give you useful product feedback. His advice definitely helped make nuroa into a better product.

And Loogic is one of the most read Spanish tech blogs, so if you have a product that you’d like to launch, there’s no better place to do it.

Congrats, Javier! I think this is a great iniative and sign that the Spanish tech scene is going global!

Here’s another viral video making the rounds. I first became aware of it when Kara Swisher posted about it, noting that it had made Robert Scoble spew Diet Coke out of his nose. Then Iñaki mentioned it when Oriol and I had lunch with him and Dani on Wednesday (btw, really nice guys. I’d invited them via Facebook to meet up with us. They quickly said yes and then even paid for our lunch! We chatted for about 2 hours about nothing and everything. A good time was had by all, and we will pay for the next meal! We’ll probably even invite them to our next party, though they’ve made us promise to keep the video cameras off . . . .) And then today, I noticed that various VC blogs were posting the video.

So I could no longer resist the peer pressure.

I think the video’s mildly humorous and relevant only to tech geeks (have I become one of those?). But in the end, I’m a bit of a lemming (i.e., easily influenced). If influential people say it’s important, I guess it must be important. And if the makers of the video recommend that I put it in a blog (and important bloggers have done so), then I guess I should do it too.

Maybe that’s what Dan meant about content not being the key factor?

I promise to try to be more original going forward . . . . I’m not in high school anymore . . . If the cool kids jumped off a bridge, I wouldn’t jump. Would I? . . . .

Next week, Sophie and I will be heading to Paris for Le Web3 and a couple of business meetings. I will be taking my trusty video camera, with the hopes of posting some of the highlights. According to the folks at Le Web3, 1300 people from 40 countries will show up. I can’t wait to see what the party will be like!

Anyway, Loïc Le Meur, France’s best known blogger, video-blogging entrepreneur and organizer of Le Web 3 is now on a major marketing campaign to promote Le Web 3 (and his new project seesmic.com, which is still in alpha). I get daily video updates from him on Facebook about what’s going on at Seesmic, all of the major tech blogs are offering free tickets or discounted tickets to Le Web 3 to spur attendance, and major newspapers like the Financial Times are writing articles about Loïc and Le Web 3.

Watching his commitment to self-promotion is cool, because I’ve gotten some interesting lessons about what we can do to promote nuroa.

Highlights from the FT article:

• Seesmic.com, a video-blogging platform, is Loïc’s fifth start-up, and he moved from Paris to San Francisco, because he thinks that Silicon Valley is the only real destination for entrepreneurs that want to launch global Internet brands. It’s a bit ironic that the person responsible for organising one of Europe’s biggest Internet events firmly believes that the US is the only place to be if you really want to be relevant in the Internet space. But Loïc justifies it by saying that Europe’s 22 languages and geography complicates deal-making, while San Francisco is at the epicentre of deals. In his words: “The way you do partnerships here, everyone’s a block away or 20 minutes away in Palo Alto. If I need to set up a partnership with [micro-blogging service] Twitter, I call them, we have coffee, and two hours later the deal is done. If I were in France, there’s a nine-hour time difference and it’s like you don’t matter.” If even marquee-level European entrepreneurs with direct access to world leaders feel irrelevant if they are not in Silicon Valley, what does that mean for the rest of us?

• On a more optimistic note, Loïc provides his top 10 tips for entrepreneurs. I’ll re-post them here and comment on them in more detail in the future. In general, I’d just say that they are very insightful, but as with most things, much of it is easier said than done.
  1. Don’t wait for a revolutionary idea. It will never happen. Just focus on a simple, exciting, empty space and execute as fast as possible
  2. Share your idea. The more you share, the more you get advice and the more you learn. Meet and talk to your competitors.
  3. Build a community. Use blogging and social software to make sure people hear about you.
  4. Listen to your community. Answer questions and build your product with their feedback.
  5. Gather a great team. Select those with very different skills from you. Look for people who are better than you.
  6. Be the first to recognise a problem. Everyone makes mistakes. Address the issue in public, learn about and correct it.
  7. Don’t spend time on market research. Launch test versions as early as possible. Keep improving the product in the open.
  8. Don’t obsess over spreadsheet business plans. They are not going to turn out as you predict, in any case.
  9. Don’t plan a big marketing effort. It’s much more important and powerful that your community loves the product.
  10. Don’t focus on getting rich. Focus on your users. Money is a consequence of success, not a goal.

Harvard’s alumni magazine, 02138, is generating a lot of attention for an article about Facebook’s creation and the various lawsuits initiated by other Harvard alumni against Mark Zuckerberg. The magazine got a lot of juicy tidbits from protected legal documents that a court clerk accidentally turned over to the article’s author. Facebook quickly put some of its millions to good use and filed legal motions trying to convince a judge to order the magazine to remove references to the protected legal documents, but they’ve apparently lost the motions and the information is still on 02138’s website.

In general, Zuckerberg seems like an aggressive guy with questionable ethics, but I’d aready posted about that. In addition, with all of the negative press surrounding Beacon (Facebook’s overly aggressive advertising system), Zuckerberg is realizing that the media often builds you up only to then tear you down.

In some sense, I feel sorry for Zuckerberg (or as sorry as you can feel for a 24-year-old self-made billionaire). He’s trying to finish puberty while navigating his way in a high-stakes, fast-paced, cut-throat business culture with international media outlets and tech analysts scrutinizing his every move. As one commentator humorously notes: “Maybe 13 year-olds shouldn’t be CEOs.”

But what’s cool about the 02138 article is that they’ve posted online some of the tawdry tibits that Zuckerberg definitely didn’t want anyone to see — they’ve included PDFs of Zuckerberg’s college application, his online journal, his testimony before the Harvard disciplinary committee, his depositions, etc. (Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal notes the irony that Zuckerberg wants to have his private life protected, even as he tries to monetize all of the private details of Facebook’s users via Beacon.). Interesting reading . . .

A few highlights:

• Zuckerberg once handed out business cards that read: “I’m CEO … bitch.”
• He has noted that he prefers Asian women.
• During March 2006 negotiations with Yahoo executives, Zuckerberg refused to meet over a weekend because his girlfriend was in town. “When I’m hanging out with her, I tend not to be that engaged [in work],” he said. (This might not seem like such a big deal in Europe, but it’d be absolutely unheard of in the United States, particularly when an Internet giant like Yahoo is meeting with you because they want to buy your start-up for $1 billion.)
• Zuckerberg owns 20 percent of Facebook, which means that on paper he’s worth $3 billion.
• Zuckerberg learned to code in sixth grade (at about 12 years old), when he got first desktop PC and the book C++ for Dummies.
• As a senior in high school, Zuckerberg and friend Adam D’Angelo designed a music plug-in called Synapse that played songs in patterns based on the user’s listening habits. D’Angelo is now Facebook’s chief technology officer. When tech website Slashdot linked to the plug-in, WinAmp, Microsoft, AOL, and others sought to buy Synapse, but the two friends decided not to sell it at first. Soon it was too late and the big companies were no longer interested. (Let’s hope for his sake that history doesn’t repeat itself!)
• Zuckerberg is really confident in his coding ability, but less so in his design ability. So when he starts a project, he starts first with the design. In his words: “I know I can code well, but I’m not so confident about the design and I know how important that is to the final product, so I always like to get the design out of the way first … I start with a simple design and build pages on top of that.”
• Zuckerberg is well known for programming long hours without eating and with little sleep. He claims that he coded the original Facebook site in just over a week, during Harvard’s exam period.
• As a sophomore at Harvard, where he was a computer science major, Zuckerberg got into trouble when he created a website called “facemash” — a kind of Hot or Not service that put photos of two Harvard students side-by-side and asked users to choose who was hotter. To get the photos, Zuckerberg had hacked into Harvard’s servers and copied pictures from student directories, informally known as facebooks. He admits in his journal that it was a crappy thing to do: “[O]ne thing is certain, and it’s that I’m a jerk for making this site. Oh well. Someone had to do it eventually … ” Harvard’s disciplinary committee (known as the Ad Board) placed Zuckerberg on probation for “improper social behavior.” It was that notoriety that caused the guys at ConnectU (the site that allegedly “inspired” Facebook) to ask him to do the programming for their proposed social networking site.
• Though his parents are affluent (he’s the son of a dentist and a psychiatrist), when Zuckerberg went to Silicon Valley in the summer of 2004 without an internship to seek funding and work on Facebook, his parents paid only for his mobile phone bills and health insurance. He decided to drop out of Harvard at the end of the summer to stay in Silicon Valley (at that point, the company had 250.000 users), funding the company with the rest of the money that his parents had saved up for his college education.
• In Silicon Valley, networking paid a huge initial role in Zuckerberg’s ability to get financing for Facebook. During the summer of 2004, he became friends with Sean Parker, one of the founders of Napster. Parker advised Zuckerberg on how to set up a company and introduced him to VCs. In return, Zuckerberg made him company president. Zuckerberg later forced Parker to step down after he was arrested for cocaine possession. But having Parker on-board helped bring in millions of dollars of venture capital.
• Zuckerberg is also involved in another lawsuit involving Eduardo Saverin, one of the original founders (he owned 30%) who says he was forced out when Zuckerberg incorporated Facebook, diluted Saverin’s stake and became sole director.
• At Harvard, Zuckerberg claimed that money was the least important thing to him when he did a project: “I don’t really like putting a price-tag on the stuff I do,” he told Harvard’s daily newspaper, the Harvard Crimson. “That’s just, like, not the point.”

This guy’s certainly experienced a lot for someone who’s only 24 years old!