Next in my series on top international Web apps is Spain. The previous countries profiled were Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom and Russia.
The information in this post comes from two people: Eduardo Perez Orue from the Spanish Virtual Desktop product EyeOS, plus a R/WW reader named Carlos (sorry I didn’t get his last name).
An interesting fact about Spain’s web apps is that most sites are presented with multilingual engines. Eduardo told me that Spanish Web entrepreneurs think that Spanish-only sites have a limited audience – “only 300 million people or so” (!) – so a lot of them create multilingual apps.
Also, Eduardo noted that the big three (Yahoo, Google and MSN) are a big part of the market. Almost everybody uses Yahoo.es and Google.es – and Google and YouTube are used for videos, etc. This may sound obvious, but remember that a lot of the international markets R/WW has profiled so far are not dominated by ‘the big 3’ – Russia and Korea for example.
Eduardo’s Picks
Here are Eduardo’s favorite Spanish apps (and Carlos’ follow after that).
Tagzania – a geomapping site with excellent features; you can create your own “geoposts” and it automatically produces a KML file of your posts for Google Earth. Here is Eduardo’s account and the KML of his videos (in the form of a travel videoblog).
MobuzzTV is an online video channel.
Bankinter is a banking website, which is an unusual thing in the web20 world. Eduardo said it’s “not really a great web site, but the integration of the web with the SMSs (text messages on cell phones) is very good. You can set alarms in your web page to get an SMS when you get money, when you transfer money, when you reach a certain balance, etc. I have an alert every time my credit card gets charged, so when I go to a restaurant I can see inmediately how much they charge me in my phone – and if they charge only once! The alerts arrive sometimes before I get the paper to sign from the waiter…”
FON is the new routing invention of an Argentinean entrepreneur living in Madrid. The Fon router shares your DSL or cable connection so that other people can use it. In exchange, you get to use other users’ wifi. Eduardo thinks it’s a great idea and notes that the developer got backup from Google and Skype.
Other Spanish Web Apps
Digg clone: Meneame.net is the biggest and most followed digg clone in Spain and Latin America. Eduardo says it’s not a full digg clone, in that it has improvements in some aspects.
Slashdot clone: Barrapunto excellent site, now shadowed a bit by the digg clone Meneame (similar to what’s happened in the Western world).
Podcasts: Comunicando and Triunfa en internet
Classifieds: Loquo is a copy of craigslist that has been having a bit of success lately. Eduardo has his own classifieds play, in the form of a new app called Zolow.com – which he says “is our version of a digital bulletin, the kind you find in a supermarket.” I’ve looked at it myself and am intrigued…
Video channels: MobuzzTV is the best (mentioned above). Also see Cálico Electrónico, which despite its difficult name is an impressive Flash animation site. Eduardo says go to “capítulos” and watch one. They have thousands of subscribers. Also Eduardo mentions fresa.TV, another one he’s involved with. He says that MobuzzTV is better, “but we are aiming at the non-geek market.”
Blogger clone: http://www.lacoctelera.com/, which is popular in Spain.
Monster clone: http://www.infojobs.net/
Barradevoces / Barofvoices allows you to leave messages in your blog a la voicemail from Skype, Ekiga, etc.
QDQ has pictures of thousands of buildings in Spain, so you can search for an address and see what the building looks like (type Castellana 2 for instance in the street address in Madrid).
Endeve is an online invoicing system.
Video downloader to download YouTube or Google Video videos.
MMORPGs: La Prisión is the biggest one in Spain.
Xiclets (Eduardo is also involved in this – he’s a busy guy!) allows you to create mini pages in seconds.
eyeOS is a virtual desktop service that (you guessed it) Eduardo is involved in 🙂 I can confirm though that it’s not in this list to make up the numbers, as I reviewed it recently on ZDNet and it is without doubt one of the global market leaders in the small but growing WebOS space.
Carlos’ Picks
Carlos from Spain also sent me a great list of local apps. Some of these are repeats of what Eduardo’s list, but Carlos has some good notes – so I’ve left his list pretty much as-is.
First here are some Spanish apps that are available in english:
- MusicStrands (http://www.musicstrands.com/ )
- Panoramio (http://www.panoramio.com/)
- Tagzania (http://www.tagzania.com/)
- The Ad Cloud (http://www.theadcloud.com/)
- Tractis (http://www.tractis.com/ )
- Vootext (http://www.vootext.com/)
- ZoomClouds (http://www.zoomclouds.com/)
- ZoomBlast (http://www.zoomblast.com/ )
The following apps are mainly Spanish language ones, although I’d be interested to know how many of these are multilingual (as per Eduardo’s note above). Perhaps some Spanish-speaking people can let us know in the comments to this post?
Comments below are by Carlos…
Social Networks
http://www.econozco.com/ (business networking, like LinkedIn)http://qdamos.es/ (social, just contacts)http://www.egrupos.net/ (for some, the MySpace of the Spanish world – from the same Zoom developers (see above), this is probably the most prolific 2.0 company in the Spanish world so far.)
Blogging platforms:
http://www.bitacoras.com/ (oldest and probably the largest blogging platform in Spanish)http://www.blogalia.com/http://www.blogia.com/ (not as plentiful but many good & popular blogs live here)http://www.zoomblog.com/ (yup, the Zoom guys again)http://www.compareblogs.com/ (some really cool experiments on blog stats)
Aggregators and Digg-like:
http://www.feedness.com/http://www.meneame.net/ (like Digg but in Spanish, very popular – yes you can feel the “meneame” effect in the Spanish world just like the Digg effect in the US but at a smaller scale of course)http://www.fresqui.com/ (Meneame runner-up, nicer UI, 1/4 of the success)
Others:
http://www.caleio.com/ (Online calendar, in English)http://www.mirablog.com/ (blog search engine)http://www.ataja.es/ (like tinyurl but in Spanish, not sure this would be considered a web 2.0 app)http://www.mytv0.com/ (add TV to your site/blog/etc. The service sounds interesting but I haven’t tried it)http://www.magnatuneasy.com/ (a sleeker UI and RSS feeds for magnatune.com)http://www.eventtos.com/ (create & keep track of events)
Thanks to Eduardo and Carlos for the excellent info here. As with the other international web apps posts, I encourage people to add any Spanish apps that weren’t listed. But more importantly, tell everyone what the Spain Web industry is like – what’s happening there that’s different to Silicon Valley or other places? I got some fantastic comments on the Russian post (a few of them challenging it, but that’s fine too). So feel free to comment on this post if you’re from Spain or speak Spanish and know the apps that come from there well.
Update: Antonio Fumero points out an excellent list of Spanish apps at Loog(ic). There are also additional apps being listed in the comments of my post here.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)