One in ten thousand

by irenet - October 7, 2008

Once in a while users drop by the 11870.com HQ to meet the team, chat and try out our espresso machine. We love meeting the people that inhabit 11870.com, not just for the photo-op, but also for the great stories and tips they give us on how to improve the site.

From left to right: Marux, irenet and ferujaldon

Last week our visitor was Marux, a San Franciscan whose network of friends is spread over cities like Madrid or Istanbul. Through her visit and her page here we’ve learned that she has her eye out for good vegetarian food, is a self-declared coffee whore and loves vintage motor bikes.  If you’re reading this: thanks for stopping by!

And speaking of users… we reached the myriad recently. Yes, there are now over ten thousand 11870.com inhabitants sharing their favorite places and services.

categories: just for fun

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Summer of 2008!

by irenet - September 5, 2008

Summer’s a perfect time for discovering: people take off and travel the world, returning with great pictures and stories about places they’ve been to. We’ve invited all our users to participate in an end of summer challenge that fits the occasion.

Discover two new places on 11870.com before September 30th and you’ll be in for a nice surprise… so says Maestro Armero, who’s being very secretive about the whole thing We’ll find out what he’s up to in October, when the challenge comes to an end.

If you’d like to participate too, just add your discoveries (places you’re the first to save) to your page and tag them as summer2008. Remember, the purpose of this is to pool our knowledge: so tell us a bit about your experience there!

categories: just for fun

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Choice: Best of 2008 in Madrid

by irenet - August 25, 2008

We took the hint. Some places just stand out for whatever reason. And there are five hundred places in Madrid that now stand out in particular thanks to recommendations by locals and visitors on 11870.com.  We thought these businesses would like to share this recognition with their customers,  so we sent each of the 500 a sticker like the one you see below.

This is the front of the restaurant Integral Artemisa, for a full list of the places go to Best of 2008 in Madrid.

If you’re walking through Madrid and happen to spot one of these stickers,  you might like to add a picture of it to our Flickr pool.

About the sticker

Note the gray area in the bottom part of the sticker, it includes the name of the service and the address of its 11870.com page. What’s that black and white square to the left? It’s a datamatrix code, this bar code can be scanned with a cell phone to access the 11870.com page with information related to the service in question. A site tracking the use of datamatrix featured our initiative, they’re an interesting source if you’d like to find out a little more about 2d codes.

categories: features

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As seen on TV

by irenet - July 24, 2008

… and in the newspapers, and in magazines, and at the entrance to our favorite restaurants, and in your mobile phone too. 11870.com is garnering lots of media attention in Spain these days. Prestigious newspapers like El Pais, Publico or El Diario Vasco have covered us recently. We were even parodied alongside other very addictive social sites in El Jueves.

If you speak Spanish, or if you’re just curious about what our offices look like during business hours, you can watch a video of a TVE (Spain’s national public TV) program that featured us a few days ago.

categories: around the net, press

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picks from the office listening pile

by irenet - July 11, 2008

At 11870.com we share a love for music… and our records too. We thought it would be fun to let you in on some of our favorite songs via Muxtape.

Our tastes are varied: soul, pop, rock, dance, flamenco… so it’s a pretty crazy list. Since muxtapes can only be 12 songs long a lot of team members got left out in the first one. They get dibs on choosing what goes on the next mix though, as we plan to update our tape from time to time.

Here’s what’s on 11870.mix Volume 1, and who chose it. Stay tuned for Volume 2!

irenet: Aroah - An orchid is a flower that thrives on neglect
urbilateria: Terremoto de Jerez - Fiesta en el barrio Santiago
ferujaldon: Scissor Sisters - Comfortably Numb
overgon: Deep Dish - Flashdance
lngky: Lauryn Hill - Everything Is Everything
antiácido: Santogold - You’ll Find A Way (Switch & Sinden Remix)
fresus: Stereophonics - Jealousy
mitrofan: Havalina - Dónde Irán
dagger: Looptroop - Don’t Hate the Player
peralta: MGMT - Time To Pretend
alexei: Jaco Pastorius - Portrait Of Tracy
gemel: Interpol - Evil

categories: just for fun

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Enhanced searches on Yahoo: Search Monkey and 11870.com

by irenet - July 3, 2008

SearchMonkey is Yahoo Search’s open platform, it allows developers to build online web apps that enhance Yahoo Search results: making them more visual and informative. Nayra Quesada, an 11870.com user and MBA student in Oviedo, has recently developed three SearchMonkey apps that display 11870.com results within your Yahoo Search results page.

To visualize the enhanced results you need to be logged in to Yahoo! and to have activated the applications. There are three different applications available:

• 11870 Application

• 11870 Product’s Images Application

• 11870 Product’s Comments Application

In the above screen capture you can see that all three applications are installed, though only Product’s Comments is displaying information.

categories: around the net

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Mobile-friendly version

by irenet - June 27, 2008

Answering users requests for a better integration of 11870.com with mobile phone platforms, we’ve created a new light-weight version of 11870.com. It’s available at http://m.11870.com and features keyboard shortcuts and a practical link to a list of services in the vicinity of your original search.

The idea was to create a simple, easy to use and fast tool that would keep the amount of data transfer low so as to not run up your phone bill.

Right now the version is only available in Spanish, sorry! Though if you look at the screencaps below you can see that all you really need to know to get around it is the word “buscar”.

You’ll be able to see the exact address and phone number for each service matching your search, and to dial that number as well… great for booking a reservation when you’re on the move!

You can also see a map, which is quite handy.

We’ll keep you updated on further developments as we continue to perfect this version.

categories: features

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Firefox 3

by irenet - June 23, 2008

Last week, Mozilla launched Firefox 3. The judges are now deciding if the designated “Download Day” will in fact break the Guinness World Record of downloads in 24 hours. So far 557.000 plus users in Spain have downloaded the new version. We don’t know how many of these are among the 8 million downloads recorded in the 24 hour period being reviewed, but we do know where a couple of them came from.

Though we use different browsers at 11870.com, Firefox is quite popular with us. So we were very pleased to see that Spanish and Catalan speakers taking a look at the Getting Started section found 11870.com recommended there. In the Spanish version we were right up there with Craigslist and MySpace and in the the Catalan one we were in between Loquo and Facebook. Nice!

Screen caps follow. First in Spanish:

And here’s what it looks like in Catalan:

categories: around the net

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Android and 11870.com

by irenet - June 12, 2008

Excuse Moi, developed by Miguel Hernandez, is the first mashup to use 11870.com’s API with Google’s Android platform for mobile phones. The results can be seen in this video:

Using 11870.com’s API and the phone’s geolocation API, Excuse Moi can find places and services near the device in real time (including Google Maps paraphernalia, directions, etc). It’s also possible to personalize searches for a certain area: shops, restaurants, mechanics…

The application also allows a user to view everything 11870.com has on the businesses (reviews, pictures and so on). It also allows you to call the telephone number listed for a service on 11870.com and to locate the place on a map together with your own location.

We’re very pleased to see people using our API for interesting projects and look forward to see many more in the future.

categories: technical

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And following the party line…

by irenet - June 10, 2008

Last Friday 11870′ers and Madrid Babel met up at Madrid’s Barbu Club for Voyage, Voyage, an international travel-themed party… and we had a blast!

Thanks to everyone who came out! Thanks as well, to Madrid Babel coordinators Fran and Susana and to their host of collaborators for helping make it possible. Those of you who missed it - if someone did, the place was packed!- may peruse the pictures of this party on our Flickr page or at Madrid Babel’s Facebook or Yahoo Group.

If you were there and lucky enough to win one of our 11870.com t-shirts in the raffle, here’s a place to show it off.

Also we’d like to congratulate simplegearl, the winner of Landing in Madrid, read her entry here. With all the excitement, we forgot to have her remove the prize from it’s protective red bag for the photo op.

But yes, there’s an iPod Touch in the bag…

categories: events

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