2006 May « Julian Martinez’s Blog

Archive for May, 2006

Moving house this week

May 22, 2006 at 6:22 pm · Filed under Adoos

This week is going to be really hectic again…

1) Monday I’m moving house
I’m moving with three friends from school to an apartment in the center of Madrid.
The apartment is pretty amazing (not too expensive) and my new
flatmates are relax and cool. They are all consultants: 2 Bainies and 1
Booz.

2) Tuesday, time to visit my hosting company
I am probably visiting my hosting company to order 2-3 additional
servers. We need more Apache web servers because the sites are
struggling again during peak-time (6pm-7pm GMT+1).

3) Wednesday to Friday I’m flying to the US
This time I am visiting NYC for two days and spending one day in SF.

4) Saturday house warming party!
Back to Madrid. We are organising a massive house warming party!

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Maradoninho!

May 19, 2006 at 6:26 pm · Filed under General

Brazil and Argentina have always been sworn enemies. So imagine the
shock it would cause Argentineans to see their favourite son in a
Brazil shirt. Almost as large as the shock England fans might feel
seeing Bobby Charlton playing for Germany!

[click on image to open video]

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Let´s Zoom the Pics…

May 15, 2006 at 6:28 pm · Filed under Adoos

New features!
It’s now possible to zoom the pictures
of the listings by simply clicking on them. We’ve started saving all
the pictures at high resolution, 800×800 pixels, so that you can view
the products crystal clear!

Additionally, we have made some design tweaks here and there.

Enjoy

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Innovate! Europe 2006

May 12, 2006 at 3:53 pm · Filed under Adoos

Another conference next week! I am not sure if I will be able to make this one as it lasts three days. Innovate Europe 2006

Innovate!Europe gathers Europe’s most influential players in the
technology innovation ecosystem. Whether you want to talk acquisition
strategies with VCs, talk technology with pioneering engineers, or talk
about the role of government in innovation, you’ll be in the right
place if you’re at Innovate!Europe.

When: May 15 – 17 2006
Where: Zaragoza, Spain

Confirmed speakers include
* Isabel Aguilera, Google Spain and Portugal
* Miguel M. Latasa Alzuri, Informatica El Corte Ingles
* Michael Arrington, TechCrunch
* Juan-Alberto Belloch, Mayor of Zaragoza
* Niclas Bergstrom, ReadSpeaker
* Mike Carr, British Telecom
* Sherry Coutu, Angel Investor
* Ulf Dalhsten, European Commission
* Fred Destin, Atlas Ventures
* Philip Gallagher, Guidewire Group
* Judy Gibbons, Accel Partners
* Marc Goldberg, Occam Capital
* Eric Huet, Ventech Capital
* Alberto Larraz, Government of Aragon
* Loic Le Meur, Six Apart
* Simon Levene, Yahoo! Europe
* Cedric Maloux, AllPeers
* Gil Penchina, eBay Europe
* Sherry Roberts, Symbian
* Francisco Ros, Ministry of Industry, Spain
* David Rowe, Microsoft EMEA
* Steve Schlenker, DN Capital
* Hervé Schricke, XAnge Private Equity
* Gary Stewart, Goa Internet Services
* Mark Tluszcz, Mangrove Capital Partners
* Mark Veverka, Barron’s
* Niklas Zennström, Skype

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100 000 Active Ads!

May 9, 2006 at 3:55 pm · Filed under Adoos

The traffic growth has been
phenomenal in April. We even had to stop all marketing campaigns for 10
days because the servers couldn’t handle the traffic. Here are a couple
of metrics for the month.

Stats for Adoos Spain (Habitamos) in April 2006:
Active listings: 100,000+
New listings per day: 3,000
Unique visitors: 1 million +
Pageviews: 10 million +
Alexa rank: 5,000
Most popular section: Property for sale

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Adoos to open an office in Silicon Valley

May 5, 2006 at 4:05 pm · Filed under Adoos

We are evaluating the option of
opening a new office in Silicon Valley. I am trying to build a company
were geeks rule and I strongly believe that setting up a team of 3 to 4
hardcore programmers here, in the valley, is going to give us an
incredible boost to our technology.

Many of the best engineers who graduated with me from Imperial College are now working here, so I’ve spent most of last week recruiting a team.

Hopefully our new structure is going to look something like this:

Madrid Team:
Management team, arbitrage team, legal compliance, taxonomy research, international support, language team.

Buenos Aires Team:
Software development, online marketing, email support, ad quality team.

Silicon Valley Team:
Trust rank algorithm research, high availability research and development of our own pay-per-lead platform.

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Search Engine Conference in Madrid

May 4, 2006 at 4:56 pm · Filed under Adoos

OjoBuscador is organising a Search Engine Conference in Madrid this Tuesday. The event is free, but I believe it’s already full.

Where: Hotel NH Eurobuilding de Madrid
When: Martes 9 de Mayo de 2006, de 9:30h a 19:30h
—
Presentacion Motores de Búsqueda
* Los Desafíos de Buscar en la Web (por el profesor Ricardo Baeza-Yates)
* Google Sitemaps (por Grace Kwak -Product Manager- de Google)
* El SPAM en los buscadores (por Ismael El-Qudsi de MSN Search España)

Mesa Redonda
* debate sobre cuestiones relacionadas con los motores:
      o Samuel Arenas de Ask
      o Bernardo Hernandez de Google
      o Ismael El-Qudsi de MSN Search
      o Ignacio Parada de Noxtrum
      o Dirk Lammerskötter de Seekport
      o Alberto Díaz de Yahoo!

Presentacion Marketing Online
* Olga San Jacinto de Google Adwords
* Dominique Loumaye de MIVA
* Juan Sevillano de Yahoo! Search Marketing

Presentacion Optimización de Resultados
* Google Analytics (por Brian Clifton -Head of Web Analytics in Europe- de Google)
* Herramientas para SEO’s (por Tomy Lorsch de 24/7 Realmedia)

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New Image Server Architecture

May 4, 2006 at 7:30 am · Filed under Adoos

Today we have rolled out a new
distributed image hosting architecture. In theory we can now handle up
to 1 billion pictures, more than we can ever dream of needing. Our
previous image architecture was on the verge of breaking and it could
only process a maximum of 150,000+ pictures per month.

To implement the new architecture we have borrowed some ideas from Ebay about how to cluster and name the image servers:
- i1.adoosimgs.com
- i2.adoosimgs.com
- i3.adoosimgs.com, etc.

We have also implemented some AJAX/iframe functions as well as extending the limit to 8 pictures per ad.

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