And beyond participating in MAVIR, we emerge as a spin-off of the project and we form part of the group of companies that, with the universities of the consortium, are part of this research network. We had talked previously about MAVIR, but until this January, we hadn’t formalized our role as a spin-off company and as a participant in MAVIR, and we didn’t want to go deeper in this issue.

In short, we are happy to be a spin-off of a project as MAVIR, being in contact with R&D that is done in the universities (and we’re also doing) and being in a more than adequate for innovation. We appreciate the help that Victor Peinado gave to us in all the process of becoming MAVIR’s first spin-off.

The meeting wasn’t as productive as we wanted, as we got no contact with any american investor. As Rodolfo told us, the american people has a huge market and they do not make investments far away from their own homes. Rodolfo criticised us some aspects of our actual business plan, most of them very useful to us in order to arrange the next “II Foro de Inversión de Madri+D”, where we have been invited, but some other critics seem to be in contrast with some topics we have recently read and we used to improve our presentation.

Next, I have posted a photo we took to us in a post-reunion meal in a McDonald’s, where we tried to relax before the meeting.

If you have any sugestion, do not heasitate to post a comment here and we will try to add it to FlickrBabel 1.0 roadmap. Thank you very much for your suggestions

1.- Now you can restrict searches according to a certain location

2.- Fixed a bug related to translations with non english characters

3.- Now, you can see tags and geolocation when displaying the photographies. You can also perform searches by tags clicking on them

4.- Improved the search for phoographies near a certain one

5.- Some visual improvements

• The GUI is implemented in 2 languages: English and Spanish. However, FlickrBabel uses another 2 languages (German and French) for expanding user queries.
• The result’s interface shows the results photographies but also the translation of the query into the 4 languages it uses internally.
• The results that includes geolocalization, now are marked with a ‘G’, and you can access directly from them to a map where the photo is geolocated.

By the end, now FlickrBabel has a Twitter account (http://twitter.com/flickrbabel) that will be used as “changelog” and also as an aggregator for all the news related to FlickrBabel.

The enterpreunship team (and, until now, developers) of Wipley is formed by Francisco Carrero, Borja Monsajve and José Carlos Cortizo. Those people are lecturers at Universidad Europea de Madrid. From the academic perspective, they had a hughe experience of developing and managing R+D projects, including technology transfer and science difussion. They had formed part of more than 10 research spanish and european R+D projects that used technologies related to Internet, like contents filtering (spam and pornography), recommender systems, semantic web, etc.

Previously, and in some cases in parallel to their academic and research works, they had enterpreunship experience, as they had worked in several companies, and also have founded 3 technology start-ups in the last 10 years.

For more detailed information, each member of the Wipley crew are going to write a post about their personals trajectories and their vinculation to Wipley. We will link those post to this entry:

• Francisco Carrero
• Borja Monsalve
• José Carlos Cortizo

Here yo have the 3 designs. I hope that you make some critics, tell me what you prefer from each design, etc.

Design 1: Inspired on Facebook. As Facebook is considered by Wipley crew as a reference Social Network, they have tried to modify the Facebook’s desing in order to adapt their colours and style. The design isn’t finished (some parts are cutted and pasted from Facebook) but it allows to see how it could seem.

Design 2: This design is more similar to standard social networks. It is inspired on Moterus and UGame.

Wipley developers says that the first design, as it follows Facebook’s philosophy, is centered on the interaction with your friends. The second one, is oriented to discover new contents not taking care about the authors (if they are friends/contacts or not). They have developed a mixed desing (design 3), with two areas that allows several kinds of interactions (with your friends, to discover new contents, etc.)

I already have my favourite design, so do you?

We wanted to show some previous designs before in order to receive your feedback but we had no time. We hope to receive your comments about the business cards in order to receive feedback for future designs.

As well as expanding queries by means of automated translation, FlickrBabel is able to search for related photographies using the contextual information attached to a given Flickr photo. When a photographie is geotagged, FlickrBabel also shows the photographies taken near from that location as a way to expand the vision of some places.

FlickrBabe borned as a satellite application when exploring several web services APIs trying to understand better how they work to use that knowledge in Wipley development. For getting a deeper knowledge from that APIs, nothing better than doing something practical, and this is the first result. By now,  FlickrBabel is at a “beta” stage, so we will add some functionalities from time to time.

Wipley hopes to become in some kind of Facebook for ganers. A Social Network highly configurable and usable that allows videogamers to access all the information about their games, characters, groups, clans, etc. unified in a single site. But, we also look forward into a easier and more dynamic way to relate videogamers.

By the other hand, Wupley will not be a typical social network, it will incorporate several technologies to increase its usability, the information access and its interoperability, and it will also have some functionalities further than typical ones in social networks.

Where do we want to reach? We have decided to do not impose limits to ourselves. We hope the users guide the development of Wipley. For that, we have created this blog, to inform all the possible users about our advances, and where we hope to receive all kind of comments and suggestions that help us to improve Wipley.

Which is the actual status? By now, we are centerd on the business plan and working very hard in the first prototypes. We plan to release the first beta after the summer.