We launched BoutiqueHotels.com a month ago and it's already our 6th most visited site!

No PageRank yet but already appearing in the first page of search results. 

On top of that we have received several membership requests  from hotels all over the world.

Nothing like a good name in business.

A lot of people interested in .CO missed this so I thought it would be good to post it.  Looks like we are finally going to see some progress.  According to the radio interview, the Minister of Communications in Colombia will be publishing the pre-RFP soon. Sorry, but it's in Spanish.

http://www.wradio.com.co/oir.aspx?id=776061

Great piece on Obama's comments about Colombia during the third debate.  Although I am an Obama supporter, he is definitely wrong on this issue. 

Read the WSJ article here.

Thanks to Marco for sending this video.  It's a very vivid discussion on the issues facing the country and the world. I like his comparison to Pearl Harbor.  

Apparently Mr. Buffet wouldn't mind taking a 1% stake in the $700 Billion plan.  Sir, can we co-invest with you?  

Watch the interview here.

It's been a while since we hear anything interesting about the .CO process in Colombia (Colombia's ccTLD).  The Ministry approved the new policy doc which is definitely a big step forward, but very little has happened since.  

In the mean time, let's try to tackle an interesting question: is .CO a US$50 million deal for the Colombian government? Is it more? I've been asked this question by a few different people lately so I figure it's important to share my opinion publicly.

Click here to read full article..

New policy drafts were published on the MINCOM website on June 9th.  Good news:  .CO will be completely open!  I guess the public came back with strong comments about the previous documents and most (if not all) the limiting policies have been removed.  You can ignore the original post below.

Adminitration Policy for the ccTLD .CO

Transition Policy for the ccTLD .CO 

--- 

Original Post:

The Colombian Ministry of Communications published a draft policy document for the new administration of the ccTLD .CO.  Quite frankly, I was blown away by the document. I never expected something so thorough and advanced.  Sincere congrats to the team working on this.  Here are the highlights:

Positive (drum roll please):

1.  There will be a second-level domain. That means you'll be able to register domains such as "Blog.co", or "Widgets.co".  The new administrator will have to implement some form of sunrise period and wait until the transition of the existing operation has transpired to launch the second level (Note: The current administrator only allows registrations in the third level:  xyz.com.co, .net.co, etc).

2.  There will be a Registrar network similar to how .com works. In other words, you'll be able to purchase .CO domains from your favorite retailer.  While this may sound obvious, they had been talking about something quite different a few months ago.  I suppose that once they went through the thought process of implementing that "other idea", they realized the uphill battle they were facing.

Negative (end drum roll and kill all sense of joy):

1.  Registrants will need to provide an administrative contact in Colombia to register a domain.  What does that mean?  If you want to register Widgets.co and you're not a colombian resident (shame on you!), be ready to type in your name as the main contact (titular) and the name of some random Colombian person you met through Facebook to act as your front man in-country.  Alternatively, you can call me and I'll act as your Colombian friend for, say, $5,00 per year? I'll even give you a discount if you do more than 100 registrations. Yes, it's quite silly.  

2.  The number of registrars on the network will be "restricted" by the Ministry of Communications.  Folks... that's a BIG and heavy word.  That's the equivalent of telling Walmart in China that the chinese government will "restrict" the number of store openings in-country.  Talk about uncertainty.  

When I look at the Positives and Negatives, it clearly shows two competing forces within the Ministry working against each other.  New school vs. Old School.

Now we have to wait and see how the public responds to the draft, and what the final policy doc will say.  Either way, this is a huge development in the right direction. 

Having been involved with the Internet for some quite some time, few things seem to impress me.  The power of the internet is old news to everyone. It's become a commodity of our everyday lives.  However, in the last few days I've seen 2 things from the Internet that would have been impossible 12 months ago, and indicative of how much MORE powerful the medium is becoming.

On February 4th, more than 4.5 million people* around the world (mostly in Colombia of course) marched against the terrorism, drug dealing, and kidnapping  of the FARC, Colombia's largest rebel group.  The march was "organized" only a few weeks before by a couple of students through their profile on Facebook!  It took place on a MONDAY, in middle of the work day.  Colombians marched in every city in Colombia, and cities around the world such as Miami, New York, London, Madrid, and Tokyo.  How exactly this happened will be stuff of case studies in the years to come.  Mr. Gladwell: you will sell more books if you write about in your next edition of The Tipping Point. 

The next significant event that blew me away was the video of Barack Obama giving a speech with background music of several artists.  I got chills watching the video, not because I'm an Obama supporter (if I could vote in US), but because it had the simple ingredients of the type of marketing campaign that goes viral in seconds.  Add to that the fact that you can see it in YouTube, comment on it, and forward it to your friends, and you have something really, really powerful.   As of this writing, the one edition I saw (there are several) had been seen by 2.7m people around the globe on YouTube alone.

Hillary, beat that.  

* The Economist gave a number of 1 miilion people marching.  Recent official counts are closer to 4.5m.

I've put together a small regular expression library for the C language by extracting Henry Spencer's excellent library from Tcl. Try it out and let me know what you think! Erlang regex module coming soon, I hope.

Some of you may know that my country is going through a big change in the administration of its ccTLD (.co).  This is a fantastic opportunity for Colombia and we are excited to help out in the process. 

The Ministry of Communications (MINCOM) has established a committee that is defining new policies for the administration of the .co ccTLD.  Their first major step was to publish a document requesting comments from the Internet community in general.  The document laid out three potential models that MINCOM could use to operate the ccTLD:  Operate it internally, out-source part of it, out-source the entire operation.

Responses were published on MINCOM’s website.  A link to our response can be found there as well.

Next steps?  Unfortunately, I wouldn’t expect much until 2009. 

We've developed an Erlang syntax highlighting definitions file for the open source Joe Editor (freely available for most platforms). If you use Erlang together with Joe on a regular basis, read on past the jump.

Click here to read full article..

I don't know anyone who likes writing test units for their software. This kind of pragmatic self-defense technique is a necessary evil these days, with increasingly tight timeframes, ten different levels of the software stack to interact with, and seemingly-brittle libraries being called at every juncture. Like incinerating and burning your cutting board after preparing chicken, lest you get the plague, writing tests is a big time sink, but you gotta do it. However, a new form of artificial intelligence research might soon make the whole process much easier. Read on past the jump for more information.

Click here to read full article..

I would like to welcome Mike Scansaroli to our team.  Mike will be running a major PPC campaign for our online travel properties.  We are excited to have him on-board.

Mike's role:

Job Title: PPC Manager / Business Unit Leader
Description: The PPC Manager will develop and execute a global campaign strategy for multiple large-scale travel/hotel booking websites, managing a $5m / year (+) budget. He/She will be responsible for managing the campaign as an individual business unit with P&L and ROI targets across multiple PPC platforms. He/She will report directly to the CEO for budgeting/ROI matters and to the COO for operations. 

Exciting!

I'm trying to come up with a new company name for Google.  These are some options:

1. Goopedia

2. Googlepedia

3. Googlewiki 

4. Wikigle

5. Wikigoogle

Any other ideas?

...Once we're done re-branding the entire company, we can proceed to change the "I'm feeling lucky" for:

"Search Wikipedia". 

Great article summarizing the causes of the stock market crash of '29 and '87 (mostly the '87 crash). Pay close attention to the historical PE ratios graph.  Also, the following question leaves a lot to think about:  "When is a crash a buying opportunity?"  In '87 it was a great opportunity because the economy's fundamentals were strong so there was nothing but upside.  In '29 they weren't because the economy was going into a recession (easy to say in hindsight).   How does that relate the situation today?   I'm a strong believer that we are bound to see a crash in the very near future, but that it won't be a buying opportunity.  We have yet to feel the full effects of the housing market and that will keep the economy soft for at least 2 more years.  The buying opportunity will come but it won't be until some point towards the end of 2008, early 2009.  Then again, there are exceptions:  buy GOOG now ($650) if you want a 20% annualized return in the next 24 months (YES, you math wizzes out there. $1000+), but be prepared a rollercoaster ride from hell.  

Things are accelerating in the world of simple, open web APIs: now even your database speaks HTTP+JSON, courtesy of the New York Times none the less. I'm tremendously excited that we've reached the point in technology that tools like this can be implemented that are both reliable to use and fast enough to maintain the kind of crazy throughput that massive sites like NYT requires. We have our own exciting contender in this space on the way, so I must confess that I'm paying special attention to this sector lately.

Finally we get to speak out!

On this blog we plan to discuss everything going on in our company. Enjoy!