Zauber creates MercadoPin.com

We are excited to announce a new creation of our Lab: MercadoPin, a new way to browse and buy online at MercadoLibre.

Inspired by the growing adoption of Pinterest, a pioneer project which revolutionized with its design the way in which items could be presented on the Web, we created MercadoPin, a mashup that allows its users to browse MercadoLibre's catalog of products in a completely new way, with special focus on photos and visual search.

MercadoPin is what happens when Pinterest meets MercadoLibre ! This is how a list of soccer t-shirts is presented by MercadoLibre when you are looking for that particular item on their website: And this is how you could browse the same catalog of products by using MercadoPin:

We hope that our users find this new way to browse a catalog more fun and attractive than what they were using so far. This project is still under active development, so this is just a very early Alpha version. All feedback is welcome. Stay tuned for more !

Zauber raises USD 1 million to power its Lab

Hooray! We are excited to announce that Zauber has raised USD 1 million in our first venture capital financing round !

Led by AxVentures - Pymar Fund, also an investor at Cupoint (a spin off from our Lab), the new funding will enable our company to expand our boutique high-end software development services in our target markets of Silicon Valley and Brazil, as well as heavily grow our investment in R+D and new products development at our Lab.

This is a huge achievement for Zauber, which reinforces our vision of building a company that combines the offer of high-end software development services with the incubation of new products and ventures.

Here's a little bit of our story:

Almost five years ago, six friends and graduates from ITBA (Gabriel, Juan, Mariano, Martín, Andrés and Fernando) got together with the idea of starting a new venture: a software technology company with a strong focus on R+D and innovation.

It was February 2007. We literally started as a garage company, with an old dark basement at one of our partner’s parents’ home serving as our office, and a ping-pong table serving as our desks. Three of the founders started the operations, while three other founders kept their jobs for some months funding with their salaries the living of all the six. Four months after the startup, we already had our first clients and we were making some humble revenue that we used to hire our first two employees (Christian and Marcelo). Almost five years later, they remain still at the company with us, they are key members of our senior team and remind us every day that we are doing things the right way.

We have been able to bootstrap our business without the need of external funding until now. We grew our business and assembled a talented team of 37 people. We partnered with other startups, helping them to kick off their projects with our technology and know how. We have global clients in global markets. We had our ups and downs, but we never gave up, we were always loyal to our vision and values: to create a global software company which could attract the very best talent out there. We decided to raise money from VC to make innovation happen faster at our Lab, to expand our boutique business and launch new ventures. We were lucky to find the right investors, the ones who believed in this team and our vision.

Congratulations to all the Zauber team and special thanks to all our friends, colleagues and clients who helped us throughout these years to achieve this milestone. The best is yet to come !

Twitter Analytics and Real-Time Monitoring for Argentinian Elections

Last Sunday, general elections took place in Argentina and once again Zauber was present with its technology to provide a real-time Twitter monitoring and analytics platform to track the behavior and buzz generated around this event.

Two of the most important online news media in Argentina chose Zauber to deploy an interactive real-time data visualization of Twitter and FB trends for the elections.

For La Nacion, we deployed a real-time dashboard tracking Twitter mentions for each candidate, measuring tweets per minute (buzz volume) and presenting that information with a powerful visualization, making the avatar of each candidate shine with each new tweet processed. We also measured the share of voice for each candidate. All statistic were available for the last hour, last day and last week, and were updated in real-time minute after minute.

For Infobae, we deployed another dashboard tracking Twitter mentions of each candidate in time and measuring share of voice, with a different visual representation. We added to this dashboard information about Twitter followers growth and Facebook Fans growth for each main candidate, being able to compare one candidate's metric with each other.

We are happy with these two projects that we deployed, and thankful to La Nación and Infobae, who trusted Zauber to build these innovative products for such a big event as the presidential elections. For several days, we processed hundreds of thousands of tweets referred to the elections and the candidates, delivering content to thousands of users who visited these products.

Idea.me goes live - #lanzoideame

Today we are excited to announce that Idea.me, a startup client of Zauber, is finally launching live to the public, after months of hard work.

Idea.me is an online community that will help remarkable Latin American creators realize their ideas and expand internationally though the power of crowdfunding.

Idea.me trusted Zauber the complete development of the platform from ground up, integrating payments gateways regionally and creating a new first class Internet startup.

We are happy to see the results of our work finally go live and how people are already loving it.

The creativity and artists landscape will be definitely disrupted by Idea.me and the crowdfunding power in Latin America.

Best of luck to the Idea.me team and huge congrats to the Zauber team who made it possible and worked so hard during this months.

Estadísticas y Monitoreo en Twitter para Elecciones Buenos Aires

(this post is written in Spanish, an English version will be released soon).

En el día de ayer Domingo 10 de Julio de 2011, tuvo lugar la primera vuelta de las elecciones a Jefe de Gobierno y Legisladores para la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires. Como ya hicimos en pasadas oportunidades para las elecciones presidenciales en Brasil en 2010, las elecciones legislativas en Argentina en 2009 o incluso este año para monitorear los conflictos en África y Medio Oriente para Al Jazeera, en esta oportunidad volvimos a poner nuestra tecnología y creatividad en juego para crear un nuevo experimento.

El viernes 8 de Julio por la noche publicamos online una visualización en tiempo real de menciones en Twitter de los principales candidatos a Jefe de Gobierno, con el fin de monitorear el nivel de "buzz" generado en torno a cada uno y cómo éste variaba minuto a minuto, junto con el cálculo de otras métricas de interés.

Visualización de menciones durante intervalo de 1 día:

Nuestro desarrollo fue destacado en TV y en diarios online.

Desde las 9 PM del Viernes 8 de Julio a las 9 AM del día Lunes 11, capturamos 122.000 tweets mencionando a los candidatos a jefe de gobierno más importantes, a través una conexión especial al API de Twitter denominada Firehose que nos garantizó el acceso al 100% de los tweets.

Mauricio Macri (@mauriciomacri) obtuvo su pico máximo de menciones en Twitter con 691 tweets/minuto a las 22:23 del día domingo, mientras que Daniel Filmus (@filmusdaniel) obtuvo su pico con 399 tweets/minuto a las 22:56 del mismo día. El resto de los candidatos no superó los 40 tweets/minuto, marca que registró Pino Solanas (@fernandosolanas) a las 21:48. Esto nos permite convalidar la existencia de una marcada polarización de la elección entre los dos candidatos principales, la cual queda demostrada por el análisis de un medio social como Twitter.

Trabajamos asimismo en el cálculo de otras métricas de interés, como son:

• Ganancia de Followers por candidato
• Distribución de menciones a cada candidato según clusters de audiencia (medida en función de followers de cada autor)
• Distribución de menciones a cada candidato según clusters de autoridad (medida según el KloutScore de cada autor)
• Nivel de "Buzz" generado por menciones a cada candidato y picos máximos obtenidos
• Nivel de penetración ("share of voice") de cada candidato en el total de tweets referidos a ellos.

A continuación, una infografía completa con toda la información obtenida de la red social Twitter para los 122.000 tweets detectados: Nuestra visualización seguirá activa hasta la instancia de Ballotage.

Zauber @ La Red Innova 2011

A new edition of La Red Innova is taking place today and tomorrow at Madrid.

Once again, we are excited about being part of this conference, as we did last year, when TweetDiscover was elected as a finalist of the Startups Competition.

This 2011 edition is more than special for us, considering that our latest venture Dealandia, (a daily-deals aggregator and recommendation engine), a project born at our Labs, was elected as a finalist of this year startup competition called Open Talent, among more than 300 projects.

It is also special because one of our clients was also elected as a finalist for the same competition. Ideame, an online community that helps remarkable Latin American creators realize their ideas and expand internationally through the power of crowdfunding, social media and value added services. Ideame trusted Zauber the design and development of their web platform from ground up to create a first class new Internet startup, that will definitely disrupt the web scene. Congrats to the team at Zauber who made it possible and special thanks to Ideame founders for trusting us.

Unluckily, we are not in Madrid at this moment, Puyehue volcano in Chile has been covering Argentinian skies with volcanic ashes and all flights were cancelled or postponed on the last days.

So we are forced to stay in Buenos Aires, but our heart and soul is in Madrid, but more important, every single line of code we wrote, every new venture we start and our entrepreneurial passion say present at La Red Innova 2011.

PS: Don't miss the real-time Tweet-o-meter we built to track mentions and buzz generated on Twitter about #LRI11 and the partcipants of Open Talent. Find it at the home of La Red Innova website.

Zauber develops Terra Radar

We are happy to announce the release of a new project for our client Terra Networks: Terra Radar, a new innovative product that aggregates news and content from multiple sources across the Web and offers to the user a quick overview of the most important topics on the Web each day.

For this project, we partnered with our very good friends from Popego who provided the semantic technology and API of MeaningTool to automatically categorize the content processed by our engine and extract relevant topics.

Terra Radar is available in several countries and languages and for each community it provides the most important news of the day and week.

On its home page, a tag cloud of related and most relevant topics is shown: By selecting one topic, other related topics are shown: And once the user selects a topic, a detail page with the most recent and relevant news about is shown, with augmented information gathered from Wikipedia and other related terms and news. We are proud of this new product and the technology applied, combining our expertise in gathering content from the Web and processing it, together with Popego's semantic analysis capabilities.