With high-profile startups like FON getting so much attention, it’s easy to miss some other promising startups in Spain.

I last profiled a bootstrapped Spanish startup when posting about Trabber. But now I’d like to talk about another cool little gem that’s gone under the radar here for a while.
Habitamos, now rebranding to Adoos, is an online free classifieds service in the spirit of CraigsList. It’s a bootstrapped operation that has grown into a traffic powerhouse, drawing over 700k uniques per month to check its 70k ads. I met Julian, the founder, at the WebDosBeta conference in Madrid about six months ago; since then, he’s grown his team (all offshored programmers in Argentina) and expanded his site into Europe and all of Latin America. Although Europe is highly competitive, he’s doing very well in Spain, and I think he’s got a good shot at dominating the small but growing Latin American market.

I think one of the biggest assets he’s developed has been a very deep knowledge and understanding of traffic and conversion drivers. We’ve talked about these topics, and Julain’s clearly running a tight ship, with solid analytic control of his business; that competency alone should make him an acquisition gem for any of the web-hopeless media groups around in Europe.

It’s an interesting thing that an earthquake, which is sudden and very violent, is basically caused by shifts in geologic “plates” on the earth’s crust; shifts that are very slow, and hardly noticable.

So I’m going to describe my personal data point in the fascinating Plate Tectonics of the Internet:

• Today I finally gave up my Yahoo email, after many years. The old interface is crap, the new one too slow and buggy. I’m now on gmail.
• I’ve left TypePad for WordPress. I like both, but the fact is that WordPress is just so much better supported by its community.
• Many months ago I stopped using my MyYahoo page. This page, which I used to refer to obsessively on a daily basis, is now totally dead for me. My old MyYahoo time is now spent (and much more efficiently) on Bloglines.
• The death of Skype has been heralded everywhere since it was bought by eBay. But I use it more than ever, and judging by the “users online” figures, growth is still explosive. I’ve completely given up ICQ and MSN (both way, way too bloated and cartoonish), and I’m itching to get rid of Yahoo but still have too many unduplicated contacts on it.
• It goes without saying that I stopped using that heap of crap code known as Outlook a long time ago. Webmail is the only way to go.
• I have completely stopped using MS Word, and now pretty much just write on email and Writely.
• Obvious, but must be said: stopped using IE a long time ago, 100% Firefox.
• PayPal still rocks- nothing’s been able to get me off using it.
• Most Web2.0 websites are not actually hooking me, especially the calendars.
• Blogs are continuing to grow in importance as my source of news, professional networking, and even education. But newspapers are still important.

What I think would be interesting is if everyone in the blogosphere took a minute to note how their own behavior was shifting. But if my own behaviour is any indication, then in the future Microsoft and Yahoo are at greatest risk- the way things are going, I can easily imagine living without the products of either of these companies, something unimaginable to me just a couple years ago. What are your Internet Plate Tectonics?

I think this would have been a more appropriate title to Dan Frommer’s latest article in Forbes. He slams Martin Varsavky’s FON venture so hard that Varsavsky himself felt compelled to blog a response.
Personally, I found this article hilarious from the first paragraph:

Give the folks at Spanish Wi-Fi startup FON credit for moxie: They’ve devised a business plan that takes advantage of the billions of dollars American broadband outfits have sunk into their networks. Too bad they don’t seem to have checked with the broadband companies first.

Am I being oversensitive or does this writing have a whiff of jingoist alarmism to it? Is it really relevant *at all* to mention any nationalities in this story??
I also thought this was funny because in 1898, the Spanish-American War was triggered after the US Battleship Maine mysteriously sunk in the harbor of Havana. Nobody really knows what happened to the Maine, but newspapers in the US jumped on the event to create public support for a war against Spain. A popular rallying slogan was: “Remember the Maine, and to Hell with Spain!“

I’m not trying to defend FON by any means- in fact, I think the product, as conceived today, is almost a certain failure (notwithstanding the admirable marketing/networking abilities of Varsavsky). But for good journalism on why this is likely to be the case, I would direct readers to the critical but fair commentary of Mark Evans here and Glenn Fleishman here. For readers interested in a tale of evil Spanish freeriders trying to steal from hard-working, patriotic American phone companies, um, keep reading Forbes I guess.

Anyway, to pay for the Spanish-American War, Congress imposed a general Excise Tax on telephone service…and even though the war lasted just 5 months, this tax is still being collected today more than 100 years later, and has raised more than $300 billion for the US government!
So here’s a Plan B for US telcos, as their futures look increasingly grim: convince Americans to have another war with Spain, which allows the goverment to raise more bogus telco taxes to pay for it, which would then ensure that government would always protect the telcos’ well-being (don’t want no competition touching our tax cash-cow, do we?).

Very impressive…18 million euros of funding from Google, Skype, Index, & Sequoia…. A global board of advisors of Internet & blogging rock stars…

This is great for a European, and Spain-based Internet venture, to be in such a global spotlight.

And it’s a real testament to the marketing savvy of Varsavsky himself. Frankly, I’m still very dubious that FON will work, for many reasons, but at least now they have the money and partners to try it under the best conditions possible.

From a post titled, “Tips so that your work doesn’t interfere with your blogging”, plus commentary, is born the first great word of 2006….

Inverse Telecommuting: Going to the office to get your personal affairs done

From Microservios (hat tip, Nacho) – in Spanish

Looks like we have some imperial-minded, or at least very nostalgiac, map-makers.

Catalunya’s northern border hasn’t looked like this since 1659!

Apparently fewer than 4% of people in south-west France understand Catalan today- a very heavy-handed French language policy basically killed all regional dialects (not just Catalan).
From an article in yesterday’s El Pais, this map showing where Catalan is spoken:

So the UK launched today a new “Type 45 Destroyer”, apparently “the most powerful, advanced and deadly warships in the world”.

Ok, cool. So the British are keeping with tradition in rolling out fancy warships. But what struck me as funny, or at least a little bit weird, was buried in the last paragraph:

Mess decks are replaced by individual cabins, each with
their own  iPod charging points, CD player, internet access, five
channel recreational audio and larger berths.

War in the age of mass-luxury!

Link: Britain, UK news from The Times and The Sunday Times – Times Online