I think it’s great that local startup Trabber has now added hotel search to its site. Oscar Frias, one of the site’s co-founders, tells me this move should greatly enhance the experience of his growing userbase, now exceeding 7,000 per day.

Taking advantage of the exchange to ask about any initial impact from Kayak’s entry into Spain, Oscar said they’ve seen no effect on their growth.

I gave the new hotel search functionality a try, and it works well and at the same standard as the flights search. Missing a maps functionality, though- something which I’ve found does come in quite handy in browsing for hotels.

It’s always interesting to try to reconcile press headlines about the economy with what’s actually happening around you. Here are some datapoints that have come my way this week, most of which are pointing to a nasty recession already taking place:

• Cabbie with no fares. I get into a cab, terribly late to a lunch across town. The driver, who nearly comes flying into the pavement to pick me up before another cab, tells me I’m his first customer of the day. It’s past 2pm. Then he says that business so far in 2008 is the worst he can ever remember, and that it was already starting late in 2007.
• Cafe with no customers. Next day, I go into a cafe with two colleagues to have an end of day meeting. It’s already past 7pm. But the place looks about ready to close, so we hesitate when stepping inside. The bartender tells us that since there had been no customers *at all* during the afternoon that she just decided to prepare closing a couple hours early.
• Shops with no tenants. Getting a coffee this morning on my way to work I happened upon a conversation between locals in our neighborhood, gossiping about the massive oversupply in retail space in the area. Lots of shops available to rent, but no tenants in sight. Some of these places have been empty for many months.
• PR firms with bankrupt clients. A friend of mine in the UK is in the process of hiring a PR firm for his company, and was asked abruptly by the firm to prepay all the next three months’ retainers because many of their ‘thought-to-be solvent customers’ were now communicating an inability to pay the firm’s invoices.

Oddly, in the US where things are meant to be worse than in Europe, friends and suppliers are reporting excellent business. Only a few people connected to the mortgage industry are having a very tough time.

Just some data points, nothing worth extrapolating from. But it does highten sensitivity to what may be a major turn in economic conditions around the corner.

On a side note, getting an accurate, bigger picture of trends like this is something I’ve always wanted to do with the massive data that we are generating at Properazzi. We’ve started analyzing real estate for sale and for rent on an ad-hoc basis for some professionals asking us for very precise analytic queries, with interesting results. It would be interesting to explore this further…

…or how “Release Early, Release Often” comes to Consumer Electronics.

Over the holidays I bought two Chumbys, one to give as a gift and one for myself. I don’t even know how to describe this thing, best just check it out on the chumby site.

A few days ago, having just started blogging again, I thought I’d post a review. Frankly, it was going to be negative because the only use I’d really found for it was as a glorified alarm clock. But this is a very curious consumer good, because the actual software gets updated via the Internet automatically whenever there’s something new to offer. It’s also got an open ‘plug-in’ type of architecture that allows people to enhance the product, and contribute their enhancements to all the other owners.

So just a couple days ago, Chumby do an over the air update to the software and suddenly, the whole interface and even feature-set have changed. It’s a whole new gadget! And the changes have been great- now I can stream internet radio from multiple sources, customize my alarms much better, and more. And as they say on the Chumby website, this is a product that will *never* be finished, because they’ll always be upgrading it with new stuff. Much like google or salesforce.com are never “finished”, but constantly evolve.

Fascinating to see this happen in the context of a consumer electronics gadget, instead of the now-common web applications.

Exciting!

(side comment: Apple is doing the same thing to its iPhone, constantly improving the product people have already bought. Now, how is it that traditional mobile phone operators and handset makers have NEVER been able to do this?)

Forbes magazine has again named our investor, Mark Tluszcz, to its annual “Midas List” of the world’s best venture capitalists. This year, our company (the world’s largest real estate website) is mentioned by name, which we here thought was pretty cool.

Read the Forbes blurb on Mark here

I’ve just started a new blog, called Recurring Thoughts, to post about the property market.

If you have an interest in international property or the real estate market in general, or just want to stay up to date on what’s going on at Properazzi, come check it out or subscribe by RSS.

I’ll continue posting on this blog more personal and miscellaneous comments, like my previous rant about being charged for laptop electricity in a local bar

I recently attended a meeting with some leading Spanish Internet gurus that was attended by the press. The next morning, the title of the article that appeared in the newspaper quoted one of the local gurus saying, “A Spanish Google? Impossible!” That was in answer to the question of whether a company of the calibre of Google could ever start and survive in Spain.

That phrase came to mind again with two independent events that occured today:

1- Starbucks announced it was going to start providing 2 hours of free wifi per day to its customers. Fabulous!

2- I just had a meeting with a colleague in a local cafe in Barcelona. There’s no wifi at all, but that’s not the point. We took laptops and sat at a table near a power outlet. I plugged in, we ordered coffees, and had our meeting for an hour. But when we paid the bill, the lady at the cafe charged me 1 euro “for the electricity you were using all that time” (!!!!) To make things worse, I’m a regular customer, someone who’s been there at least 30 times in the past year.

I know, Starbucks is evil and expensive etc. But it actively encourages people to do whatever they want at their stores. Come in, get comfortable, stay as long as you like. Use our freaking electricity at no charge! It may be cheezy, formulaic customer service, but it’s still customer service where the customer’s needs come FIRST. There are exceptions, but generally the level of customer service here is so bad that it’s not surprising at all to understand why there isn’t any equivalent success as a Starbucks among local service companies.