Posted on July 6, 2011 by amuino@1uptalent.com

Next week, the amazing Conferencia Rails is taking place in Madrid. And of course we will be there supporting the event!

The conference itself will be held in the historic Parque del Retiro, but the party will start the day before with a set of workshops (at a different location). And one of them is not about Ruby, but Node.js.

And there is also a session about Coffeescript and another titled «Five languages in a moment». How cool is that? We live in polyglot times and there is no reason to be stuck in a single language. Even one as nice to use as ruby.

So go check the schedule, grab your tickets if you haven’t already and lets meet there. Or better… join us in the after-event parties!

Posted in events | Comments Off

Posted on June 13, 2011 by amuino@1uptalent.com

Anybody reading this should know that we love working with startups. We know their budget is constrained, but we are the kind of folks who prefer an engaging project rather than coding yet another boring payroll system.

So it should be no surprise to find us at the Startup Weekend Madrid which happened last weekend.

Zoomry

Zoomry is based on a simple idea: summarizing an event using its fingerprint on social media. It is like Animoto for tweets, but wiser.

A a pay-per-use service targeted at all the small events looking for tools to make a difference and promoting their event without burning their budget on other expensive alternatives. And because twitter is on the rise, but the budget for events is being cut… this seems like the right time for a tool like this.

Ironically, since the tool needs to grok the social network activity to make a meaningful summary, Zoomry will be able to provide a valuable analysis for the organizers of the event, while not trying to compete with other statistics-oriented tools which already exist.

The project won a total of three prices during the event, including fast path access to the linktostart final round.

Of course, we will continue to help this promising project!

GoPointz

Another simple idea… digital point cards for small businesses. Imagine you could collect points when buying at your local grocery store and spend them later at the coffee shop… all from your phone.

Saving on printing costs and leveraging a community of stores instead of a single one, customers have a compelling reason to sign up to this frequent buyer program. And, the best part is that there is no investment on new technology for the business owners… just print and display the QR code customers can scan!

Very simple, potentially very large… and most importantly, very helpful. We are following the progress of this team and will certainly continue to be involved if they decide to turn the project into a business.

Startup weekend itself

This was our first time at Startup Weekend and we can confirm that their no talk, all action motto is certainly true. There was an insane amount of action.

We enjoyed the company and energy of all the people who gather there… including our friends from BeCode, TetuanValley, StartupBootcamp and Madriagil.

To be honest, the weekend was exhausting. But we must have done something well, because we were invited to the upcoming Startup Weekend events at Galicia…

Just to say something not good about the event… there were lots of issues with the network, which I think we overloaded (plus some additional problems with the carrier). But that allowed us to focus more on the plan and less on the coding, which turned out to work great for us.

All in all, we are very happy with our decision of being there. This is the kind of people we want to be surrounded by every day!

Posted in events | Tagged gopointz, madrid, startups, startupweekend, zoomry | Comments Off

Posted on April 11, 2011 by amuino@1uptalent.com

We have been working for more than a month now without any online presence.

That is a great sign, since without any advertising we have been able to land a really interesting project. One of those that can truly change the world. Its name is Valioo and it is still in private beta, but you can learn more and reserve your position in the queue.

Anyway, I digress.

The only purpose of this post is to announce (to no one, really) that we have started this wonderful adventure called 1uptalent. This is what we’d call our MVP (or Minimum Viable Product) for a corporate website. There’s still a lot of work to do, but let’s walk one step at a time.

It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.

We have been extremely well accompanied so far with people like the Tetuan Valley crew (who taught us a lot about startups) or Byron Standford (of Project Presentation fame). We hope to continue walking with them in the future.

See you at the next crossroad! We’d like to walk with you until your next stop…

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off