Erepublik is a company co-founded by my friend Alexis Bonte, developing a “Massive Online Social Strategy Game”, half strategy game, half social network that has now more then 20,000 registered users, while still in private beta. Erepublik is another global start up managed from Madrid by a Non Spaniard or New Spaniards (immigrants like myself), others include Tuenti, Mobuzz, Vpod.tv, Meneame, Fon and Hipertextual.

Erepublik is played on a accelerated browser based version of the real world (1 Erepublik month is like 4 years in real life). All citizens are real people interacting with each other as politicians, entrepreneurs, soldiers, journalists, etc. Their goal is to develop their own country’s economy, with politics, business or even war.

The company has just closed a new round of financing from top entrepreneurs and investors like Brent Hoberman (co-founder of lastminute.com and founder of mydeco.com) and Stefan Glaenzer (Executive Chairman of Mendeley and Chairman of Last.fm), along with AGF Private equity (one of the leading French Venture Capitalists).

Send me an e-mail to martin@fon.es if you want to get an invite to try Erepublik.

WooMe is a company founded by Stephen Stokols and George Berkowsk. They created an online version of speed dating, a place to meet interesting people using video, audio and a few minutes of your time.

Users sign up to the site, create and personalize their profile, create a session, invite the people they find more interesting and wait for their session to start. They then have up to two minutes to chat to each of the participants, and finally decide who they “woo” and who they’re not into. If two users woo each-other they’ll have a chance to get each other’s contact information using their Woo credits (now given out for free).

Using video and audio for these “online introductions” or speed dates is a smart idea and technologies like Flash allow Woome to offfer all this in an easy to use environment, without requiring any download. People use WooMe not only to find their soul mates, but also to meet friends or chat about any topic.

The website is getting extremely popular between 18-24 year-olds, doubling their traffic every month.

A couple of weeks ago I met with the founders of Mendeley, a tool for researchers and students that because of a commonality of investors, it could be called the Last.fm for research. As Last.fm tracks the music you listen to and, basing on your taste, helps you discover new music and people, Mendeley helps you manage, share and discover research papers and find new articles and people with similar research interests using a recommendation engine. Mendeley also allows you to keep track of what is going on in your research field and shows you statistics about up and coming topics and authors.

The application automatically extracts metadata from academic papers and saves it into a library database. Users can then search across all their papers, share their library with others and receive recommendations based on their interests. I saw a demo and was very impressed. It´s been a while since I was doing my 2 Master´s at Columbia University and I had to do research but I certainly wished I had had Mendeley back then in the 80s.

Mendeley was founded by two Ph.D. students (Victor Henning and Jan Reichelt) and one Computer Science grad (Paul Foeckler) living in London. They have been recently joined by Stefan Glänzer, who was the first investor and executive chairman of Last.fm.

Image via WikipediaI just had lunch with Brian A Gallagher, President and CEO of the United Way and I was surprised to find out that United Way gives away $4bn per year of which half of that money is given away outside of the United States. As you may know America as a country is extremely stingy when it gets to US Foreign Aid as a percentage of GDP. The European Union is a much larger international donor than USA. But what I wonder is how the figures would add up if you start including as US foreign aid US private donations. I certainly think that the efforts of United Way, or the Gates foundation should be added to the US foreign aid figures to make them more realistic.

Image via WikipediaI rarely remark on what a President of a small country says but with Danilo Turk I will make an exception. I just heard him speak at the Forbes CEO Forum in Cannes and much to my surprise he made a lot of sense. Steve Forbes interviewed him and confronted with a lot of questions that he answered extremely well, without absurd, political sounding promises. What was remarkable was how much he knew about the world scene. So while at the conference I wikied him and it turns out that he is an outstanding global diplomat. Am I one of the few who had no idea who he was? My favorite phrase out of his presentation? To end a war does not necessarily mean to learn to build in peace, witness Kosovo.

This morning the leading newspaper in the Basque region of Spain, El Correo, was bombed by the terrorist group ETA. When the attack took place around 50 newspaper employees were at work. Fortunately nobody was killed and the internet edition is online as usual. Regardless of what the aims of ETA may be, all democratic forces in the world can agree that bombing newspapers is not an acceptable way to achieve any political objective. As a result I have started a bloggers campaign to show support to all the journalists of El Correo. The objective of this campaign is to send traffic to El Correo so the journalists at El Correo have today, the day of the attack as the most visited day to their web site. I encouraged all bloggers from around the world to do the same regardless of whether they understand Spanish or not and show our support for this courageous journalists and all other workers of El Correo. We call this campaign Visitas contra las Bombas (visits against bombings).

I decided to let my readers know how many visitors my English and Spanish blogs get every month, so here they go. My Spanish blog gets around 200,000 monthly views and 130,000 unique visitors, while the English one gets around 54,000 views and 39,000 unique visitors. According to Feedburner my Spanish blog has 9,300 readers via RSS feed, while the English one has more then 5,000. These are the people who read my blogs in sites like Netvibes.

Here are the graphs for the last months.

Spanish:

English: