Suscipe is a forum for entrepreneurs coorganized by the student associations in Spain of the London Business School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the Standford University, as well as by the Association of former interns of “la Caixa”, in collaboration with the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Industriales de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.

The following is event’s program (pdf). The event is free of charge and you can attend only the parts you are interested in:

• 19:15: Innovative Project: Tractis
• 20:00: Special Guest: Angel Iglesias, founder of Ikusi, a Spanish company with over 700 employees present in more than 80 countries
• 21:15: Networking event

My presentation will be focused on the project itself, whereas Angel Iglesias will talk about his activity and entrepreneurial experience. The event will take place in the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Industriales de Madrid, Room 3 (c/ José Gutierrez Abascal 2. Zona Paseo Castellana – Nuevos Ministerios).

Francisco Hernández, one of Suscipe’s coordinators, told me that 113 people have already confirmed their assistance, but there is still room for more. Whether you use Tractis or not, if you are starting your own project, or are interested in spending some time with people that want to make a difference, I will be happy to meet you in person.

Update 2008.05.26: The organizers at Suscipe have just uploaded the video of the presentation of Tractis.

If I had to sum it up in a single word, it would be ‘intense’: many presentations, conversations in the hallways and even a few nights out. Both days we started at 10am and ended up finishing at 4am. These types of events contradict the myth that computer people are introverted and boring. There was an excellent atmosphere with good humor and a lot of laughs.

Regarding my presentations, the feedback was positive (though I owe some people beers for this!) and the experience was pretty good, so I’ve promised to prepare another one next year and to try and improve. The slides from the presentations are here:

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If you couldn’t attend this year…don’t miss Rails Conferencia 2008! If it’s anything like this year’s, you won’t be sorry

See you at the next one!

• Ernesto Jiménez, who couldn’t attend last year because he was in Finland (although he still won the speed programming contest at the conference) will present the Tractis platform in his talk “Case study: A technical spotlight on Tractis” in which he will give an overview of some of the specific design details of Tractis.

Ernesto will appear again, joining the list of negonators that will give presentations that are not directly related to Tractis:

• David Calavera will talk about the tools that ruby makes available to interact with the atomPub protocol, how to test it’s implementation and an example of the use of the 11870 API.
• Juan Lupión will present Slingshot, the open source alternative for integrating web applications with the desktop using Ruby On Rails.
• Juanjo Bazán will encourage the attendees to contribute improvements to the Rails repository and will explain the necessary steps to add code to the project.
• Ernesto Jiménez will revise the common web security vulnerabilities and will comment on the tools available in Rails to avoid these types of vulnerabilities.

All the sessions look good and the difficulty will be choosing which to attend. For all of you who cannot go to the talks, they will be recorded on video and made publicly available including, of course, the keynote presentantion by Obie Fernández which will close the conference.

The organisers have set up a Start-up room. Over the course of the two days, next to the main hall, various entrepreneurs will get 10 minutes to present their company and services. While it will be my first public demo of Tractis, I’m not especially excited. Should I be? Nervous yes (clearly I hope all goes well) but I’m not excited. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a promising program and I want to listen to and meet all these people but they’re not the real judge. After the experience in Amsterdam, I know how it will be: Investors making an effort to demostrate that they are not searching for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs trying to look like they don’t need money. A necessary mating dance I don’t mind playing.

A potencial collaborator to whom I explain the project for the first time, a mailing list where problems corp up and everyone offers their help, an alternative system of production which really works, a software-challenge that no-one had dared to try before, a system that resolves a real necessity (legal security in e-commerce)… these are the things that truly excite me. Maybe it’s the end of the year that’s made me emotional but today what really moves me is to look back at what we’ve accomplished. Only this week we’ve closed our round of seed capital, found our first reference client and put Tractis 2.0 into production environment. So many things and such little time to post about them. Another stage finished with a mix of excitement and exhaustion. Time to take a breath and experience Paris for the first time. LeWeb3 is only the icing on the cake of an intense year.

The conference was the perfect excuse for us all to meet up: David Calavera, Vidal Carro, Luismi Cavallé. Various collaborators that we’d never seen in person. On Saturday night (25th) we went out for tapas in La Latina together with some habitual reader of this blog . It was great to be together and put a face to many people that we only knew from e-mail, chats and phone/skype conversations. Various negonators participated as speakers and you can download their presentations here:

• Juan Lupión, Distributed Computing in Ruby on Rails
• Juanse Pérez Herrero, Internationalization, Rails y Gettext
• Juanjo Bazán, Rails for Java Programmers
• Manolo Santos, Design of the Tractis online negotiation platform

Ernesto Jímenez, veteran negonator, couldn’t attend because he’s studying the final year of his degree in Helsinki. But that didn’t stop him. Not content with winning the speed programming contest at the campus party this year, he also signed up for the speed programming contest at the conference….and won again. The result: Battleships in RoR (coded under the GPL license), 48 hours without sleep and the prize of a beautiful 80Gb iPod Negonation apart, the presentations on XML support in Rails (by Javier Rámirez of ASPgems), Systems Administration in La Coctelera and The Shaker (by Fernando García Samblas and Alvaro Ortíz of La Coctelera) and Testing in Ruby on Rails by Jean-Michel Garnier were very very good. We’ve talked for some time about Tests on the mailing lists and the presentation by Jean-Michel (the lower photo) in the end convinced us of the need to incorporate them into our development.

Unreserved congratulations to those who worked to make this event a reality. We should do it again.

One more thing…: Launch of Project FIT

We’ve saved the best ’till last. As announced by Juanse Pérez at the end of the internationalisation presentation, we want to start a new project that overcomes the problems currently faced when translating web applications. The translators complain that they need to learn unusable and different applications for each client. The designers want to eliminate the complex management of the translated files and automate the process as much as possible. David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Rails, afirmed during the videoconference on the Saturday that ‘Internationalisation’ means different things for different people and, therefore he sees the solution as a plugin and not a core part of Rails. This is the right moment. We invite you to participate in a new project: FIT or “Found in Translation”, an open source tool that makes life easy for the designers of international applications and enables translation companies, vendors/integrators of software and start-ups/clients to standardize. We now have a mailing list (fit_project@googlegroups.com). Do we need anything else?

• Juanse Pérez (tractis-translation) will explain about the available tools and the state of the internationalization art in Rails. I highly recommend this if you are developing a web site in Rails that has to be available in various languages. Installation and configuration of Ruby-gettext, i18n, Pootle and several subjects to consider.
• Juanjo Bazán (tractis-setting) will help Java programmers who are interested in, or starting with, Rails. A crash course on the main differences in classes, methods, namespaces, etc. and the “Ruby way” on programming.
• Juan Lupión (tractis-people) will present a project together with JJ Merelo: a distributed processing architecture (ala seti@home) using a Rails application as the server. To prove the concept, they will describe how to implement and resolve a genetic algorithm.
• Manuel Santos (tractis-core) will talk about his experience in the development of Tractis. Architecture, components, platforms (SVN, Trac), deployment (Capistrano) and development decisions in the real world and with a distributed programmers’ group.

All the speeches, round tables and activities look good. There will be several contests and an install party where you will be helped to configure your equipment for working with Rails. David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, is expected to participate by videoconference. Tickets cost €60 (€30 for students and €0 for active Negonation collaborators ) and they include food, coffee and a commemorating T-shirt, as well as discounts for book purchases and hosting. The Rails introductory presentations are free. It’s an event by and for the community. Nobody obtains a profit. For those who can’t attend and for Spanish-speakers from the other side of the pond, all the event’s conferences are in the evening and will be streamed.

Don’t miss it. In the meantime, to take the edge off your appetite…

Update 17 September 2006: The “Testing en Rails” conference was finally converted into “Integrating Asterisk with Rails” (pdf). I’ve updated the link of the November Rails Conference organizers.

The day before

I arrived on Thursday 6th and, on that same night, I attended a pre-conference party at a place called The Mansion. There were some investors of 3i, TVM-Capital… but, above all, there were entrepreneurs making contacts by the ton: Jan Miczaikaka, CEO of HitFlip.de (online bartering), Willem Balkerna, CEO of Second Home Market, Kasper Luursema and Joost Luback of EYEFI.nl (web consulting firm), etc.

The Conference

The conference was on the 7th and there were some surprises. Just after the start, it was announced that Kevin Rose of Digg was not going to attend and, in his place, there would be a videoconference with Jay Adelson (CEO of Digg). The list of speakers included people like Steven Pemberton of W3C, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and Marc Tluscz of Mangrove Capital Partners (the company that invested in Skype). Steven stated that declarative programming languages were the future. He mentioned a study which shows that a larger number of code lines increases the number of bugs exponentially. When he was asked about RoR, he answered that it was “a good language in a good direction” but it still needed some things. Michael stated that he did not understand the people who complain that “many Web 2.0 applications seem to be the same” since the continued reformulation and re-use of ideas (even those that have previously failed) is the key to evolution. I liked Marc Tluscz’s explanation about Mangrove’s investment criterion: “companies that break paradigms“. He stated that, when Skype was simply an idea, the founders presented him the project and told him “look, we’re going to create a software that enables people to talk free and which will bring all telcos to their knees“. Marc asked the audience: “How could we resist?” However, Paul Molenaar of Ilse Media (the Netherlands’ largest online publisher) remembers the story in a different way. In his presentation, he stated that “When Niklas Zënstrom came to Ilse to seek financing, he spent 15 minutes explaining the idea and 45 minutes explaining how he was going to sell the company”.

At the end of each speech, there were 10 minutes in which several companies (WidSets, eSnips, Plazes, Netvibes, AllPeers, Hyves) presented their services. In the coffee breaks between presentations, I explained Tractis to Michael Arrington. To my surprise, he was very interested in the idea, he asked me quite a lot of questions, and said that he would participate in the Beta . I told Marc Tluscz that I loved his presentation and believed that Tractis had the disruptive potential that Mangrove was seeking. He told me that he wanted to go further into the idea; I’ll tell you what has been the result. It wasn’t all a bed of roses. At midday, it was time to do the elevator pitch to the people from Atlas Venture. I was in the elevator with Marc Oiknine. I told him my full pitch, 30 seconds, from “We want to create a legal system for the Internet nation…” to the end. When Marc said “I don’t know if that’s an interesting area“, I remember thinking “WTF!? What could be more interesting?”.

Kevin Kelly rocks!!

In general, the level of speakers was very high but, if I have to choose a single presentation, I have to select Kevin Kelly’s (editor of Wired and author of “New Rules for The New Economy“). He described the web in quantitative terms and stated that it was interesting that the amount of hyperlinks, clicks, data transmission, etc. corresponded quite accurately to the number of synapses, neurons and activity of the human brain. He referred to the Internet as a unique machine, of which we form part and which searches us as we search it. His speech was, at least at a personal level, inspiring and full of brilliant quotes like “The web runs on love and attention, not greed“. It looked like the birth of a religion and Kevin was its high priest. The web has only been around for 4,000 days yet every thing we ever said about the Internet is happening. The web is growing rapidly, every thing “wants” to be in the web, the web is everything and the web will own every bit. He said that many complain about the web 2.0’s hype but, according to him, “the web is under-hyped“. For me and others, that was the conference’s “quote”. The best is yet to come .

A detailed description about Kevin Kelly’s speech can be seen in The Yourdon Report: The Next Web: Kevin Kelly’s Keynote

After the conference

After the conference, there was a party at Boris’, one of the organizers, followed by another party until the early hours of the morning at Jimmy Woo. From what I hear, it’s one of Amsterdam’s most select clubs. I had a great time with Fabian (yes, I’m the one with half a head) of the Outfoxed project, the 19-year old Tariq Krim of netvibes, Diederik of TwOnes, Kat Orland of SEOmoz and Web 2.0 Awards….

Final assessment

The Next Web was an excellent opportunity to meet people behind the best European start-ups. And all this in a very beautiful city. The weather was great. There were houses at ground level (without curtains!), friendly people on their porches drinking wine and eating dinner, and boats with groups of friends sailing along the canals. It was like a Bohemian Hobbiton. Congratulations to Patrick and Boris of Fleck, the event’s organizers, for an excellent job. I can’t wait to 11 May 2007 to attend the next edition.

“The Next Web” (Blog) conference will be held in Amsterdam on 7 July, dealing with how web technology will change the way in which we browse the Internet, make business and live. I hope it’s successful because this type of event is much needed in Europe.

I have known Patrick de Laive and Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, the conference organizers and the entrepreneurs behind Fleck (Blog), for a few months. Fleck is in a similar situation to that of Tractis: seeking financing. Patrick has shared with us advice and some horror stories. From what he says, the venture capital situation is better in the Netherlands than in Spain but not by much. Offers from US investors always have one more zero than from Europeans. My opinion of Spanish venture capital (the only one I know) can be summarized as follows: sometimes I would like to put them all in a pot, place some loudspeakers as tall as buildings, and sing them a song. At full volume. 10 times. One for each lie. But only sometimes, afterwards the thought goes out of my mind.

My main aim is to contact potential investors. Several top-tier venture capital firms will attend the conference. I would love talk to the people from Atlas Venture (they manage 2 billion dollars to invest!) and Mangrove Capital Partners (the Skype investors). I hope I can do this. The Atlas Venture people have set up a curious test: they’ll give you the opportunity to give them an elevator pitch at the hotel. An elevator pitch consists in explaining your idea in 30 seconds. The term comes from the time which, in theory, you have to get into an elevator with an investor and tell him your idea before he leaves. You can tell that they’ve taken it literally. I hope I don’t coincide with Sonali De Rycker because I’ll lose my concentration. I would like to meet Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. It would be wonderful if he decided to participate in Tractis’ beta. Wish me luck . I’ll tell you all about it.