Patrick de Laive

I just met the founders of LeCool (Rene and Andrew) based in Barcelona.

Le cool magazine is a free, weekly magazine presenting a selection of concerts, djs, exhibitions, odd movies and other cultural events and happenings. It is also a clever guide to the city’s most worthwhile bars, restaurants, shopping and other experiences, without being necessarily trendy – just really good.

It is an email subscription magazine, but formatted as if it were a traditional magazine
The Amsterdam version is just out and it is kinda cool.
Andrew told me that they have over 70.000 subscribers in 5 different places now. LeCool incorporated three years ago and is profitable. Actually, they are looking for some growth capital to develop the online part of their business and to expand to other cities throughout the world (they didn’t want to say what the Next LeCool city will be).

I’m keeping an eye on them.

Thanks for the coffee guys.

BTW they are looking for a funky office in the centre of Amsterdam, so if you know something…. amsterdam at lecool dot com

I just visited the initiator (Vincent) of HotelWorldMap. It’s a full screen google maps interface mashed up with a Hotel database of over 60.000 hotels worldwide. You can search a hotel by ‘going’ to a city or area, zoom in and click on one of the available hotels.
It’s a nice feature, but still a bit buggy (the search box doesn’t work in FF, its pretty slow). Vincent told me that still a lot has to be done to make it more useful, but the first reactions were good.

Although I don’t see a real big market here for Vincent, it is a nice new way to find hotels. It probably fits better to a large travel agency or e.g. tripadvisor, than as a standalone service.
I hope Vincent keeps developing to give the visitors a great experience. All the best

Yesterday, I bumped into David Fleck (vice president Marketing of Second life). He’s in Amsterdam for an IPAN meeting and to give a keynote speech at the emerce e-day. He told me that he hated us for inventing The Fleck Handsignal.

During boardmeetings at Lindenlab (the creators of Second Life) they give him ‘the handsignal’ when he’s talking to much, and then he knows….. I have to shut up . “Its driving me crazy”, David admitted.
It’s great that the Fleck handsignal spreaded out into the San Francisco offices. For all the LindenLab employees, I’ve got you a present its your own David Fleck (and me) giving you the Fleck Handsignal.