Back to Argentina

I just finished a pretty weird monday. Anyways, my weekend was great, on Friday we went to Creamfields, where Chemical Brothers and Carl Cox did their thing. A friend gave me some VIP tickets, and for our luck, it had a full open bar, so we had a great time and of course the night end up quite crazy. On saturday I went to a BBQ where we had a great dinner, and after ir, we had a special guest, our old friend Jack Daniel.

Tomorrow I´m heading back again to Buenos Aires, Argentina. This is time I´m atttending Intel Editor´s Day which will be held in Rosario, Argentina. The event starts on Wednesday and our bus to Rosario departs very early, so we are leaving one day before.

I will have to go back to Buenos Aires on the end of this month, 29th and 30th, and if things go well, I should go in between this week and the 29th trip.  Because Chile is so small, many manufacturers decide to throw their press events at Buenos Aires, which is a bigger market, and fly journos there. It´s a good trick, an probably cheaper, although we´ve arrived late to more than one. That´s why it´s always better flying the day before.

PS: Slashdot only moved something around 2000 uniques to our site. Not too bad although less than we expected.

The million pesos rum

One million chilean pesos is around 1,000 pounds or 2,000 american dollar, and yesterday, Havana Club announced it´s newest and most exclusive rum, Havana Club Maximo Extra Añejo with that price tag. Maximo is a blend of several aged rums, including some of them that are 100 years old. It´s bottle is made of man made blown crystal, and in it´s recipe there´s years of Cuban perfection. Yesterday I attended it´s launch in Chile at the Ritz Carlton, and had the chance to try it. I must say it´s the best rum I´ve ever tried and of course the most expensive one. If you want one you should hurry, it´s a 1000 bottle limited edition and in Chile it´s already sold out.

Quoted on microblogging article at El Mercurio

El Mercurio is probably the most important newspaper on Chile. Even though it´s not the most read, it´s a high end product, for influential people (or so they say). Yesterday my collegue Gabriel Esteffan wrote an article about microblogging (i.e. Twitter) and gave me a call to hear my thoughts about it, today he published it.

Usually when we get linked from a newspaper, it doesn´t drive too much traffic, but it helps indirectly. Executives in IT companies read El Mercurio, and when they hear about ChileHardware – which was mentioned in the article – they will remember us. For example, if I met them in the past and they already heard about it, now they heard it again, or if I meet them in the following weeks, they will at least heard about us before. Anyways, being quoted either online or offline always helps, and help is what will make us even more important.

This week won´t be too busy, which is good, because I will have time to pick up with some articles I left behind. Next week I will be travelling to Rosario and Buenos Aires… again.

Blogging chit-chat with Nokia´s VP of Multimedia

During my stay in Buenos Aires I had the chance to be in a panel with Nokia´s VP of Multimedia, Mark Selby. We talked about content, technology, web 2.0 and social content. My friends at MobileCloseUp recorded it, and you can see the first part of the presentation in this video.

I´m feeling a lot more comfortable about talking in public, I think I´m doing much better than in the past. I will also be speaking at a LANParty in two more weeks, which I hope will help in my experience talking to large crowds.

From Buenos Aires with good news

This has been crazy. If someone thinks that working at the internet full time is an easy job, he is completely wrong. Now that I´m full time internet, I´ve been working three times as hard. Good news is that we´ve already seen some reactions to this. I´m going to all press events and doing lots of networking, I have meetings almost everyday and we´ve been published full articles everyday. TecnoSquad, our one year old Consumer Electronics blog, achieved a PR6 rating and BotonTurbo our one month videogame weblog is averaging over 2.5k uniques a day. We have a new design ready for TecnoSquad which we should be installed during new year´s eve and ChileHardware will receive a new face lift which I hope will be ready for CES 2008 / MacWorld. As you can see the sun is shining and things are getting even better.

Nowadays I´m at Buenos Aires, for a Nokia event. I´m staying at the Faena Hotel, according to some, the best designer hotel in the world, and definitely the best in Argentina. This is full John Chow CES style! I also fixed some meetings during my stay here. I really hope to have some more time for blogging, I hope. One the meantime, feel free to check our GeForce 8800 GT review, the only analysis on this card in the hispanic world.

The start of a new life

I think I’ve just started the beginning of my real Internet Entrepreneur Adventure. On Saturday I moved in to a new apartment. The new apartment is quite cool, it’s very close to everything and my room mates are quite interesting. On one side there’s James and her girlfriend, they used to live in San Diego, CA and now they are working at their own bar in Santiago. On the other side, there’s Anikka and Patricia, Annika is German and she’s on an exchange program, Patricia on it’s side is working in a food related company and her family lives in Chicago, Il. This makes our flat quite busy, which is definitely fun.

On my personal side, I just freezed my studies. I will give all my attention to our Internet proyects, just like Shawn decided to do a long time ago. I really think we are in the right time, I’m not sure if I’m in the correct place, but time will tell.  I have lots of plans for the next 12 months, I’m looking forward for a big change that includes lifestyle and work. On the short term, I’m planning on studying Mandarin, and who knows, maybe even moving to Shanghai on the long term!

Two prizes in one week

This week two important contests for media finished. The first one is the HP Press Awards, where all local media could submit articles and our Editor in Chief turned out with the second prize on Technology. On the other side, another contest finished and it´s the Intel Weblog Contest for Latam, TecnoSquad took the big prize and our editors won a brand new portable computer. Congrats to our editors and let´s keep up the good work!

Update: Guess which was the biggest prize… traffic! TecnoSquad broke another record and we had lots of backlink love

Vacations… or sort of

As I told you, I was going out for vacations. Finally I couldn´t, which kind of sucks, but I still have to take care of some business, so I´m trapped in Santiago. My last exam was on Friday, just after the test I went to a Belkin press event. During the weekend I just slept and partied, the good news is Monday was a holiday, so it was a long weekend. I´ve being sorting  some things up, I may have to go to Buenos Aires next week to try some nice hardware. This week I´ve been fixing some details on a trip I´ll do during the next months, I´ll let you know about it when the time comes. I haven´t been able to write for ChileHardware or TecnoSquad, which is what I love to do, on Tuesday we had a lunch meeting with potential sponsors and I´ve been stuck to the phone and my mail account.

The only cool thing about what I´ve been doing, is that I´ve stressed quite a bit a notebook and a new cellphone I have for review. I have to give this things back during the next days, but meanwhile, I´ve really used them a lot, which helps to have a final impression about them.

I´m looking forward for this weekend, I´ll drive to Viña del Mar to hang out with some friends in the beach. I just need to really work tomorrow, and right now I have a terrible head ache.

Stats for May

May is finally over and our stats broke their all time records. ChileHardware was read by 581,082 people, which is a 10.6% increase over our last record, the month of March. This responds to our top of the line servers which encouraged international readers to visit us. There is still room for improvement, considering we just switched servers the second week of May, so June should show the full potential of our new investment.

On the other side, TecnoSquad gave us a great surprise. Even though we wrote only 133 posts, which is 3 stories less than during April, we had an impressive increase in our readership. 70,331 unique readers visited TecnoSquad during May and that is an 82% improvement over the last month, which was also our last traffic record.

So what´s next?
We are preparing lots of stuff for our readers. TecnoSquad will have a huge giveaway during June and ChileHardware will be covering Computex for second year. And that´s only the begining, we have lots of surprises prepared

Alive…

My cold has finished, I survived. Even though I was sick, I kept track of some things from bed. Stats are doing great and ad sales are going up. As I told you before, I won´t be able to make it to Computex, but my partner will go there.

I´m right now in the worst part of the semester, where I have to study quite a lot at school. I won´t have much time, and if I was thinking on going somewhere for vacations, I´m really tempted in flying to Silicon Valley to check out the latest trends and meet with old friends. Vacations, work, play… it´s all the same.