fesja

In 2024, USA will reach the current present in Europe ;)

Since 2017, the SEPA Instant Credit Transfer protocol is enabled in Europe. Which is basically what FedNow will be.

Multiple apps and banks have built on top of it solutions for consumers and businesses.

I interviewed Bizum, the success story of Spain related to instant payments. Here, "bizum" is a verb. 100% of banks supoort it. Everyone, kids and adults, use it to pay for beers, food or presents https://www.javierescribano.me/bizum/

from another article

You can see them in the front line, looking for melee with the police. They are covered, some wear helmets and elbow pads, communicate by radio and do not get rid of almost anything. They are the 500 anti-systems, which the police divide between revolutionary independence activists and anarchists, mostly young people, who are at the forefront of the riots that have had their epicenter in Barcelona since Monday. This nucleus has a reinforcement of another 1,500 that add to the altercations.

What at first began as peaceful mass demonstrations has sparked sporadic violence, with protestors setting fire to buildings and damaging property

As engineers, we should be more careful about the consequences of what we build. It can be used for the good, or for the bad. What will those engineers think when there is first dead person (either violent protester, pacific protester or policeman)? Will they feel responsible?

Pacific protests are allowed every day. Violent protests with people setting fire to cars, bins, etc; and people throwing rocks or acid to the police must be prosecuted.

Disclaimer: I'm from Madrid and I live in Madrid right now. I've created 3 startups. I've spent monts or weeks working from San Francisco, New York, London and Barcelona. My companies have been invested by Atomico, Idinvest, PointNine, 500 Startups

Many people ask me why I haven't moved permanently elsewhere. The answer is simple: quality of live. It's really hard to get the quality of life that we have in Spain (free health care, awesome food, awesome weather, lots and lots of places to visit on the weekends, awesome hiking places, beaches, mountains to sky, etc). Specially if you have a high salary like us in tech do.

About Madrid and Barcelona. I think both are good choices, but let me summarize some thoughts: - Barcelona. It has a beach and the sea; if you are really into it, it's a great choice. It's near France, so it's great to rent a car and travel to Europe (France, Italy). The city is lovely although there are way too many tourists now (you will avoid many areas). It had an ecosystem much bigger than Madrid, but right now it's not anymore. The design community is bigger there. There are more international people living there for 1-2 years, but they usually leave. - Madrid. The bigger companies are here (Amazon has tons of good paying jobs, Google, Facebook). If you avoid Puerta del Sol, the rest of areas are very calm. It has high-speed trains with all over Spain, it's the best spot if you want to travel. The startup ecosystem has grown a lot, Google opened a Campus there (like in London). There are many accelerators in Madrid. And many of us who sold previous companies are already into our 2-3 companies. Wages are higher and the cost is kind of similar now (what they told me in Barcelona two weeks ago). Madrid has more events than in Barcelona.

About the work. If you work in Tech, Spanish won't be a problem neither in Madrid nor Barcelona. In both places you may want to learn some Spanish & Catalan words to communicate better, but the situation is improving a lot (there are thousands of American & British teachers in our schools).

Salaries? Lower than in UK and Germany. But the top companies are paying much more than traditional companies. Let's say that the idea is that you save the same money. A Senior dev can get paid between 40 and 60k in Madrid in one of the top startups + stock options.

Don't do freelancing with local clients. If you are into remote, that's the best way to save money. Remote for a US client and work from Spain.

If you are searching for a startup and Madrid is finally a good option for you, check ours https://ontruck.com/work-with-us/. We are around 40 employees, we have grown a lot (€) in one year and we have just been invested by Atomico and Idinvest https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/11/ontruck/. Our focus is Europe.

OnTruck | All Senior – Product Manager, Product Designer, Full-stack, Mobile | Madrid (Spain) | Full-time, ONSITE https://ontruck.com/work-with-us/

Hi, this is Javier, VP of Product. We are hiring for many positions. We are 35 people right now. 95% of us seniors.

We are disrupting the logistics sector in Europe, we are growing like crazy and we are backed by top investors from London and Berlin.

We follow really good agile and product processes. Look at our Product Process for example https://nerds.ontruck.com/the-product-process-at-ontruck-e25...

You can write me directly at javier@

Hi Alex,

I already had it in my mind. I did El Camino el Santiago last year, and I want to travel abroad this time (I'm Spaniard). Did you do the full way or just some weeks? Do you remember any good website/guides to prepare it? Any way of contacting you?

thanks!

I just want to say that I love what you are doing and specially how you are executing. Keep up! And come to Spain soon :)

Bonus point: Peru could get into the fight too because some of the gold, silver and emeralds could have come from there. Back to the old books!

Disclaimer: I am a Spaniard

This is going to be a long fight because traditionally those ships and its content belong to the owner. There are some international rules that some countries have agreed on (UNESCO): http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13520&URL_DO=DO_TO.... Colombia hasn't signed that, but it doesn't mean they shouldn't obbey.

I don't know about this topic, so I won't add much more. However I wouldn't be so ingenous to think that the full treasure belongs to Colombia or to Spain. I suppose they will end up in international legal figths and they will end up agreeing on sharing the treasure. In any case, they CAN'T sell it (I believe) so it'd be as worthy as the tickets of the museum. It's more of a patriotic fight than a practical fight.

Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Pepsi, Nokia, Mastercard, Deutsche Bank

It's not so surprising to me. When you have stomach ache, the first thing they tell you is not to eat until you have been cleansed. We have always done that in my family. Also, once that I had a weird allergy on my skin (I'm not allergic to anything) I fasted for 4 days drinking Aquarius and some ham and rice the last 2 days. I didn't need any pills.

No, they don't. They just had Uber Pop.

There is a Spanish Uber competitor called Cabify that does comply with the law. They have professional drivers and cool and clean cars. So yes, Uber could be legal if they want (it implies more effort though as every driver has to have a license)

FYI

Spain has the second biggest high speed train network of the world, with over 3.000 km (many more kilometers being built), just after China.

This 2014, 28M people will have traveled by train, compared to 31.2M in USA in 2012. The goal is to reach 56M in a few years. After many years where the prices were expensive, we have started to liberalize it and prices have go down. Now it's reasonable cheap. You can buy one-way tickets for 30€ for a 1h30 route (like 4h by car). Madrid-Barcelona is one of the most demanding routes and flights can't compete with the high speed train. In just a few years, people have moved from using flights to most of them using the train. It's way way more comfortable.

Of course, the key question is geography. Trains works best for a distance less than 1.000km. In Spain that's the distance from east to west or south to north. In USA there are some areas that make a lot of sense like Boston-NY-Philly-Washington; and California.

I'm a Spaniard and I can't agree more!! Yes, we love to be near bars, restaurants, terraces, small-medium supermarkets you can buy fresh food daily, use public transportation instead of depending on the car, have nearby parks to play sports, good public schools... Also usually our family and friends live nearby. That's very important for us. Also, many people used to choose their apartment in a walking distance from their job (traditionally there is few movement of workers, people usually stay many years on the same company).

It's way different than USA (except NY or SF maybe). Not better nor worse, just different :)

I was the founder of TouristEye, a travel guide app that makes trip planning really easy. We got into 500Startups, we reached 500k registered travelers and then we sold the company to Lonely Planet, the leader of the sector.

I see myself on this post. Several years ago we decided to build an amazing trip planning, that allowed you to plan your trip day-by-day. You can see some screenshots on the Chrome extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/touristeye-planner...) (not working now). We got over 100k users using it on their trips (not daily users obviously). It was gorgeous, people really loved it, Google really loved it, but the usage was pretty low. Just 5% of our users used it.

So because we were a startup we decided to kill it and we focused on capturing user wishes, and recommending those things for their trips (kind of Google Now for trips and offline). That's what gave us more usage, more income and finally it was one of the reasons of our exit.

So, yes. Trip planning sucks as a business. But all our team remembers it proudly. It was just fucking amazing :)

I'm waiting for Codetree (https://codetree.com/) to be released! I have high hopes on it (not affiliated with them in any way)

I don't use anything. Right now, I have the ebooks I buy in Amazon and then the others in a folder in Dropbox. But I have no order...

I completely agree. I talked with the Calibre leader some years ago offering my help with the UX, and he didn't seem to have any interest in simplifying the UI. It's his app, and he wants it to have as much features as possible. It's great for many people but not for the majority I believe.

I stopped using it because I can't stand the UI :(

finally they are coming in 10 days! You can see some photos of the electric bikes we will have https://www.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1...

that's right. But in Madrid families also use buses and trains to go to the center because it's faster and more convenient than car+parking. In Tokyo too. It's just a matter of investing in public transportation, and wanting a cleaner city.

Location: Anywhere in USA, Relocation, Full Time Stack: backend and frontend, also some design

10 master engineers who have just finished their degrees and have 28 month visas http://spaniardengineers.com/

A company to keep learning and have fun :)

These are 10 Master engineers who are finishing this May their Tech Master in Chicago and they are looking for a job in a startup. They are all Spaniards who have done the same studies like myself (Computer Science in Madrid, and Master in Chicago). They have a 28 month visa so they have no problem of visas. They can start tomorrow.

You can find their info here http://spaniardengineers.com/

I know several of them, and they are good, very proactive and they learn quickly because that's what we have been educated for. You may want to contact them. One of them have just been hired by Amazon (she also had a Google offer).

On the website you can see that the people who do both studies end up doing good things :)

Good luck all of you!

All my praise to these Google engineers and scientists. Another completely crazy idea that will really help millions of people every day. Thanks Google!

We have discovered a lot of Google X technologies in the last months. It seems that Google X is really working. We may have to stop having fun of Google+.

we started with some that seemed reasonable, and then we modify them after some weeks of use.

We also use Asana and Kanban. However we have a simplified use in Asana. I've found that you have too many projects and places where to look.

We have one project called Kanban board, with all the features for web, iPhone and Android app (8 people use it). This board has several headers:

* To Production -> All tasks that are ready to be deployed

* To Test - Second test (5) -> All tasks that have to be tested a second time

* To Test - First test (15) -> All tasks that need to be tested

* Development - Finished (10) -> All tasks that have been comitted, but haven't been deployed to the alpha sever/app.

* Development - Working (7) -> All tasks that developers/designers are working on.

* Pending - Bugs -> All tasks that need to be fixed.

* Pending - Analysis -> All tasks that need to be analyzed (improve description, break them into subtasks)

* Pending - New (20) -> All tasks that need to be done

* Backlog -> All future tasks / features / suggestions

We use projects to indicate if the task is for web, iPhone or Android; and tags if it's urgent.

There can not be more tasks that the number between parenthesis. If there are 12 in Finished for example, we know we have to deploy to the alpha server/app.

just received an email from http://www.androidrate.com/ offering "Boost your app with 5 star ratings and positive reviews". Yes, Google should ban them.

These are two different things:

1. Give more weigh to recent ratings in order to calculate the average rating. If there hasn't been any new rating, there is NO penalty for not having recent ratings. 2. Rank better the apps with more recent ratings. There is a penalty for not having recent ratings.

I agree with 1) (my proposal), but not necessarily with 2). Although it's true that ConnectBot has a lot of new ratings despite having been updated in October 2010.

thanks!

no, the idea for the article comes from the changes in iOS7 that have improved the number of our downloads. So it affects all apps that started a few years ago.

But it's also true that I'm a perfectionist myself, so if we have spent thousands of hours on the app, I want it to have the fair rating. And with the current algorithm it hasn't.

wow, that's really sweet! I'd have done a great job with this info 12 years ago when I created a top MTG website ;)

So many good times!