If you have read previous posts, you know that we started customer trials on mid-December and that the first results were really encouraging, with higher than expected usage and proving a great for our clients. But we have kept working hard and learning from our mistakes and now we are able to deliver even better customer insight.

We’re proud to say that a couple of weeks ago we started working with a restaurant chain that has been relying on 11870.com, Yelp and Tripadvisor to access their customers’ opinions. Aggregating the results from those three sites they got 283 comments in two years. But with emtrics they gathered 289 opinions in just two weeks.

Two weeks! We’re rocketing at 50x times the speed of current sites.

So now you can use emtrics on 44 trials in Madrid with 22 companies and expanding quickly, hopefully by the end of the month we’ll have doubled that number and entered into new sectors, such as hotels, taxi companies, bus services or banks.

Last Thursday was also memorable. Mathew Key, Head of Telefónica Digital, came to the Wayra Academy in Madrid with a delegation of journalists, businessmen and investors from the UK to pitch the Wayra concept as they’ll soon launch Wayra London, and we had the opportunity to pitch emtrics to them (and thanks to Gary and all his tips it was probably our best pitch ever).

Matthew Key, Head of Telefónica Digital, pitching Wayra

Afterwards, while we were chatting with Ronan Dunne, CEO at Telefonica UK, a guy came congratulating us and very excited about our product, as he wanted to try it. As we quickly found out he runs a very innovative taxi service in London and he’s very user focused,so he was very interested in testing Emtrics in some of his vehicles! So, we hope we’ve found our first international customer!!!

Our milestones for February include releasing the beta of emtrics and start generating revenue. Also we will release our new homepage, designed by Pablo Lago. He has done a great job, you’ll see it soon.

And last, but not least, you’ve to know that last Wednesday we collected our the 1.000th opinion!

It is a very special number and we want to celebrate it with all people that are helping us. We also have to thank all of our families and friends, all the Wayra staff, our colleagues in other startups, our mentors, the external team working with us, and all the businesses that believe in our project and are testing our product.

Thanks to all of you!!!

1000 opnions!

We have started testing on different businesses, such as, Restaurants, Coffee Shops, Online Shops, Events companies, Dental Centers, Training Centers and Fashion Shops, and we are seeing very interesting results.

It is amazing to see how a restaurant, that has got 42 opinions at “11870”, the Spanish largest restaurant site, and 20 at Tripadvisor, has exceeded those numbers using our service in just tree weeks, or how on online shop of a reputed fashion brand is getting feedback that will help them improving, from more than 10% of its customers; or how the market intelligence department of a large multinational has obtained feedback from 40% of the attendees to one of its sessions.

One comment that we will always remember is when the owner of a restaurant that is trialing Emtrics, told me right before Christmas that thanks to our service, she was able to receive feedback from an unhappy customer and how we help her from getting a bad comment on Facebook or at a review website.

Another happy anecdote came from the US, where we had our first foreign user of Emtrics. This user wrote to the online shop customer of us.

“Thanks! It was quickly delivered; the consumer service was very efficient and replied to my emails very quickly. I had my order in less than a week and i live in the USA, just 5 days before Xmas. The jacket was nicely wrapped. Thanks again!”

One of the most exciting activities of December was when we put our logo and happy faces stickers on our place in Wayra. We had lots of fun and I did not know how difficult it really was to avoid having any bubbles. Anyway, the following picture shows it all.

After some fine-tuning to our web-app, we’ll hopefully start testing Emtrics on Hotels, Transportation, Telecoms Shops, Banks, Sports Centers, Travel Agencies, Utilities, Retail Shops and Jewelry chains. These new customers will help us improving our communication strategy and learn about new applications we are discussing with them.

I think we are going fast, sometimes maybe too fast, but learning a lot every day. Now there are plenty of new challenges in front of us, and we need to continue delivering value to our customers. I am convinced, and that’s the feedback we are getting from our customers, that we are heading on the right direction!!!

Also, we have showcased Emtrics in Zoom Net a program on new technologies in the Spain public television.

Happy New Year!!!

Needless to say, we are extremely excited!!!

Now visitors at Wayra will be able to provide feedback on our pitch, business model, team, etcetera. Also, we will be testing it at the coffee bar in the Telefónica Building, managed by Grupo Arturo.

And this is just the start! In the next weeks we will be rolling out emtrics in many, many places around Madrid: from restaurants, to jewelries and fashion shops. December and January will be very fun!

The last weeks have been pretty hard.
It’s difficult to distribute time between engineering task, meetings and all the lunches and sessions that Josep and Gary are organizing for the teams at Wayra. But exhausting goals are the ones that carry the bigger rewards and I’m really happy of what we have accomplished until now, and eager to do much more.

Returning to all the activities at Wayra, since our last post José Cabiedes has explained us what they look for in a project, we’ve talked about Agile/Lean Entrepreneurship with Mario López de Ávila (he also organizes the Agile Entrepreneurship Spain Meetup, a must-to-go event), Joaquín Márquez from the The Cocktail taught us the basics of usability and UX and finally Jesús Encinar has shared his experience building idealista, the biggest real-state site in Spain with us.

And last but not least, we had the inauguration of Wayra with the Secretary of State for Telecommunications, Juan Junquera, and the Telefónica’s president, César Alierta. To whom we had the opportunity to present emtrics and I dare to say that he liked it quite a lot.

I’ll leave you with the video (in Spanish) of the inaguration. You should watch it at least until the minute 5:30.

Despite the fact that Eduard was not at a 100% due to tonsillitis (“anginas” in Spanish) and super-doses of antibiotics, this week has been extremely positive. I believe that in these past 15 days, we have obtained great momentum, as we are now able to demo our product.

On Monday, Gary and Josep went through and reviewed our “elevator pitch”, and gave us great hints on what we need to improve. If on Monday probably our pitch was rated with a “D-”, I now think that we are close to a ”C+”, and we’re getting there, I am sure that we’ll have an “A+” at the end of our period in Wayra.

Tuesday it was bank holiday in Spain, so we worked from home. It was time to review the market research we launched in October. We will share more on detail when it’s finalized, but, so far, there are some interesting results on why customers don’t provide feedback on traditional businesses in Spain, mainly: i) lack of knowledge that it is possible, ii) lack of certainty that the business manager will get the feedback, and iii) the existing feedback processes are lengthy and complex. Truly, after reviewing the first data, we believe that Emtrics is becoming more important for the traditional business than we initially thought.

Once the Demo has been implemented, we have been able to show it to potential customers. The initial feedback we have got is extremely useful for the next stage of the product development and it is also ensuring us that we are heading the right way.

This week’s anecdote comes when, after an excellent pitch from Eduard, the head of the entrepreneurship institute of Madrid, asked us if we could deploy a pilot of Emtrics at their site, and guess what our answer was: “yeahhhh!!!” and then is when our adrenalin flow skyrocketed.

For me, next week will be very emotional, as Wayra will be officially inaugurated by Telefonica’s top management this coming Wednesday. It is going to be a special moment, as I, hopefully, will see and spend some time with long-lasting bosses and friends.

The first and foremost news is that we’ve a working prototype and that it has been very well received by everybody we showed it to, from friends, to mentors and potential clients. It has been a big boost of energy for Iñigo and me; and now we’re working hard to reach the next phase of the project with a pilot program to test the product in the wild. You know, this is going to be big!

Wednesday was a packed, but extremely interesting day. It started with a great talk with Martin Varsavksy at the IE, it was a stream of consciousness were we learnt from his past experiences with Jazztel, the present with Fon and the future. We also had the chance to try our pitches on him and got some invaluable feedback.

When Martin finished, he flew to pick up his son after a physics exam, we ran back to the Wayra HQ to have lunch with Ismal El-Qudsi, one of the big names about SEO in Spain, and also got his feedback.

After the lunch we got the only chance of the whole day to get some work done. But it was a short window, because at 17h all the Wayra teams meet in the Ágora to assist to a masterclass by Enrique Dans on Marketing? Plan? for Startups. For the moment, this is the talk I’ve enjoyed the most at Wayra.

Wednesday ended with a couple of meetings with our mentors. First with Pilar Latorre from Telefónica, and after that with Gonzálo Castellano and Phillip Hasskamp, founders of Groupon Spain and Portugal.

Thursday started with a visit from several Spanish reporters to Wayra to know what we’re doing there. The result, Emtrics appears in El Confidencial!

Once the journalists visit finished, we had to run to the Bullnet offices as we had a lunch with Javier Ulecia, also our mentor. Javier has a lot of first hand experience in tech-entrepreneurship in spain and gave us some valuable advice and contacts.

Finally on Friday Alberto Benbunan provided his feedback on the best way to get out projects to the market, from viral campaigns to SEO and SEM.

This has been a short and intense week, fun and somewhat exhausting, but very, very productive and valuable. Now on Sunday evening, as I write this post, I cannot stop wondering what surprises and leaps will this coming week bring to us. In any case, we’re ready and eager to find out.

Iñigo (left) and Eduard (right)

Right now we’re looking for a recent graduate in computer science, electrical engineering, or similar to join us a trainee engineer or one or two students in their final years to join us as a interns.

As a trainee engineer/intern you’ll help us with all the tasks related to software development: design, coding, testing, documenting and deploying the app. You will be completely involved in the process and will attend any technical meeting we have, but I promise we will keep them down to the minimum necessary!

We do agile development with our interpretation of SCRUM with Kanban, and the documentation and testing of the app are crucial. We believe in team work, in direct communication, and we hate barriers. We like freedom so we need responsible people. We hate missing deadlines. And we love code quality, so we enjoy doing code-reviews for fun and improvement.

Profile and knowledge:

• You’re fluent in english. We use it for work.
• You can code in Ruby and JavaScript. Also you know HTML5, SQL and CSS3. It’s what we use. If you also know Java (for Blackberry or Android) or Objective-C even better.
• You’ve experience developing modern webapps, or at least know their architecture.
• You’ve worked in agile environments and have experience writing tests.
• You can start with a fresh installed Debian and setup the common services: sshd, a webserver, a database, some cache…
• Bonus points: You’ve been playing with some NoSQL product.
• Bonus points: You’ve some code in GitHub

The great kitchen!

We are working on a tight schedule and there’s a lot of work to be done, so we are looking for somebody who han commit itself to the project.

Our intention is to hire you as a full-time engineer after the internship/training period.

If you’re interested, please send an introduction and CV to hello@emtrics.com.

My first comment is that, for the first time, Eduard and I have been able to work face to face. Initially it was a bit odd, as we had been working from home and having weekly meetings at Starbucks, but as the week progressed it’s become great for both of us and the project.

Iñigo (left) and Eduard (right)

Secondly, Gary and Josep, Wayra Spain’s managers, are providing great help and support. They are taking care of all aspects of our life at Wayra and, at the same time, pushing and giving us very useful tips. I love when Gary comes out of the blue with a potential investor or speaker and asks us to make a one minute elevator pitch while we are with our guard down.

Josep (left) and Gary (right)

Finally, I have to talk about the facilities Telefónica has prepared for Wayra. From each startup’s space, to the meeting corners, chill-outs, bar, relaxing, stress-out and Agora areas: chapeau guys, they are simply great. The outcome is just perfect and it shows the effort and the commitment Wayra is putting on the project. But what I really love the most is the building where Wayra is located. We are on the 8th floor of probably the most charismatic building in the Madrid, the Edificio Telefónica, Telefónica’s old HQ in the heart of the city.

Chairs in a meeting room.

The great kitchen!

Telefónica Building in Madrid

Well, the first week is already over and we have had the chance to attend to two great presentations, one by Iñaki Arrola and the other one by José María de Churtichaga. We also had some hangout drinks, birthday cakes, launched a customer survey (by the way, thanks to all of our friends that have helped providing us their opinion!), started the recruitment of two Jr. SW Engineers, engaged 99designs for our new the logo and image. And we have been working to re-shape our product and offer, writing a lot of code and overall having fun, fun and some more fun.

You can see more photos of in our flickr

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

— The Agile Manifesto.

Computer science is a young field that has evolved at an amazing speed. It’s easy to forget that the first general-purpose electronic computer, the ENIAC, was turned on for the first time in 1946. Today we have computers even in our pockets.

Due to that quick progress computer scientists and technicians knowledge and abilities were outrun by the computers capabilities. This widening gap brought humanity to what was called the software crisis:

The major cause of the software crisis is that the machines have become several orders of magnitude more powerful!. To put it quite bluntly: as long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming has become an equally gigantic problem.

— Edsger W. Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer

The crisis manifested itself in several ways:

• Projects running over-budget.
• Projects running over-time.
• Software was very inefficient.
• Software was of low quality.
• Software often did not meet requirements.
• Projects were unmanageable and code difficult to maintain.
• Software was never delivered.

It had become such a great problem that in 1968, NATO held the Software Engineering Conference to address it, and was at that conference where the term Software Engineering appeared for the first time.

As the programming problems being tackled became larger and more complex, the ad-hoc processes that had been useful for small research teams became unfeasible and project managers turned their heads to other technical fields, such as industrial engineering or architecture, and their methodologies and processes where took as a reference.

But in these industries risk cannot be tolerated due safety and economical reasons that make corrections after the design phase impossible or extremely expensive to implement. So their processes and methodologies are strict and averse to change. Every phase must be completed and validated before moving to the next one.

This led to a methodology that mimicked those constraints, even though in most software projects they are not present. This methodology was first, informally, introduced in 1956 in the Production of Large Computer Programs presentation by Herbert D. Benington, where he described the software production for a defense system.

But it wasn’t until 1970 when Dr. Winston W. Royce published the paper Managing the Development of Large Software Systems in which the methodology, that became known as Waterfall, was introduced. Dr. Royce wrote the paper after his experience managing large software teams developing software for spacecraft mission planning, commanding and post-flight analysis, a field where error is not an option.

In this model the progress goes from one phase to the next downwards, like a waterfall.

The Waterfall Model

The problem of this model, as stated by Dr. Royce, is that the implementation is risky and invites to failures if the requirements aren’t perfectly defined and static. The worst thing is that when there’re failures, usually noticed at the testing phase, they’re costly to fix as a major redesign might be required and those changes are likely to be so disruptive that a major redesign or even new requirements are required, creating up to a 100% overrun in time and/or costs.

The solution, also stated in the paper, is feedback and iteration. But the tools they had at the moment made it basically impossible, developers didn’t have access to much computer time.

Fortunately as computers became cheaper and more powerful and the development tools improved, the Iterative and Incremental Development process and derivates became possible. In these methodologies the programs are developed through repeated cycles (iterative), like small waterfalls, adding functionality on each repetition (incremental).

Iterative and Incremental Development

The first documented case of Incremental and Iterative Development is NASA’s Project Mercury in the 60s. In 1986 Barry Boehm published A Spiral Model of Software Development and Enhancement in which he presented the Spiral Model, an iterative and incremental model with very long loops, from six months to two years. It was the first time that the risk-driven-iterations and the need to do risk assessment in each cycle was formalized and highlighted.

It wasn’t until the 90s that a number of methodologies were developed based on the Iterative and Incremental Development model with shorter cycles. Methodologies such as Scrum (1995), Extreme Programming (1999) or Test-driven development, that nowadays are known as Agile Methodologies after the 2001 Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

The Agile Methodologies share some core concepts but differ on how they implement them. Those concepts are:

• Do not involve long term planning.
• Features are broken in small pieces and iterated.
• Iterations are short, usually from one to four weeks.
• Each iteration ends with a deliverable, which may be released or not. So it includes a full software development cycle including planning, requirements analysis, design, implementation and testing.
• Teams are small, multidisciplinary and self-organizing. Efforts that require more people can be obtained by using several teams working on different features of the product.
• Focus on the code instead of the documentation.
• The customer is a stakeholder and should be present during the whole process.

At emtrics we are Agile, we use a mix of Scrum and Kanban which I will talk about in another post, but we always have present that there are no silver bullets.

As we are entering this new age, we are encountering very interesting behaviors that show how important Customer Intelligence and New Technologies are becoming in today’s purchasing processes. Here are some examples:

• 71% of online shoppers read other people’s comments, and out of them, 77% are influenced by those opinions. Imagine, more than 50% of an online business depends on good or bad feedback from its customers!
• 70% of shoppers say they were willing to spend about 13% more with companies they believed offer excellent customer service.
• 84% of in-store shoppers are doing some type of mobile activity while they are shopping. Just over 70% are comparing prices, 67% are accessing product reviews and 61% are looking for specific store information.

These are just some facts that show how the environment is changing very rapidly.

The customer is becoming more and more relevant in some leading companies’ selling processes, let me give you some examples:

• Large hotel chains are calculating the yearly bonuses of the individual hotel’s management team based on how the hotel is ranked in Tripadvisor.
• Phonehouse, one of the leading European telecom distributors, is getting first hand feedback from the customer right after a sale. A large part of the salesman’s bonus is based on the client’s opinion and overall sales process satisfaction.
• Lowe’s, one of the leading US retailers, is arming its workforce with 42.000 iPhones to answer shoppers’ questions, ring up purchases and catch up relevant customer information. Its CIO recently said “Forget about the competition, we are playing catch-up with the customer psyche”.

In these new times, the question that any business should ask itself is, “am I becoming customer obsessed?”.

Our view is that in the online world, most companies are aware of the importance of customer obsession, and they have managed to implement very powerful feedback tools to gather client intelligence and develop strategies to help them maximize the impact of positive opinions, and minimize the negative ones.

But offline businesses are lagging behind in terms of customer knowledge and ability to respond to their needs. This is clearer on SME’s which have neither the skills nor the resources to deploy the relevant processes and tools to accomplish it.

We believe that within the next couple of years most businesses will have to evolve and adapt to this new wave, investing largely in customer intelligence and new technologies that will help them succeed in the Age of the Customer.

Steve was one of a kind, a visionary and a creative genius of superb taste. And he’s leaving behind a number of jewels behind him. I want to turn my attention to one of that gems, the one that probably has had the biggest influence on Iñigo’s and on my own life. It’s not the Mac, nor the iPad, not even the iPhone.

It’s Steve’s 2005 Stanford Commencement Address.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. — Steve Jobs, 2005 Standford Commencement Address

Thank you Steve, thank you very much.