TechCrunch / CrunchGear meetup in Prague, May 23, 2008

Nelso will be co-sponsoring (along with GoodData and Newstin) a TechCrunch/CrunchGear meetup in Prague on May 23, 2008. The event will be held at Restaurace Zvonařka in Prague 2.

You can read more about the event in this post on TechCrunch, and you can sign up through Facebook.

Nelso founder interviewed in Czech on Buzzmag.cz

In what is definitely a first for me, I was interviewed (in Czech) for the Buzzmag.cz podcast. You can see the video here: TechCrunch Central European Meet-up v Praze.

We talked about Nelso, the TechCrunch/CrunchGear Prague meet-up on May 23, 2008, and the Twitter contest we are running this Saturday night. It's all in Czech, of course, so if you don't speak that language it won't be quite as interesting.

A single London listing

We added a friend of ours, Kate Lye, to the Nelso database. We realized when adding this record that we didn't have a convention for country code for the United Kingdom. The ISO code for the United Kingdom is actually "GB", not "UK" as some would expect.

The problem is this: we put the country code in the URL for a business listing (i.e. http://www.nelso.com/cz/place/140/ for Kolkovna in Vítězná). Do we want the URL to read http://www.nelso.com/gb/place/XXX/ or http://www.nelso.com/uk/place/XXX/? Does it matter to the GoogleBot?

Twitter Contest - Win an iPod Touch

I've had a brand-new iPod Touch on my desk for about a month. I've always meant to run some sort of contest on Nelso, but couldn't decide what to do. I thought about running a contest to encourage users to add tags to businesses, a contest to add new places to the database, etc., but those all seemed like a lot to ask just to enter a contest.

I recently wrote a Twitter bot for Nelso, to help users look up business info in Europe. So the contest I decided on is to use this bot to try and crowdsource some data about what bars and restaurants are popular in Prague.

Rather than explain the contest here, I'll just point my readers to the contest page on Nelso.com: On Saturday, April 26, 2008, check in with Nelso on Twitter and win an iPod Touch!

Nelso in Spanish

Just launched a version of Nelso in Spanish at Nelso.es. Translation still needs some work, but want to get it out there so Google can start the indexing process.

At this point, the only major European language that we are missing is French. But I have to admit we're even more interested in Asian languages like Korean, Chinese, and Japanese.

Trying out AdBrite

On our English-language Europe local search pages we've switched to AdBrite for text ads. We'll leave these up for a little while to test how they do in comparison to the Google AdSense ads we've been running for the past few months.

New York Times calls Munich "Germany's Hot Spot of the Moment"

Speaking of Munich (see our last post), The New York Times has proclaimed Munich "Germany's Hot Spot of the Moment".

The article specifically mentions Saf im Zerwirk, a vegan restaurant that is getting very positive reviews. Based on the reviews, even a die-hard steak man like myself might give this place a try.

Women from Dominican Republic confuse Munich with Monaco

According to an article on Deutsche Welle, two women from the Dominican Republic drove from Italy to Munich to pick up their niece who was actually on the Paris-Monaco train.

How did this happen? Well, in Italian, the name Monaco is used for two cities: the famous playground of the rich and famous on the French Riviera, and the German city of Munich. For this reason, the city of Munich is often referred to in Italian as "Monaco di Baviera" (literally "The Monaco in Bavaria").

Skagen, Denmark added to Nelso

We have just completed adding listings for Skagen, Denmark to our database. Many of you might not have a clue where Skagen is, so here are a few stats:

Skagen is one of the more popular holiday destinations for Scandinavians (and Danes in particular). This little fishing village is situated in the far north of Denmark (map), where The North Sea and Kattegat meet, and is a very popular place for sailors. During the summer season the small harbor is crowded with sailboats from all over the region. When you are not on the water, the village offers a large variety of excellent seafood restaurants and other nightlife.

If you are considering a trip to Skagen please make sure that you book well in advance since the hotels and vacation homes get booked very quickly.

24 hours to rank #1 when searching for cafes in Berlin

This is a new record for us. It took only 24 hours to rank #1 when searching for cafes in Berlin (see search results on Google).

But perhaps this was too easy, optimizing for a search term in Czech. Let's try another one: ristoranti berlino. It should be considerably more difficult to rank for an Italian-language search for restaurants in Berlin. We'll check back in a few weeks and see how we've done.

Update: Right after I posted this, we not only lost our top spot for this query, but all our Berlin listings seem to have been removed from Google's index. No idea why.