Linqia Stars running with the Bulls!

A remarkable weekend in Pamplona celebrating San Fermines ..

The Linqia Team took off exploring famous Spanish traditions - we went on a 2 day adventure to Pamplona on the occasion of the Festival San Fermines.

It's a deeply-rooted celebration held annually from noon 6 July, when the opening of the fiesta is marked by setting off the chupinazo to midnight 14 July. Its most famous event is the encierro, the running with the bulls. Throughout the whole week you see special street shows of dancers and street entertainers, such as carnival giants and the week-long celebration involves many other traditional and folcloric events. During this week, every person is dressed in traditional clothes in the colours of red and white!

The outcome for the Linqia team was:
Our clothes were NO LONGER white - sparkled with obligatory red wine!
After celebrating the whole night, we had two team members run at 8 a.m. : our Aussie Jay (he made it for 30 seconds) and our Belgian Star Greg who could not get enough of it and ran straight into the arena with his bull friends. So glad you both came back safe!!

Linqia Star at the top of Europe

The team has been using the metaphor of mountain climbing to track the progress towards our quarterly goals at Linqia. This gave me the idea to take it a step further and to attempt the ascension of Mont Blanc whose 4,808m summit makes it the highest mountain of Europe.

I took the opportunity of a long weekend in June to leave the office and to head up north with David and Octavi, two friends from the Club Excursionista de Gracia. Taking into consideration the unusual quantity of snow at that time of the year and the associated risks of avalanches, we decided to go for one of the classic routes of Mont Blanc called The Voie des Cristalliers.

We arrived in Chamonix on Saturday morning (21/06) where we had breakfast (yummy French croissant are so good) followed by a short session of shopping (boots, gloves and climbing gear). We then drove to Les Houches, a ski resort located at 6km from Chamonix, where we left the car and started the ascent towards the Nid d'Aigle. After 4 hours of walking, we arrived at the Refuge de Tête Rousse (3,167m) where we spent the night. I keep wonderful memories of the landscape at sun set.

On Sunday morning (22/06), we left the refuge around 8:00AM as the snow was still hard and this facilitated the ascent towards the next shelter called Le Refuge du Goûter (3,817m). That section was the most difficult (and fun) part of the route with a mix of snow and rock climbing. I would have loved going down and going up again. During the afternoon, we practised crevasse rescue in a safe place above the refuge. One of use would simulate a fall on icy slope while the other two would rescue him. On Sunday night, we went to bed at around 8:00PM as we would have to wake up at 2:00AM the following morning. We did not sleep very well due to the altitude and of the promiscuity in the dormitory.

On Monday (23/06), we were out of bed at 2:00AM sharp, ready for a quick breakfast and eager to reach the top of Europe. There were about 75 people in refuge and everybody was busy to get equipped with the usual gear including harness, crampons and ice axes.

We got out of the refuge at 2:40AM and started the walk following the headlamps of people who had left shortly before us. I was so excited to walk at night in such a peaceful environment. I could not see the surrounding mountains but I could feel their energy and I had a lot of respect for their majesty. We reached the Dôme du Goûter (4,304m) within 1.5 hour and headed towards the Vallot cabin before attacking L'arrête des Bosses, the ridge that leads to the summit. The wind was blowing a lot while we were exposed on the ridge.

We eventually reached the top of Mont Blanc at 7:10AM. I felt very happy to get to the top with David and Octavi. We walked at the same rhythm supporting each other during the whole ascension. We stayed on the summit during 15 minutes, enough time to contemplate the scenery towards Italy, Switzerland and France and to take a few pictures.


Unfortunately, it was time to go down. I would have loved staying there a bit longer but we were getting cold and there was a long way back to sea level.

The ascension of Mont Blanc means a lot to me. I wanted to do for a long time, actually since I saw it for the first time in 2000, and I am proud to have done without a guide and with my Catalan friends. In addition, this personal achievement was a great opportunity to live the Linqia values such as Passionate, Team Player, Fun and Healthy outside the work environment.

Advertising in Social Networks

It's well known that Social Networking Activity is growing enormously worldwide.

An interesting study provided by Datamonitor predicts within the next four years there will be 107 millions members of Social Networks in Europe - compared to a current total of 41,7 mio Europeans.

The European Ranking is:
No 1: UK is the leader with 6 million users growing up to 27,1 mio in 2012.
No 2: France follows with current 8,9 mio users increasing up to 21,3 mio in 2012.
No 3: Germany currently has 8,6 mio users growing up to 21,7 mio of users in 2012.
No 4: Spain has 2,9 Social Network users and is very likely to reach 7,3 mio within the next four years.

This enormous growth introduces significant opportunities for today's marketers assuming that they have the right strategies in place. Marketers who would like to be successful need to know which kinds of advertising formats are effective within Social Networks.

The survey Community Effects 2008 has verified that sponsored music, viral videos and games are most accepted by community members. "A particularly promising strategy is a combination of decently communicated advertising messages, a high fun factor and the possibility to communicate indirectly with other users."

More than every second questioned participant evaluates music-clips (59%) and video-campaigns (51%) as a throughout positive advertising medium. On the contrary, most community users reject classic contests (30 %) and implored Flash-Layers (31 %).

Linqia's Chief Happiness Officer

Hi! I'm a new Linqia team star. My name is Ana Carolina and I am from Patagonia, Argentina. It´s been already two months since I became the “Chief Happiness Officer” at Linqia.

The best surprise in joining this team was to realize how everyone lives the company's culture & values. We organize ourselves to live each value every day. This is shown during our daily morning huddle of 10 minutes, where each Linqia Star provides a brief overview to the team about his or hers “what’s up”, “metrics for the day” and “stucks”.

Every Friday we have an extended team meeting adding our highlights of the week and talking deeper about operations and projects such as our values. I find this meeting very special since each one of us has the opportunity to share his or her personal and/or professional highlights with the rest of the team.

Moreover we enrich each other with special contributions from different team members e.g. an inspirational message in form of a video clip. Last week JC, our Interim COO, has inspired me deeply by showing us this video:



Last but not least, I love the weekly team meetings because Maria (Linqia's CEO) brings delicious croissants for everyone!

Linqia is giving me the discipline to organize my daily tasks in order to be more efficient and to better structure my day. The question is: “It's not about being busy. What are you busy about?”

Also, more and more understanding the way in which Linqia highlights the potential of online communities & groups, encourages myself to be the moderator of my own group. It´s called Eco Snowboarding. I believe that loving the mountains demands participation in the struggle to prevent that global warming melts our snow.

It´s a pleasure to work with such a wonderful professional team.

Thanks Linqia!

Ana Carolina Vicente

Founding CTO of Kazaa Phil Morle joins Linqia

How does a young start-up based out of Barcelona attract a world class CTO such as Phil Morle?

Synchronicity. Diligently reading blog articles circulated by mavens. Digging deeper.

Late last year an email highlighting the work of social networking expert Ross Dawson landed in my inbox. What aroused my curiosity and immediately prompted me to schedule a meeting in Sydney over Christmas was Ros's Web 2.0 framework. During this meeting Ross recommended I meet with Mick Liubinskas who was working at Tangler. We were keen to feature Tangler's groups at Linqia and over a coffee in Pyrmont we shared our passions to leverage social networks to connect to developing countries. Mick promised to follow-up with interim CTO of Tangler Phil Morle to see how he could squeeze Linqia into their tight development schedule. Three months later Phil was in Barcelona for a one week technology assignment which eventually lead him to joining our team as acting CTO.

With the Linqia team, Phil will take on big challenges as well as an equally big opportunities. He will be working with our engineering team based out of Barcelona, Pisa (Italy) and London juggling an Australian/ European time zone.

Phil describes himself as a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) with experience running massive scale consumer internet businesses. He was the founding CTO at Kazaa where he was part of developing a technology strategy which saw 5 million users online at any one time, millions of downloads per day and a total global user base of over 100 million, all this powered by innovative technology, a globally distributed team and a sprinkling of imagination.

2 Linqia Birthday Stars

This was a special week at Liniqa!

On the 30th of June, we celebrated the (.. – no numbers mentioned here ;-)) birthday of our CEO Maria. We surprised her, probably on one of her most stressful days in the last months, with a delicious chocolate starfish cake. She did not hesitate any second to chop off one arm proving whether it's a real LINCKIA starfish which grows another one!! Probably it did - in our tummies ;-)



A few days later, we celebrated Linqia’s 1st Birthday since its day of company constitution on 4th of July 2007! It’s been more than one year now since we created the company and we are very happy and proud to see what the Linqia team has achieved and created so far!

Maria's Birthday Message to Linqia and the team: "July 4th is celebrated as Independence Day in the United States and closely ties in to our theme at Linqia with an intention to liberate millions of groups from the few social networks who benefit significantly in fame and fortune. Our mission is to redistribute the wealth of knowledge, opportunities and revenue as well as connect people and leaders around the world to one another."

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!