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Juan Tornoe's Insight About Batanga
2008-04-01 05:23:00
LATINO is a new magazine that recently launched and is focusing on Latino "issues, politics and culture." Juan Tornoe's article at GrokDotCom provides excellent insight about this month's cover story featuring Rafael Urbina, the CEO of the popular Latino social networking site Batanga.com. Batanga now receives over 3.5 million unique visitors per month (according to ComScore's Nov. 2007 Media Matrix).Believe it or not, but we are often questioned by "Internet experts" and VCs whether Latinos use the Internet. We are also asked whether Latinos voluntarily come together online. We respond to these questions in a number of ways, but they usually include colorful stories and a few statistics such as the ones below: - There are over 16 million Latino adults in the U.S. who use the Internet- Over 2 million U.S. Latinos currently use online dating- 80% of Latinos are married to another Latino Referencing Batanga is another tool in QuieroLatino's arsenal. The growth of Batanga ...
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Hispanic MPR Features Joe and QuieroLatino
2008-03-30 05:55:00
Check out the latest article written about QuieroLatino at Hispanic MPR, the Hispanic Marketing and Public Relations Website and Blog. The in-depth article features QuieroLatino and our partnership with NocheLatina. Click here to see the full article.
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Must-See Video - Lou Dobbs and "Under the Moon" Trailer
2008-03-28 18:53:00
This is a must-see video...good enough that we'll gladly give "Under the Moon " a free plug.
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Hispanic Business: Betting on Love
2008-03-20 05:54:00
Here's a snippet of our article in Hispanic Business :QuieroLatino.com a new online dating Web site for U.S. Hispanics, is hoping to lure single Hispanics away from mainstream dating sites by offering what it says is a "culturally friendly" environment for meeting other Hispanic singles. Click here to read the full article.
More About: Love

Out of the Office - Working from BaoNecci in North Beach
2008-03-07 18:55:00
We're out of the office today working from Danilo Bakery's BaoNecci in North Beach . This little family-owned Italian bakery and cafe is a new personal favorite. They make a delicious omelette, brew great coffee and have an in-house bakery that produces some of the best focaccia bread outside of Italy. They supposedly have amazing pizza...which I might try for lunch today. And the free wireless doesn't hurt! My advice is that you hang out for a bit and watch the colorful personalities who drop by on a regular basis.Does anyone have a recommendation for a good place in SF with wireless? If so, let us know in the comments below.
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New Partnership to Offer Latinos the “Essentials to Human Existenceâ€� â€
2008-03-06 19:14:00
We're excited to announce that we've partnered with LatinGossip.com, the popular blog that reports on Latino entertainment news and gossip, to provide our users with even more relevant content. Read below or click here to read the full press release. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASENew Partnership to Offer Latinos the “Essentials to Human Existence� – Love and GossipQuieroLatino.com and LatinGossip.com Announce a New Partnership to Provide Visitors with an Enhanced Offering of ServicesSAN FRANCISCO, CA – March 5, 2008 – QuieroLatino.com, an exclusive new dating site for Latinos in the U.S., and LatinGossip.com, the popular website that explores, reports and highlights Latino entertainment news and gossip, today announced the details of their new partnership. Together, the sites are offering Latinos a broader variety of entertainment options from information about Latino entertainment to online dating for Hispanic singles. As part of the new partnership, QuieroLatino is providi...

Where do Single Latinas Hang Out?
2008-03-04 00:26:00
During the last year we’ve become pretty knowledgeable about understanding where Latinos in the U.S. “hang out,� both online and offline. Some experts wisely point out that Latinos very often act like the general population with regards to their online habits. Although that perception is true, it significantly oversimplifies the situation since Latinos in the U.S. have developed certain consumer habits and patterns. Offline, a number of magazines reach a significant number of Latinas, including Latina, Catalina, Latina Style, and People en Español. A number of non-profits exist for Latinas, including MANA. And a number of Latina sororities exist for Latina college students. Regardless, specifically reaching Latinas is not so easy since a lot of the social infrastructure is still being developed. I recently received an email from Michelle Olvera, founder of an organization and website for Latinas in the Bay Area called SupaSistaLatina, who wrote that with regards to tar...
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More QuieroLatino News
2008-02-22 08:23:00
We want to point out and thank some of the wonderful coverage that we have received by the top bloggers and journalists in the Latino community. Here are some of these:
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Newspapers Joining the Buzz About QuieroLatino
2008-02-14 23:36:00
QuieroLatino has received some great press recently. I'll include the print articles now and list some of the blogs later today.The San Antonio Express-News did a nice summary about QuieroLatino in their Conexion section (see above).And the Chicago Tribune gave us a shout out in their Redeye section.More to come in a later post!
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Microsoft adCenter: We don’t speak Mexican around here
2008-02-13 07:34:00
When we started developing QuieroLatino.com as the exclusive online dating site for Latinos in the US, we created a website primarily in English but with Spanish terms and phrases incorporate throughout.When it came time to advertise online, we approached the main players in the field: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft .Although Google made it easy for us to set up advertising campaigns, Microsoft apparently does not want business from Latinos in the US. They rejected all of QuieroLatino’s ads and sent us a shocking explanation:The reason for the disapproval is because of the use of a foreign language on the landing page. You are using the English US distribution channel and targeting the US and so you must use only the English language on the landing page.Here’s the kicker:Also, note that the words tu media naranja in the ad will need to be changed to English.In summary, Microsoft’s adCenter allows its advertisements to only be in either English or French. So if you’re advertisin...
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Hosting Providers "Gone Wild"
2008-02-10 20:38:00
Back in late December, Joe blogged about choosing a hosting provider. You can read Joe’s blog here but I want to elaborate a bit more on how we conducted research, why we eventually chose Liquidweb, and how we feel about our decision.Researching Hosting ProvidersWe first developed a list of well-known hosting providers by asking other entrepreneurs, our family, friends and programmers. The list was expansive but we quickly narrowed it down to the following providers: Rackspace.comLiquidweb.comHostgator.comHo stmysite.com1and1.comHostway.comOur next step was to determine the basic features that we wanted, including:- A dedicated server- A managed server- Remote backup- Multiple data centers- Reliable 24-7 customer supportNext, we requested a proposal from each company and compared the specifications (i.e. processor, memory, backup, managed v. unmanaged, firewall, scalability, etc.) and price. We used our “tech advisory board,� a group of about 6 tech experts who have graciou...
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Locating a Startup – San Francisco v. Philadelphia
2008-02-02 04:31:00
A lot of people have asked us recently about why we decided to move our company out West. As everyone knows, QuieroLatino used to be located in Philadelphia but we’ve moved our office to San Francisco . Philadelphia has been our home for the last few years. We both attended grad school at Penn and spent over 6 months after graduation working out of offices on the Penn campus as members of Wharton’s Venture Initiation Program. We had great support, a great network, and a great group of friends. I grew up on the East Coast, spending most of my time in the DC Area before moving to Philly. Although Joe grew up in the Bay Area, he’s spent the last several years on the East Coast splitting his time between NYC and Philly. So why did we eventually decide to move our office thousands of miles away to San Francisco? The environment in San Francisco for a startup company, particularly an Internet startup, is unparalleled. During our first week in the city, we were introduced to do...
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An East Coast Farewell
2008-01-19 00:15:00
This week marks the end of my voyage on the East Coast . It also marks a new beginning for me, as well as for the QuieroLatino business, in San Francisco, the heart of the Tech World.Several days before New Year’s 2008, we made a decision to move the business to San Francisco. Having lived there for a couple of weeks now and getting settled I came back to Philly to tie up loose ends and visit New York one “last� time.With a one-way ticket back to the city by the Bay, I now get to finally reminisce on my time here.Military boot camp. I think that’s the best analogy for the nearly 6 years I spent on the East Coast. It was great training. It made me a man. But I would not want to keep doing it.I can rant on and on about the West Coast’s great weather, appreciation for life, and laid back attitude, but this is a blog and not a book.In the end, I will certainly miss my friends and things like being able to run in Central Park, but I look forward to being in a place I can finally...
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Popularity Contest
2008-01-18 06:55:00
Being popular feels good. In high school, popularity gets your prom king. In college, it gets you school president. As a web entrepreneur, popularity gets you financial success. Given the many rewards of being popular, it is easy to understand why so many fake popularity in order to reap its rewards.One of the easiest ways to measure popularity on the Internet is through clicks or traffic. Each unique visit, each pageview is a vote for a site’s popularity. Businesses such as Alexa, Quantcast, and Compete have cropped up to validate traffic claims.The problem is that unless you’re in the Top 0.0001% of ALL websites, it’s hard for these third party services to truly measure traffic making it difficult to discern the jocks from the wannabes.So, who do you end up trusting? Abe Lincoln once said, and George Bush famously fumbled, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.� My point is: when trying to gauge the popularity of a website, trust the insider source at f...
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Reputation 2.0
2008-01-15 18:02:00
In the old days, reputation was a much more private matter. First, you had to know who and what to ask. In the end, whether the exchange was verbal or written, it would be tucked away, its memory only to be sugarcoated by time.The Internet has changed all that. With user generated content, social networking and the blogosphere, reputations are for everyone to see anywhere in the world. What’s more, these reviews tend to last for a very long time if not forever.On the one hand, the process has become more egalitarian. Incompetent vendors, spammers and self serving business owners are much more easily outed for who they really are. On the other hand, it can be a case of the pot calling the kettle black.This dilemma has opened the way for services such as Rapleaf. But even then, humans have a tendency to believe the worst when it comes to unknowns. As a result, it takes a whole lot of good reviews to overcome the negative effects of one bad review.With regards to our strategy, we hav...
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Looking for Latin Love?
2008-01-10 21:43:00
Another cool blog about our websiteby Kathryn VercilloA new site is going to be launching at the beginning of the new year and it's focused on a highly specific group: Professional Latin os Looking for Love . According to a news report about the site which was published last month, the Penn alumni co-founders believe that this is a niche market which has been underserved by the online dating world. They say that although there are sites specific to meeting Latino dating needs, none of them have really gotten enough attention to become the kind of brand name that brings a big selection of people to a site's dating pool. They hope to change that with QuieroLatino.com.For more of this article, click HERE

Best Month For Online Dating
2008-01-06 23:12:00
As we get ready to launch our website, I wanted to do some research for the best month for online dating. Would it be February with the pressure of Valentine’s Day? Maybe the summer lovin’ months? Or November when you have to bring someone special to all those holiday parties?It was not easy to analyze data because even looking at patterns from last year, there was an overall increase in most metrics such as traffic and revenue for online dating from the beginning of the year to the end.Still, if I had to crown a statistical winner, it would be December. It seems that the greatest pressure is to share a New Year’s kiss with someone.With December gone, the next pressure to find a date is right around the corner with Valentine’s Day on February 14.
More About: Dating , Online Dating , Online , Month , Mont

Blast From The Past
2008-01-04 00:16:00
My first blog entry for a grande 2008 is a reminder of a great 2007. Here's an interview with co-founder Ariel Oxman by Univison 65's Ilia Garcia in preparation for our Latin Grammy Party in Philadelphia, which was held in November 2007.
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Looking For A Host Provider
2007-12-28 07:15:00
We had to kiss a lot of frogs before finding a good host provider. Unfortunately, this is the only way to do it. Why? There are no truly credible ratings sources.Here’s the deal: Rackspace is the [fill in the blank for most luxurious car ever] of host providers.For those entrepreneurs trying to maximize the dollar, there has to be a lot more digging done in order to avoid a lemon with the rest of the options. The reason it’s so hard to differentiate is that they can all look the same to the untrained eye. There are offers for similar hardware and software setups, similar customer service, and similar price.What’s most deceiving are all the different Top 10 lists that come up in search engine results, which I quickly realized were sponsored and were thus rendered meaningless.Since you can’t get the milk for free, buying the cow (i.e. the hosting service) is the only actual way to find out the truth. The next best thing is to gather advice. One good discussion board is Web Hos...
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Match.com Hits On Facebook
2007-12-20 01:44:00
Looks like Match .com will be coming to Facebook next week with an application called “Little Black Book� according to the Guardian, a UK newspaper. I can’t wait to see who ends up on top.You have Facebook users who are great people, but not worth a whole lot given that they don’t click on ads and don’t buy anything (mostly because the majority are under 18 with no money).Then, there’s Match.com, the 800lbs. gorilla in the dating world with over 1.5 million PAYING subscribers at $30 for one month membership. If there’s someone who can get Facebookers to pay, I think Match.com is well positioned to do it.In the end, “you get what you pay for� and when it comes to dating, trust me, you don’t want to skimp.
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Being Efficient
2007-12-19 04:05:00
As newly minted entrepreneurs, we constantly encounter the mantra that we have to focus on not just working hard, but working smart. From this saying, it can be easy to assume that one can simply work smart and not necessarily hard. Herein lies the problem: being able to “work smart� comes from a background of “working hard�. Eventually, the two can be separated, but not at first, is my contention.This sounds pretty abstract so I’ll elaborate with an example. We are faced with a slew of forks in the road every day from big decisions like marketing strategy to lesser ones like choosing a payment provider. We bust our butts doing primary and secondary research, debating choices, and ultimately making a decision. At the end, the decision looks so simple and obvious. As a result, it can be easy to wonder why we had to spend so much time figuring it out.In reality, we needed to do the hard work to understand the ingeniousness of our choice.
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Kwiry Is Coming To Your Phone
2007-12-16 19:09:00
We are excited to spread the word that one of our biggest supporters has officially launched his business called kwiry.With kwiry, people use their cell phone to text personal reminders to their online account and email. People often watch TV, read amagazine, talk to friends or see a billboard and think, 'I should checkthat out' or 'I should e-mail that to a friend.' kwiry gives them a way toremember those things easily, with just a cell phone. Anyone can use the service simply by sending a text message to 59479(K-W-I-R-Y). Additionally, registered users have their kwirys (textmessages) stored for them at kwiry.com. The service quickly integrates with other sites like Facebook, iGoogle and myYahoo.Check out more at kwiry.com
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Wharton Press
2007-12-13 04:11:00
Here's a neat article that gives a glimpse into the camaraderie inside Wharton's incubator program:The Mentor Next Door
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The Daily Pennsylvanian QuieroLatino Article
2007-11-28 20:47:00
Check out the excerpt from the front page article in today's Daily Pennsylvanian:Dating site aims to spread some Latino lovin'by Alissa EisenbergFun loving SF NS in search of athletic M, 18-25, for NSA relationship, NBM, enjoys long walks on the beach, romantic dinners - and Latino culture. QuieroLatino.com, a new online-dating site started by two Penn alumni, will aim to bring together young Latino professionals when it launches in January. "Latinos are proud of their heritage and [the cultural nuances of the site] resonate with the community," said Penn Law alumnus Ariel Oxman, who created the site with Wharton alumnus Joe Spector.Their goal is for the site to garner high status - like similar niche sites JDate and ChristianMingle - by "incorporating cultural nuances" into the world of dating. "There are over two million Latinos in the U.S. who use online-dating sites, and while there are existing Latino-specific dating sites, none of them has brand name recognition," Oxman said...
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A Thanksgiving Thanks
2007-11-23 01:14:00
Most of my recent Thanksgiving s have gone by as a repeated ritual of family dinners. I have been rushing through life for a while now. The last time I recall sitting down to give thanks on Thanksgiving was back in fifth grade when I first learned of the American holiday as a new Russian immigrant. So why am I thankful?I am thankful that immigrants can have a crack at entrepreneurial success in America. I am thankful for the support of family and friends, both old and new. I am thankful for having so many friends and family. I am thankful for having the opportunity to cause change. I’ll stop before I get completely cheesy. The point is: I have lots to be thankful for.

The Drive To Succeed
2007-11-21 08:19:00
I just came across a great quote:Difficult things we do quickly.The impossible takes a little longer.- David Ben-Gurion
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QuieroLatino.com Latin Grammy Celebration
2007-11-14 08:05:00
The Latin Grammy Party went extremely well. Here are some pictures from the event:
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Hooking Up While Hispanic
2007-11-13 02:24:00
Ariel and I are on the road in California meeting with investors this week. Our Latin Grammy turned out to be a great success and a sllide show will follow soon. Meanwhile, check out this article by our good friend Al Carlos Hernandez from LatinoLA.com:My wife and I were watching one of those dating shows and she commented that it must be hard for college educated, middle class Latinos to make a real love connection.She reasoned that given the cold and transient corporate climate, it seems almost impossible to meet ethnically eligible people who share the same socio cultural background. My wife is a successful Latina business owner; I am a part time University Professor and full time Insultant.They asked the Comedian Redd Foxx who played Fred Sanford on Sanford and Son, “How did you meet your wife?� He said, “I opened up my wallet and there she was.�My wife and I met the old fashioned way: at an upscale skyscraper nightclub during a Halloween party. She was a mid-level Execu...
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Philadelphia Celebrando Nuestra Musica Party
2007-11-02 15:17:00
QuieroLatino will host Celebrando Nuestra Musica Party in Philadelphia on November 8th. The Red Carpet will start at 6:30 pm. MC for the event will be AfroTaino Productions.

PRESS RELEASE
2007-10-31 04:29:00
Press Contact:Ariel OxmanChief Operating Officer, QuieroLatino.com LLC215-746-6668dating@quierolatino.comFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEQuieroLatino.com, AfroTaino, and Univision 65 Announce Details of Celebrando Nuestra Musica PartyCelebrate Latinos in Music and Latin Music Awards at Tierra ColombianaPhiladelphia, PA - October 29, 2007 – QuieroLatino.com announced today that it has partnered with AfroTaino productions and Univision 65 to sponsor Celebrando Nuestra Musica in anticipation of the website’s official launch in January 2008. The event will be an opportunity for Hispanics and non-Hispanics alike in the Philadelphia area to watch and celebrate today’s biggest Hispanic music stars. “This is the first time that something like this is happening in Philadelphia and we hope to make it an annual tradition. We want people to come out and have fun meeting each other while enjoying Latin music and culture,� said Joe Spector, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of QuieroLatino.com.T...
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