sonar festival barcelona

Electronic Music Lovers Unite at Sónar Festival Barcelona

One of the best things about visiting Barcelona is their thriving creative community whose members are undoubtedly drawn there by things like the myriad works of Gaudi throughout the city. With both a prevalent creative class and large universities who are contributing to the global new media movement, Barcelona was the perfect choice as one of the world’s Sónar destinations. The Sónar Festival Barcelona, taking place June 18th through the 20th is a celebration of creativity, technology and business, aiming to inspire artists and entrepreneurs alike to start thinking without limits. This Barcelona stop is one that features both the world’s frontier-minded electronic musicians, its most inventive new media artists, and most forward thinking entrepreneurs.

Sónar Festival Barcelona Musicsonar festival barcelona

One part music festival, Sónar-goers can expect earth-shattering sounds from an eclectic mix of electronically inspired musicians. You’ll recognize names like Duran Duran, Hot Chip, DJ Fresh, The Chemical Brothers, Skrillex, and Southern Hospitality, who are on a long list of over 100 emerging artists of the mixed genre. If you love to move to unique beats, and that strange place where technology meets music, Sónar is definitely a world you will want to explore. You will very easily get lost in the music, and enter the artists’ worlds of creation.

Sónar +D

Sónar +D is a sensory experience. Not only will you witness the most cutting edge electronic music scene, but you’ll also get to experience completely new art forms from a the place where digital fabrication and rendering meet the tangible world and interact with audiences of the Sónar Festival Barcelona. Whether you’re coming as an entrepreneur, a creative job seeker or someone who’s interested in a little bit of everything, +D will inspire you to go to lengths you would never have imagined.

This interdisciplinary gathering of creative-minded businesspeople happens in an intriguing mental space where creativity and technology meet the transformation of cultural industries. Taking place at Fira Montjuic, alongside the ongoing musical performances, +D will be a conference and showcase for innovative people to display their ideas and creations. The diversity of things present will certainly be astounding as you’ll witness innovations in everything from turntables and computer innovation to robotics and virtual reality.

Part of what makes the +D such an excellent addition to the music festival is the impressive list of speakers and presenters who travel from around the world to share their innovate ideas that apply to both work and lifestyle. This year’s showing will include multiple Mego executives, Amy Robinson from EyeWire; Christina Hug from The Maker’s Nation; David Cuartielles, the creator of Arduino; Indy Saha from the Google Creative Lab; and Jeremy Boxer, the Creative Director of Vimeo. These giants in the creative class have some things to share for people interested in using crowdsourcing and technology for trailblazing their industry.

The Sónar Festival Barcelona is one of the best events of the year, and well worth booking a short term rental for. From the comfort of your very own city flat, you’ll have the true Barcelona experience, getting a feel for the creative class here in Catalonia!

X marks the Spot

One of my favorite games as a child was to discover buried treasure. Of course, you needed a gang of like-minded ‘mates a couple of spades… and a treasure map! Before you knew knew it, we’d dug up half the garden and half the lovely old lady nextdoor’s garden too. The time we got really lucky, we dug up a couple of worms, and kept them to go “fishing” the next day.
Flash back to reality… now that we are all grown up, the romance of the treasure hunt remains entrenched in our hearts. So what better way to pay tribute to our childhood memories than by creating a treasure map of our own?

So we at bizFlats did just that, we created a map with all our properties on it so you can quickly find an apartment in your favorite area of Barcelona. It’s still in beta, so if you see anything strange happenning, be assured we’ll work to sort it out. Have a look at the map below

Map view of Barcelona rental apartments


Pinpoint your exact requirements

You can add and remove the apartments in any area of Barcelona. Likewise, you can add and remove the types of apartments most suitable to your requirements. Then click on a property’s icon on the map itself to get the vital statistics and a picture in the nifty little bubble.

Atop the map you can see a list of apartments too, which is especially useful when you seek out multiple apartments for a big group, all in one location.

Toggle to your heart’s content

Now you can see your chosen apartments either on a list – the traditional way – or on the map. When you include the dates of arrival and departure you’ll get the prices too. So just click the tabs at the top and toggle back and forth as much as you like. Soon, we’ll add a synchronization so if you make a change to the list, you’ll update the map and vice versa.

The treasure of a lovely stay in Barcelona is right here waiting for you to find it.

Do you have suggestions on how to make the map tool even better? Is there a particularly useful tool you have found on another website that you’d like to share? Tell us in the comments below

How to get Google Website Optimizer and Joomla to work together

Finally, I mustered up the courage and took the time to write my first post. Do read, enjoy, comment, curse to your heart’s desire. If I like the experience, maybe I’ll write even more … you have been warned!

Ever wanted your website to be more profitable?

Nowadays, websites for hobbyists, are well, just for fun; everything else is serious business, so undoubtedly turning a profit is first and foremost. How can you know if you’re not leaving money on the table? One sure way is to tweak your website to get more revenue from each visitor. Making simple changes can lead to large increase in conversion rates and profits.

Google’s Website Optimizer (GWO) probably needs no introduction by now, but let’s say that it’s a tool which allows you to test changes to your website scientifically in a controlled environment, before fully committing them, thus saving you from the painful mistakes of just following a gut feeling. I know from firsthand experience that can hurt, bad.

I won’t go into the gory details of how GWO works or how to set up experiments since google’s documentation covers that pretty well. However, I will say that if you can use just one tool to make better profits from your website, GWO is definitely the one. Heck, even optimization guru Bryan Eisenberg says he’d take it to a desert island! Read more