https://youtu.be/g0mQz3Y1_q4?si=zfwCxrZh7L1e4vem
Three students in the Bachelor’s program in International Studies at the School of Management and Social Sciences are developing an innovative digital platform designed to help people better understand the world. It’s called HUB Internacional, has been online since March, and, they say, will improve “minute by minute.”
“Far more important than knowing what’s happening in the world is understanding it”—that’s how students Ilan Bajarlia, Guillermo Fremd, and Alan Mai describe their project.
“HUB Internacional was created in response to a need we felt was shared by many others: the difficulty of finding relevant, high-quality information on international issues. Specifically, HUB is a digital platform that curates the best content on international issues—analysis and opinion, not news—based on users’ preferences and interests,” says Fremd, the only one of the founders currently based in Uruguay. “It started as a personal and group need, and then we realized that it would solve various problems for more and more people if we brought together the best of what they most wanted to understand about the world,” adds Bajarlia.
The three students found a niche and capitalized on it. According to them, one day Bajarlia gathered the other two team members to work on something together. “I invited them out for a beer to chat about the idea of creating something much more basic than what we eventually built, but the essence was the same: connecting Latin America in general and Uruguay in particular with the world; helping Latin Americans in general better understand the world; and making hyper-information accessible by curating the best content in an incredibly beautiful environment, with great design and user experience. We longed to ‘take the world’s tie off,’ that is, to diversify the best content on international affairs, removing barriers for ordinary people who didn’t have easy access, and giving it an informal, friendly format that would invite and encourage reading and, ultimately, ‘understanding the world,’" says Bajarlia.
“The group dynamic is amazing. We always said we were ‘playing at entrepreneurship’ because we were having so much fun. We became very close friends, building personal relationships (…) Each of us read a couple of basic books to develop a business model and a strategy to follow; we’d gather at ‘the office’ (my grandmother’s house) and, over sandwiches, Cokes, and cookies, we’d give each other presentations on the theories we’d read. Then we’d grab a whiteboard and start creating. That’s how we built what eventually became this beta website that’s online today,” recalls Bajarlia.
The project was supported by the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) from the university, which seeks to promote and guide this type of initiative. The three young people highlighted the importance of this support and the help provided by their mentor. “It was, first, the anchor of a cloud of ideas (…) Gonzalo Cuíñas’s mentorship has gone beyond ordinary mentoring and has become a spectacular relationship, which continues every week via Google Hangouts, and which helps us immensely to visualize HUB from a holistic and broad yet practical perspective, which adds so much know-how“as well as the technical side,” says Bajarlia.
“I think the meetings we had with (Professor) Enrique Topolansky were transformative: they helped us turn a crazy idea into a viable project. How viable and sustainable? That remains to be seen, but at least we have a path forward,” adds Fremd.
Alan Mai says that the three team members are working full time. “We also have two developers and a designer on the team. But there are plenty of other people who pitch in on a daily basis when we need them: from teachers to friends who are now part of the team as well,” he explains.
Currently, two of the three founders of HUB Internacional are abroad as exchange students, which poses a challenge for the group. “It’s complicated, but possible. We always start from the premise that when you face a difficulty and recognize it, you can either let it overwhelm you or overcome it. We decided to do the latter, each giving 150% from a different corner of the world. I’m in Manchester, England,” says Bajarlia. “Alan (Mai) was first in Israel and then in Korea, and Guille (Fremd) in Uruguay: there were times when Guille and Alan were 12 hours apart, and I was in the middle (six hours from each). It was crazy. Now, looking back, we say, ‘It’s incredible what we did.’ We launched HUB under those circumstances.” “It’s complicated, but it adds a lot to have people abroad making connections and seeing how things work in other countries,” adds Fremd.
The project
“In general, HUB Internacional selects the best high-quality explanatory content on international issues—such as international economics, international politics, business, and entrepreneurship—and tailors it to the user’s preferences,” explains Bajarlia.
Access to the platform is free, and it is already available on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. There are also plans to expand it to smartphones and tablets.
What sets the site apart is its personalized content for each user. “You have to log in and select your interests so the system can get to know you and recommend content that matches your profile. You can also use it without logging in, but in that case, there’s no personalization—all content is displayed by date,” explains Fremd. “What sets us apart is that we curate the content. We position ourselves between a conventional RSS reader and the user to filter the content so they only access what truly interests them and is of high quality,” says Mai. “We guarantee an incredible user experience that’s different from traditional media,” Bajarlia adds. “We’re currently preparing a weekly email so that all users receive something like this in their inboxes every week: ‘Hi X, here are your five favorite posts of the week!’ We want to implement a search engine so that anyone who wants to learn about Syria can go to HUB Internacional and find the best content in the world on that topic, for example,” he adds.
The three entrepreneurs agree that the initial response from users has been very positive. “The feedback overall is better than we expected. Our user base is very diverse—ranging from students to businesspeople—but everyone agrees on how useful it is in their daily lives,” says Mai. “We’ve had an excellent response from users, and what’s even better is that it comes from different types of users, from different countries, and of different ages. We’re very happy with the emails we receive almost daily from people across the continent saying, for example, that HUB is helping them save time, or that it’s helping them with their studies,” says their colleague Fremd. “An article in Cromo by El Observador, which was republished by the América Economía and Universia websites, gave us a lot of visibility that translated into registrations and visits that multiplied in just a few days. Now we have to find new ways to figure out what to do with all these new users; how to reach them every day and make sure they remember that HUB is there and will help them a lot. That’s a big challenge,” says Bajarlia.
All three plan to continue working on their project. Guillermo Fremd plans to apply for a master’s degree abroad once he completes his bachelor’s degree in International Studies. “I hope HUB will be the organization where I can grow professionally for many years to come,” he explains. Alan Mai says that the field of International Studies is very diverse, but he intends for HUB to become his “livelihood.” For his part, Ilan Bajarlia plans to continue traveling while staying involved with HUB International. “I think traveling allows you to see things from other perspectives, both literally and abstractly.”