BARCELONA, Spain –- Bet you don't know what a water fountain looks like in Barcelona. A recycling bin? A mailbox?
There's a cab driver in this Catalonian capital who believes you might care enough about those mundane objects to hail his website, especially if you're from Brazil.
Aspiring techie Francisco Dugo has been flashing images of Barcelona on Taxitupi.com for the last year and a half, seeking to parlay a simple digital camera and some HTML knowledge into increased business.
He doesn't exactly take you for a ride of the city's monuments and tourist sites on his Web page, designed in black and yellow, the official colors of Barcelona cabs. Instead, Dugo unobtrusively takes pictures of whatever he finds interesting during his shifts, selects the best ones and loads them into the site once or twice a week.
"The webcam captures the day-to-day," Dugo said, referring to the 94-picture camera mounted with Velcro atop his dashboard. "It may show a dog, just as it may show a traffic light. There's a photo section that does show the prettiest parts (of the city). But there are any number of Web pages that can show you the Sagrada Familia or the Ramblas. I have that too but that's not the point behind the webcam."
Besides promoting his native city, the point is mostly to attract customers, and the concept seems to be working. Dugo said his site averages about 250 visits a day, the majority coming from Spain, but with Brazil running a not-too-distant second.
That's a source of great satisfaction for Dugo, who lived in Sao Paolo from 1986 to 1992 and retains a fondness for the Brazilian culture. In fact, the tupi part of his site's name refers to the language spoken by natives of the Amazon jungle. Dugo initially wrote all the text for the site in Portuguese, then later added Spanish.
"I spent a whole year registering my site in all the Brazilian portals and search engines," he said. "At first I received a lot more hits from Brazil than from Spain."
Those online contacts have translated into an average of four, and a high of 12, Brazilian customers per month. The visitors often rely on him as a de facto tour guide and travel agent, asking him to check out hotels and recommend restaurants as well as show them the city.
Dugo's ingenuity has caught the eye of the local and national media, which have featured the tall 35-year-old with the metal-frame glasses in print stories as well as on TV and radio. He's already done more than a dozen interviews.
Dugo hopes the attention will lead to a sponsorship deal that would allow him to update his current equipment, which he describes as "rudimentary." His goal is one day to go live in real time, the same way a couple of cabbies in New York and Berlin have done.
For now, he has to limit his improvements to putting in tourist-friendly touches such as city maps, weather reports and links to informative sites. That's been good enough to elicit words of appreciation from a Barcelona tourism official.
Fellow cabbies, on the other hand, are waiting to ascertain whether Dugo's creation goes beyond the realm of an enterprising driver trying to boost his business.
"It seems like a good pilot project, but we'll have to see if it has any general application that would help improve customer service," said Xavier Sabate, spokesman for the Barcelona agency that supervises taxis.
"It's always good to show our industry is coming up with innovations, and maybe it'll help change the image of the cranky cab driver."
