Articles in category Business

Been a long time since updating this blog. Maybe too long.

Two main reasons for that:

1. As most of the people who know me already know, the past 18 months or so kept me busy developing a few web-based consumer products for the Romanian market. Those products are metropotam which is the most popular online local city guide (or the Romanian version of Gothamist), invita which is an event management tool (evite or amiando for Romania), coolio which is a social shopping tool (not sure there's an non-Romanian version out there), urbee (mobile calendar for city events and going out places), 100eyes - photo sharing (Romanian version of Flickr), urbanbite which is a teens reommendation site and soon-to-be-formaly-launched metropotravel (leisure travelling recos). All those products were thought as functioning together under the same umbrella with a single-sing-on service and, presumably, is on its way to become the most visited Romanian platform for a cool social life for youngsters.

2. I moved all my communication, online networking, ideas sharing or random findings on twitter. I am more busier than ever and the little daily time that I have seems more suitable to a microblogging lifestyle. So if you're (still) interested in my random musings or whatever, you may as well start following me on twitter.

Other than that, I am also involved in a few other things, among which my older and dear Krogos, which just recently launched a new cool product that basically works as an Adobe Photoshop plugin that automatically converts a PSD file into XHTML+CSS standard compliant code. (recently launched, still in a alpha mode).

I also started recently to become more interested in online video under its all forms - it's still an infant industry with lots of technologies fighting their way to become dominant standards and, accordingly, lucrative models.

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good read from Dave Winer for the BBC

The name, that is, as we all know Cisco already has it trademarked. The tonight's go ahead most likely means that the last round of negotiations settled with a final proposal coming from Cisco last night was implicitly accepted by Apple.

This morning news or last night's in the States (saw it this morning over at OM) is Mybloglog's sale to Yahoo. Didn't blog it as I found it a bit ridiculous that a big company would pay for something it would have been able to internally create with a 4 people team in 2-3 months.

Now I read that the price was 10 millions for a mere 45k user-base. Holly shit! - OK, no more talking, just look at some of the angles on why this figure just doesn't make sense from a pure business perspective.

a european city blog

A list of 500 companies compiled by BBW, with Gameloft in the top seat, with 236 companies from France, Germany and UK and with only 46 companies coming from the Central Eastern Europe and the Baltics (the New Europe).

Dimitris sent me to an interesting European city survey indicating that Budapest, Moscow and Bucharest are the places to see the strongest capital inflow in the coming period, with Bucharest positioned in a high-interest position. That should not come as a surprise to anybody as the market was and still is underexploited by foreign companies - office spaces and real estate are the hottest places to invest into Bucharest, everybody and their mother are having a vested interest in it. [pdf]

However, talking to some local entrepreneurs at Podio (the one and only podcasting show about business and entrepreneurs in the Romanian online and my latest gig together with Radu) Romanians might also consider going after Europeans markets as well given the coming January 1 EU admission. That might be a brilliant idea in some certain market segments, me thinks.

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Your day is full of them so you gotta have an efficient aproach so that i) the deliverables are clear and ii) the time allocation is justly done. Here's how Google's Marrisa Meyer is doing in this respect - btw, she runs 70 meetings a week, on average.