Some links to fill up your lunch break with:

- the story of Skype's founders, the people who formerly founded Kazaa. They are Estonians and they are smart. Skype is a company producing software allowing PC to PC phone calls. For free. Remember the times when we used Dialpad for calling abroad? Skype's quality is better, might disrupt some businesss models that nowadays look solid. Did I mention it is free?

- a good story about challenges Yahoo faces in trying to catch up with Google's search engine. For people who are not familiar with the story, Yahoo brought in Terry Semel from Warner Brothers a couple of years ago for moving the company to the next level. Everybody expected that Yahoo would become a media company as a consequence, instead the guy understood the lucrative model of search engines and acquired Overture last spring. (at that time Overture was topping the search engine ads based industry revenues)

- an interesting article from The Economist presenting the comparative advantages of US economy for using outsourcing/offshoring jobs. Again, you may know that nowadays US is facing some scandals about job migration to India, with Bush even forbidding the outsourcing of federal contracts overseas. My take is that outsourcing is inevitable, in spite of that, it is the free laws of economics that will govern.

- the Romanian flavour of the first part of the day with a Smartree research claiming that Romanian managers biggest problems are bureaucracy, wasted time staying online and the excessive formalities. I guess those problems have nothing to do with management skills, or lack thereof. And this happens more in the SMEs than in large corporations. The sample size is 145, I wonder which is the split between SMEs and the big ones, and what the geographical spread is. Finally, it seems that the biggest pains are waiting in line to pay taxes and dealing with authorithies. Any feedback from the other side in this sense? 

- more stories about international corporations investing in or expanding their operations in Romania: the Americans from Honeywell looking to expand in the chemical industry and sensor producing capacities, the Swedish automotive safety equipment maker Autoliv  relocating in Romania or the Italian furniture manufacturer Ciatti building a factory to make furniture for electronics.

- finally, for dessert you may try take a short quiz for testing your math skills.