August 2005

Via Sillicon Beat -- interesting business that is some sort of a market maker, whereas it intermediates the "consumer joe" to find and purchase stuff like auto, insurance, real estate or financial services. Basically it is an intermediator by slashing considerably the search costs and offering what they call "the best price" with their revenues model relying on a successful transaction percentage from both parties. Except in the cars and houses case.

Apparently they're not first movers at all in their market but the model is certainly challenging.

UPDATE: Over at a:c the profile of a similar company that was founded in the dot com era, circa 1999, and was sold by pieces eventually.

Paul Graham is behind a very interesting company that does exclusively seed funding. That means you don't need to have a company or the money  you just need the idea and a good underlying strategy. It isn't easy to come up with an idea, but once you have it they make it easier.

...temporal in nature, more difficult to create as compared to text, or more difficult to skim as compared to text. link via

So Interbrand had the 2005 brand value top out (via Didier) -- it is worth having a look, most notable is that Google's not in the global top 20, though, in terms of brand awareness, it stood  right on top last year  (or in 2003 if I am not mistaken). Also, I thought it would be interesting to put the top brand values head to the innovative companies one as perceived by about 1000 executives from all over the world surveyed a few weeks ago.

Company	Innovation awareness	Brand Value (mil. of $$)	Company	Brand Value (mil. of $$)	Innovation awareness
Apple	25%	7,985 (#41)	Coca Cola	67,525	not in top 20
3M	12%	not in top 100	Microsoft	59,941	9% (#3)
Microsoft	9%	59,941 (#2)	IBM	53,376	5% (#7)
GE	9%	46,996 (#4)	GE	46,996	9% (#4)
Sony	6%	10,754 (#28)	Intel	35,588	2.7% (#16)
Dell	6%	13,231 (#21)	Nokia	26,452	4.21% (#10)
IBM	5%	53,376 (#3)	Disney	26,441	not in top 20
Google	5%	8,461(#38)	McDonald's	26,014	not in top 20
P&G	4%	not in top 100	Toyota	24837	3.02 (#14)
Nokia	4.21%	26,452 (#6)	Marlboro	21,189	not in top 20

So -- lots of interesting things to notice I believe, I will let you make your own conclusions. A couple of observations though: clearly the winners in this case are Microsoft, GE, IBM and even Nokia whereas we could see a strong correlation between the brand value and the innovation factor -- that means  their innovative efforts were correctly communicated and, moreover, there is a strong consistency between what the company judge as operational efficiency and delivers as a consequence and what the market accordingly perceives.

Another observation is that a good chunk of the brand value comes from the marketing budgets, and different business models require different marketing approaches. It is interesting to note that in the top valued brands 6 out of 10 are technology companies (more or less -- where using technology is core competence and marketing is a support activity). The others have a different model that probably has the marketing closer to the main activity in the value configuration process and this may explain a higher brand value. Also, it is notable that Apple - the most perceived innovative company - has a brand that is valued at about 15% of the one of its main rival.

Finally, P&G has not made it to the top for the simply fact that this company is a sum of brands, whose awareness and value, respectively, are considerably high. I was just too lazy to look them up though. :)

I just reinstalled the OS on the laptop -- it was slow and cluttered with tons of apps I have tried out for the last 9 months or so. It wasn't exactly on my agenda these days, but I kinda did multiple tasking by working on the desktop while re-installing everything on the laptop.

While setting up Thunderbird I was considering also making it the default RSS reader since i) it has that option and ii) in spite of me being familiar and quite comfortable with Sharpreader it eats up lots of memory (about 50 megs) and slows down the machine considerably. Unfortunately Thunderbird has only two options: it either downloads the entire page, which I dislike due to the time waste, or takes an abstract, usually the first 20 word or so, which again I am not really a big fan of - I actually don't subscribe to websites that don't offer FULL feeds.

So I am still at square zero, not sure what to do. Most likely will get back to Sharpreader till I find a better (web-based) reader - I am only looking for something simple, usable and light letting  me read everything fast and clean -- kinda like Gtalk in the IM space. Actually I couldn't imagine on the user lock in such a RSS reader can create -- the switcching costs are high.
Googlehome/my yahoo or Start.com are not among the options I am considering - btw I will have something similar on @rgumente soon: my feeds available only as titles though, but the cool thing is that I can import the opml and have everything in one space. Kinda makes a good experience when scanning for good titles.

Btw, speaking of IM clients -- MSN's is 9.1Mb, Yahoo's 20Mb and Skype 7.2Mb. GTalk is only 900k -- how the hell can you beat that? The former still benefit from what it's called network externalities (the more users the more value for the network) -- I truly hope people would start using GTalk, while the app remains in this resource range. :)

UPDATE: I am playing with Rojo....

It's become quite common to have (parts of) your blog content published and made available to an offline audience, either in a book or a magazine format. Apparently now it is very easy to even create your cover magazine in very few and simple steps. All you need to do is to format the rest of the pages, include nice, suggestive pics and find funding for printing  - a sponsor is the natural choice. :) via

So I finally manged to make the switch to a better software solution that was developed in the house (no, not a Krogos solution though - just one conceived by me and a buddy of mine). Without getting into details, we managed to come to a satisfying version, now in beta, that we've been working on and off since the beginning of the year. As you may imagine we spent our nights and weekends to learn lots of stuff and to make tons of mistakes throughout the process but at the end of the day I believe we succeded to have a fine piece of software.

A couple of comments for making your way out in this blog:

- I divided the website into 2 parts: a main and a side section ( situated on the right side now - briefly), as most of the time I am pointing to links rather than making comments at large. As such expect the side section to be updated more frequently.

- RSS feeds are offered for the main part, for the side one and for all the comments. As such, if using a RSS reader please update your feeds: main, side and comments.
 
- I prefer the minimalistic design, and it resulted what you can see. Other sections such as the most popular comments, latest ones, etc will be made available soon.

- It took us a lot of time for porting as we needed to clean up the spam that I was too lazy to filter for the last 18 months or so (>1200 posts). In the new format the archive is not functional yet; however the old version of the website is entirely available.

C'est ca. Please let me know what you think, any feedback is highly appreciated. :)

Folks, we're working to port the website to a newly upgraded solution, as such the website may be unavailable at times. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Soon there will be exactly 9 months since the presidential elections, and it looks like the idiots from a certain Romanian embassy from a certain European country (Denmark that is) still seem not to be aware of it, thing acknowledged several times (also) on this blog - probably it's because they live in a different country and it is hard to keep up with so much and important news. As such, just to eliminate any sort of confusions, I created a new poll at the right. :) Thanks to Horia for the reminder.

Btw, according to the previous poll my readers are news junkies, just like myself.

Romanian-born director Radu Mihaileanu won awards at the Copenhagen International Film Festival for best movie and best script for "Live and Become," a film about an Ethiopian boy who struggles to integrate into Israeli society. More here.

Bonus link: Cristi Puiu movie enters Vienna Film Festival.

Required reading. It's a killer cause you cannot fake passion, and it's more about enabling and sharing than about walling the garden.

Contrary to many beliefs, doing business is not always about being serious or stiff, but rather, sometimes, about creating a laidback and comfortable setting with your stakeholders in a business context (customers, employees, etc) that may lead to better premises for achieving results. Additionally, (good) humour may take some of the stress away, especially in not-so-favourable cases with, for example, the customers when trying to make the best out of a situation. I guess it all depends on the character/personality of whoever's in charge though and her being spontaneous. Here's a good example.

I actually briefly touched upon this discussion a couple of days ago -- my take is that the responsibility for the content should be upon the content creator's shoulders while the  comments are not binding any liability. It looks like (in the US) if moderrating the comments though, the website/blog owner should be liable, as being a content pusher. I'd be curious to learn some more on this.

It looks like more and more organizations start to get it. Heh, I remember the odd looks I got from the local marketing guys from Msft, Oracle or SAP when talking about it at ROCS last year. :) Here's the presentation for the latecomers.

What it is like in USA -- you invest a lot in your education just to have a job that pays lousily as compared to other education/payout combo jobs. Cases in point: architect, chefs or academic research scientists.

In this part of the world, architects and chefs are well financially regarded though -  it may be that the business environment presents different challenges and opportunities in the construction/infrastructure or horeca business (i.e. higher demand --> more business --> more competition --> higher salaries). via

Good weekend reading via the New Economist about what it will be like in a financial crisis situation in the emerging markets environment, how it would affect other emerging economies and which economies would likely be most affected by the trasmission mechanisms.

Note: if you don't have a good (macro)economic understanding you may find the topic rather boring or useless.

If you'd like your outgoing Gmail messages to display another one of your email addresses in the 'From:' field (instead of your Gmail address), just follow these easy steps... I had no idea about it, that is awesome. :) via

Phrenology (the context I learnt about it is also worth reading)

...is increasing by 100 mega per month and that means that by the beginning of next year we will have something in the 3 giga range. That's the bottom line of a cool geeky calculation made by Adi.

That's the latest strategic move from Philips targeting a 3.3 billion customers from developing countries. Btw, do you remember prof. Negroponte's 100 bucks laptop initiative? I haven't heard anything ever since. via

If you're into trading and following (and monetizing eventually) the evolution of commodities, stocks, bonds or currencies, over at a:c there's a good review of HedgeStreet - a US-based market maker (allegedly the first in US) focused on the individual (as opposed to institutional investors). Also, there's plenty of links to similar companies in UK or even France. Investment management is an area with unexploited potential in Romania/Central Eastern Europe either.

This. is. a. must. read.

motto: I'll have Google for lunch. :)

Lunch reading -- the maximizing shareholders wealth theory: a good and easy-to-read description of some of the pressures of the company coming from the growth imperative. Those factors are some of the day-to-day variables management will have to weigh in and may be equally applicable to privately held or small organizations. [link]

...grew by some 28.3% to $167.81 mln in 2004. It doesn't mean anything, I agree with Calin Tatomir, nothing notable is expected to happen in the Romanian IT industry for the next 2 years, unfortunately Romania looks like a messed-up country with lots of potential seemingly never exploited. (don't have the link handy now, it's somewere in the Computerworld Romania magazine)

The flaws of a brilliant idea, I've been meaning to write about it - execution matters, in this case by indexing only the English-based news source (note that this doesn't include blogs though) the relevance of the tool loses significance.

Similar to these days' controversies among the blog search engines -- btw check out a very simple way for understanding why Technorati may have relevancy issues for the moment. via and via

Can extreme poverty be eliminated by Jeffrey Sachs -- saved it for my weekend readings.

The Deutsche Welle's Best of Blogs circa 2005 is now on -- good opportunity for learning about some new and interesting stuff. The blogs are structured in 13 categories and can be written in 9 languages, and no, Romanian is not one of them. :) via

It's certainly the company that kept the headlines of these days -- two more articles that are worth mentioning: Kottke speculating on the web as a platform to replace the OS and a NYT piece about Google being somewhat similar to Microsoft's early (hey) days..

That's something I intend to learn more about in the future -- here's some advice given to Jarvis for ad optimizing the BuzzMachine. Additionally, via Jason there's Jensense and keep an eye on Riana's (have a look on her ppt on topic). 

"They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free. Google Talk enables you to call or send instant messages to your friends for free - anytime, anywhere in the world." more here...and after I play more with it. My first thoughts are about the interoperability with YM, MSN's messenger or SKype, it'd be difficult to make GT the default messenger/voice chat client.

Courtesy to Ronald, thanks again!

UPDATE: more coverage here, here and here.

more update: I like it, I agree that there's no wow factor in it, it ain't rocket science and it hardly differentiates from YM, MSN or Skype. Even so, its simplicity, cleaniness and intuitiveness made me a fan. The voice quality is very good, even better than skype - no interruptions or delays. A simple and powerful application that simply does its job - I am sure there's more to come.

Last night I dowloaded the beta version of IE 7 and didn't like it at all, though it seems very fast. As such, I decided to give Mozilla another chance (that would make it the 4th time). Up until now IE was my default choice of browsing as the good enough experience wouldn't justify the time spent for looking for hacks and plugins for having Mozilla the way I would have liked to. Today I spent about an hour for doing just that.

Update: Just checked it out, it looks like Yahoo Mail is working only with IE 6.0, Netscape 7.1, or Safari 1.2. Not with IE 7, probably because of the beta status.

The blogosphere is full of speculations about Google launching a IM/voip client tomorrow. Wait and see I'd say, it is well known that Google's using Jabber internally and, as Fred put it, it will take a one hell of a voip app to make users switch from Skype. We shall see, patience is a virtue I heard. :)

UPDATE: Looks like I am not the only one waiting for the facts first. :)

Jeff Clavier explains his reasoning behind being part of the investors of PodShow (which I mentioned about earlier this month). He says that basically the vision behind podcasting is a newly emerged medium that would disrupt (and go after) the $27B market of radio broadcasting advertising. And, very importantly, this vision is in the hands of people with solid background, history and authority in the field at this moment.

While I certainly can understand the above points and putting aside my subjective impression of the me-too atitude for a hyped investment, as there are a lot of high profiles VCs making this bet (prestige of the syndicate -- they cannot be wrong, can they? :)), my humble opinion is that this new medium presents some different characteristcs than the radio ecosystem such as the listening habits or the real time/live broadcasting. As such, the user profile may be totally different in this case and the supposedly disruptive innovation that podcasting may become (because it kinda changes the rules of the game) could lead to a different value proposition for a different set of market segments. And trying to quantify those market segments may get to some surprises.

Nevertheless I am sure JC et all considered all the facetes of their investment, after all it's their money involved -- all of my arguments may represent some variables that need to be worked out for making podcasting a lucrative business model, right? I would be curious though to learn more about what their challenges/objectives are for the next 12 months? :)

In talking to most of my friends who were at least considering venturing into having their own gig, one of the most frequent question I get asked, besides the organizational detalis, is advice upon various business ideas.

Well, now, look no more for brand new ideas -- for people with strong software/technological background, Business 2.0 has made a survey among the early investors in the Valley asking for some few specific details about potential ideas they would back up and why. I am talking about very serious stuff here, the funding is in the millions of dollars range and usually the timeframe before a potential funding and until getting at somthing tangible for a product (a prototype at least) is from no less than 6 months to no more than 2 years.

So go ahead, read, learn and get your hands dirty. :)

It's not unlikely that in this part of the world sometimes journalists think that they are some kind of semi-gods who can manipulate everything and everybody, given that they have the right context created for making and throwing opinions into the public environment. (read that they have the $$ backup from the people paying for what the journalist writes about - interests driven journalism that is).

If we take the Romanian case for example, one of the latest case studies is this dude who is owning three Romanian newspapers and who tried to blackmail the president - he is actually among the ones having made the blackmail an industry practice in Romania. Of course there are no evidences whatsoever, not even in the president's case, this guy plays clean. :)

Apart from those hidden agenda cases, most of the rest of the local journalists have no idea what they talk about, are idealistic or just simply try to make a living by sneaking around controversial opinions.

But I digress, all of the above is definitely open to discussions and it even may start a flame war -- that's certainly not my intention though, I just want to provide some reality check here, as I know at least about a couple of young journalists following this blog: :)

"Journalism is no longer a "profession" but a "practice" in which both professionals and amateurs now participate. [...] I also think this is all the more reason why journalism shouldn't be taught as a separate degree - or at least the granting of degrees should no longer be the focus of journalism education. I would rather see education about the practice of journalism better integrated into basic high school English classes, and definitely into the required curriculum for all college students.

In a world where all citizens can and increasingly do create media, we need to teach people the skills, social responsibilities, as well as legal and personal consequences of what they post online. I've always felt that our school system fails to educate the American public on how the news we consume gets made - and how to be an intelligent consumer of that news. These skills are all the more urgent now that practically anybody can become a news organization. If I was funding journalism education, I'd want my funds to be spent on widespread public education about journalism and media - not on the granting of largely useless degrees."

[the rest here]

Btw, last time I asked a Romanian journalist about his mission at job he told me bluntly: to sell/make money. When I mentioned my version of informing/educating people I was laughed at. :)

USA Today is the suspect in case by launching a "glossy technology magazine on consumer electronics and trends". Sounds like the paper version of Engadget or Gizmodo to me, however I believe that the target audience, in US particularly, is going to get the related info from other channels, mostly online. Besides, the magazine will have a relevancy problem, as the magazine is published way after the real-time event had happened. Probably it will be a choice for the people who once in a while prefer reading a paper-based magazine or for the ones commuting without any internet access. All for less than 5 bucks.

Oh yeah, I am sure you heard about Google updating the desktop search product, called sidebar now and including lots of features -- am not really excited though as lately I have been trying to stay away from the desktop and replace those desktop-based apps with web-based services as much as possible.

Still, Google's move has good strategic reasons in the context of the soon-to-come MSFT's Vista launch which will likely lock most users into its own search engine. More on the strategic implications over at the internet stock blog, as always.

Trebuchet. And no, it's not the font. via

"Unfortunately, most Western executives still make these decisions based on near-term operating considerations, especially driven by the quest for rapid operating savings given lower wage rates in emerging economies. Elsewhere, we describe this as "wage arbitrage"." [..]

"More sophisticated companies view offshoring from the perspective of "skill arbitrage".  They understand that offshoring creates an opportunity to access distinctive skills."[...]

"This leads to a third way of viewing offshoring - as "skill-building arbitrage". We believe that the real opportunities created by offshoring can only be captured by companies that adopt this view. Rather than merely seeking to access distinctive skills, Western companies will benefit a lot more from offshoring if they view it as a powerful opportunity to participate in relationships and environments that can build capabilities more rapidly than would be possible elsewhere."

More here. (sub required - a short review here)

Well, that's in Russia - I always had the opinion of considering the bribes just as some overheads when budgeting business in Romania as well.

In the Romanian case I think that things have improved lately, though, on a slightly related note I can tell you that yesterday I was forced to pay a bribe to the train conductors to let me carry my bike on the way to the mountains. The problem was simple: since there's no regulation in SNCFR's way of conduct (that would be the national railway company) specifying that you're allowed (or not) to carry bikes in trains the conductors told us that by default we're not allowed to do it, though we had tickets and were offering to pay an extra fee for the bikes. Whatever it was worth. Eventually we worked things out in the usual style, but be aware of it if for some reason you want to go biking in the Romanian mountains and have the train as your mean of transportation.

That's right, especially in the computer science area. That's a global thing I guess, it's not only a US thing, you'd rather come by it in the Romanian educational environment quite often. And not only that but also there are people way behind their times, meaning that some/most teach useless/obsolete/irrelevant curricula at best. And no, I am not talking about the superficial or the mediocre/good enough type of characters, though they may be just as bad, I am simply considering the ones that don't know what the hell they're talking/teaching about.

Unfortunately this most likely will result in kids not being attracted to school or to that particular class they're supposed to attend for fulfilling their major. This is something inevitable, that's the point of being a self learner versus good schools versus bad ones, problem is that the more such latter cases, the worse -- how do you prevent them from happening though?

Here's an interesting theory: the newspapers will be starting to play a major threatening role to the TV. How's that - by incorporating video clips into their online editions. Case in point: Knoxville News Sentinel. via

I believe this makes a lot of sense for vlogs and podcasts all along as support tools into the newly emerged business model newspapers or media industry in general are going to change to as a result of the pressure coming from the online, push-to-publish technologies.

The main problem with the media model is the uni-directionality of their message -- they cover an event by telling THEIR side of the story with footage THEY believe is relevant for the specific news. And this, in most cases, is just a purely subjective way of doing their job, not to say that they either don't get the subject they present or just have a hidden agenda. As such making available online the un-edited footage of the video or audio would add a ton of credibility to the journalists voice. Add this to the opportunity of letting your audience interact in realtime by giving feedback that is WAY better than setting a focus group to learn what "the audience thinks/wants".

As such, vlogs and podcasts become support tools in the media's business model, whose primary (value creation) activity is news broadcasting. Then, depending on the type of the industry player (radio, TV station, etc), several avenues for lucrative business models may be exploited. For example, Ronald took the time to explore some grounds for podcasts in the radio shows case. 

[Btw, HotNews (a Romanian internet news spot) is offering some audio files in addition to the articles they provide (they are mainly an aggregator or a copy/paste model, which seems very succesful nowadays). Problem is they're not produced by Hotnews but taped from the traditional media sources (radio or TV stations).]

UPDATE: Over at blogspotting there's a very good analogy of media industry and the steel industry when the big producers faced huge pressure from the minimills, ultimately losing considerably high market share. Kinda like blogs these days - micro-publishing that is - except that we're down the curve of the disruptive technology.

That's Blogtronix and it looks like a strong growth candidate for the corporate blogging market by using and integrating their tools into Microsoft's .NET platform. Their headquarter is in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and seems like US is the main target market (as opposed to EU) since they have offices and incorporated a subsidiary somewhere in California. via

Google acknowledging the steam coming from Microsoft and Yahoo. [link]

It sounds like camping has become a hype thing to do, nowadays it is considered to be the world's most commercial form of anti-commercialism. This also given the emergence of the multitude of the gadgets and, basically, the advanced techology use in the specific equipment. Hmm, I guess camping is old school for me, I still find it as a better alternative for going through Europe's sea coasts, though I haven't done it in years. [link]

Videoclips (Larry Page or Guy Kawasaky), text books, case studies from Stanford Technology Ventrues Program. [link]

...from a secondary offering worth about $4bn. The first round was at $85 per share and today the price is almost $280. Still, it seems that it's undervalued, a fair price according to analysts would be in the $320-$350 range - the reason is Google's poorly monetization exploitment of the international markets.

$599 for a wireless Thinkpad. Whoaaa! via

It's the execution that matters. link via

The "crawl, walk, run, fly" approach. Combined with this - it makes so much sense. Unfortunately I had to learn it the hard way, better late than never.

How to reverse a company from the state of bankruptcy to robust health and profitability by using the right motivation tools and the organizational DNA. Company in case: Cat(erpillar). [link] 

Or his company's, Berkshire Hathaway, better said -- over at Brad's.

Looks like Hugh has done it again :) -- one of the ventures he got involved in became an essay topic in a marketing class from a business school. And this means that he got fresh and different perspectives on how the business is perceived from the outside. FOR FREE! A management consulting shop probably would have charged him a shitload of money for a report probably not-so-rich in perspectives. Great stuff!

...structured by 9 categories. There seems to be awfully a lot of them, am wondering how many are really worth the efforts or the $$ or, differently put, how many create value for their users and is not just a procrastination/time wasting type of thing. [link] 

I just read two pieces of research which seem very well documented and which may provide very useful and quite updated info on the usual need-to-know when it comes to consider offshoring projects. The first one (pdf) is throwing facts and figures on cost structures and salaries - averages and specifically by regions and countries. All the geographical areas are covered (Asia-Pacific, EMEA and Americas) and are structured on nearshoring and offshoring.

Note: Romania is the lowest cost provider in the nearshoring group from EMEA countries. (Europe, Middle east, Africa)

The second paper (pdf) is a how to guide for companies considering outsourcing their IT needs offshore - it starts from the first decision (the business case) and ends up with lots of useful info along the process.

Got a couple of friends heading to business schools for graduate studies these days and had some discussions over a few beers on some typical career paths -- here's my take:

So you're fresh graduate from college, get a job and you're wondering what the hell you want to do for the next few years. (ok, I am assuming that there are few(er) people with a clear direction in sight:)). Those career oriented work their ass off to climb up a few steps on the corporate ladder - middle management if in the case of a medium-large organization. In a small company, if you're good you may get to work with the top management and have loads of responsibilities accordingly pretty soon. The learning curve is usually steeper in the latter case, but it also depends on the quality of the management, of course.

Then, after 3-5 years of work you're re-considering your options, either ask for a raise or a better position from within or switch for different challenges either professional or financial, or both perhaps.

Also, it is not unusually (especially in the States) to consider heading to the business school. I take this as a sabbatical since the workload/responsibilities combo becomes lighter than in the working world even though at times you may reach to the level of 60-70 hours of work per week - especially in the top 50 schools. (if you think that's too much, in fields such as investement banking or management consulting the 100 hour week is pretty much standard at peak times).

Usually in the first year of the business school you're looking for an internship that would help you with two things: smooth up the way for getting a new job the following year and figure out what you want to do further on. Uhm, and a third one - you make some nice holiday money. Usually the internship recruitment starts sometimes mid January and can last until end March -- I got mine at the end of February and I know somebody getting an offer from an IB shop in the City sometimes at the beginning of April (though this is rather an exception). The second year you start pretty early - around beginning of September - preparing and looking for a job. Usually the cycle lasts by beginning of December or even Christmas, sometimes. In Europe though, afaik it is not unlikely to get a job even in spring time - in Norway at least I know people getting job offers in the spring. The school workload is lighter, you get to go to advanced classes that usually are more interesting since they're close to the area you're majoring in.

That's about it -- also probably it'd be useful to know that nowadays business school students from US are considering taking internships in India and after graduation relocating to China for starting their own business. Risky but it can bring in some interesting returns and experiences.

Or how to get a better deal when you're after a Dell purchase. If that. :) link via

...for skilled people to immigrate down under, biggest recruitment wave after the 1960.

In the meantime in US the 60,000 H1-B visas for 2005 were already granted, in spite of having been supplemented with 20k late last year as a result of the increased demand from the technological firms. This is in the context of US having granted about 230,000 visas in 2003. So the number of qualified foreign people who come to US to be among the best was reduced considerably even though the demand is high and, even more, Americans bitch about companies going offshore for searching for talents.

It may seem trivial nonethless worth knowing that the top 50 blogging tools had a 31% increase to some 29 mil unique hits from the beginning of this year. The highest one is MSN Spaces, probably because of the customer's lock in with the other web-based services (messenger and the like) The relevant number though should be how many of those are interesting, putting aside the splogs, of course. link

Vemail is an application that let's you record voice messages and have them sent over the email. Full review over at Tech Crunch.

In the American acceptance, since the survey was responded only by US Americans:

1 Albert Einstein
2 Bill Gates
3 Marie Curie
4 Stephen Hawking
5 Condoleezza Rice
6 Bill Clinton
7 Sandra Day O'Connor
8 Oprah Winfrey
9 Warren Buffett
10 Jane Goodall

The top 50 is available. via Marginal Revolution

The rankings are made considering the before-tax profits for 2003 and they were released in October 2004 (10 months after!) That's allright, I guess, if we keep in mind that they were made by some state-owned organization and we all know how the state institutions are working de facto in Romania. Beforehand you may want to have a look over the methodology, which is in English, the rankings are in Romanian.

There are some odd facts if you have a look at the figures though: at the micro-enterprises section the profit ranges from 18 bln to about 230 bln ROL, that is roughly from 500k to more than 6 mil. euros @ 35k for the euro. However, by law one of the conditions for a firm to be treated like a micro-enterprise is to have no more than 100k in revenues.

Is there something that I miss here?

Basically the model assumes that one will learn whenever faced with two or multiple oposing points of view. I am facing these types of multiple arguments on daily basis, does that make me a wise man? I gotta say that it's very energy consuming but I am sure that at least I am covering all the basis of a problem. :) [link] 

Take Harvard for example -- that's right, almost $150k for two years of studying. Insane. What is it that you get for this money? Knowledge, networking and your personal market value may increase. Wait a minute, that's about the same you may get if you start your own gig, and considering the low costs for starting a smart business these days 150k should be about enough for a year or so. JK needed only 100k for launching Jotspot.

Victoria's secrets -- taking a niche nobody would give a damn about and making it a big hit. Kinda like Google with the search engine. :)

Nice read that emphasizes that various stages of a company require different management approaches and, most likely, according to the studies, different people to run the company. They say that it is the fresh funding coming from investors the trigger for replacing the founder-CEO, but it may be as well that the more (and the faster) the company grows, the better it has to adjust to market realities, way different from the beginning. I guess that lots of entrepreneurs are too emotionally attached to know when to let go, especially in this side of the pond. :)

Usually it's the other way around, you get to read about folks switching from closed to open source apps and the like. Looks like the Scottish police had a bad experience after 5 years of trying out Linux and StarOffice and switched back to Microsoft's.

Looks like Technorati is close to be sold - Google and Yahoo seem to be the usual suspects, though Murdoch's name gets mentioned quite often as well.

Google's rumoured to team up with Apple for selling digital music (take it with a grain of salt though, thestreet.com is not as reliable for rumours, they say) 

Also, a nice speculation about Google entering the internet distribution business, wifi ala GoogleNet from Om.

Seth's is launching his latest tradional book in a very non traditional way.

Business Week has coverage on Chindia, on the challenge and the opportunity.

In US, of course - The Angel Forum.

This is how the future presumably looks like: all your electronic info stored in a keypad ring - you can suspend the computing environment on one PC and have it resumed it on a different one. link via

Ok, so I got a lot of incoming traffic from a recent (quite shallow) article on blogs from the Romanian media. Welcome folks, if you're interested in the topic here's a presentation I made last year at ROCS on how blogs are used NOT ONLY for marketing purposes but rather on several management layers at the corporate level. (competitive intelligence that is)

Yesterday's news: Ev and Adam got early stage funding for their podcasting tools. Still it doesn't sound like they figured out a business model. Advertising is the usual suspect, but how the hell can you quantify the return of an ad in an audio file? Download numbers are irelevant.

Schools in US are considering offering textbooks for rent in an e-form at 33% off the paper version. That's beating a dead horse, internet is offering a free substitute for the DRM-ed info, not a cheaper version -- the marginal costs should only come from the time spent for the alternative search. If a book is worth it, you will buy it, the see-feel experience matters. If it's not worth it, there's plenty of alternatives: library, copying it, borrowing it, etc. That's what I did in my student years at least. 

more here

Social etiquette with the American flavour. Guidance includes how much to tip or how to behave with your neighbors. :)

Oh, did I mention that this is required reading for anybody interested in the strategy field?

Looks like Hugh's plan of launching and generating awarenes on a wine brand a la guerrilla marketing way and with blogs playing a major role is starting to see some fruits. Keep in mind that Hugh purposedly didnot use traditional marketing techniques -- marketing plan? I don't have a frickin' marketing plan.

I had this weird idea of googling Bucharest and the results are quite dissapointing: the first two results were non-Romanian websites about Bucharest, and the rest of the first page hits included links to a magazine about business in Romania, the US embassy in Romania, the Otopeni airport,

If you don't feel like updating your list of RSS feeds from your blog/website you can try RSSense and have feeds automatically pulled or pushed based on the content of your site.

Heard it in the grapevine a while ago: Akela is close to be sold, Lucian is getting to a nice exit. :)

Holiday is coming, you leave the town and need somebody to look after your belongings, water the flowers or feed the pets. Online social networking at work. :) link

It's not looking good for Dell at all, seems like "getting Dell'd" is becoming part of the jargon. Background here if you're outta loop.

Free access-point deployed in Boulder, Colorado and powered by solar batteries. Hey Dragos, have you checked it out yet? 

Looking at Hugh's card on what business models are I just remembered one of the management laws our prof jokingly mentioned in a management 101 class back in the university about 10 years ago: there's a sucker born every other second in this world, the trick is to find him. :) 

Here is metrofreefi covering the US - I am just wondering about an European version, please drop me a line if you are aware of any.

The latest edition is out - four good readings on a quiet summer night.

Allegedly a good fit with Dodgeball, even though, as Mike remarks, Picasa's IM abilities seem to be neglected. Read also the comments to Mike's post (scroll down to them), there's also a link to a screenshot of the IM client (Jabber based).

Upload pics + the text of your choice via a phone or you have it read over the web browser = create your own video. You can even add effects. The demo is here. Basically empowering anybody to create video content via a web browser. via

Or Microsoft getting into the paid blogging biz. More competition is good Jason sez - of course it is, kinda reinforces his own biz models assumptions and sets the grounds for the exit to a late-entrant bigger player. Jason's model is even acknowledged by MSN. :) link

More on open source from Paul Graham.

Nice interview about Apple getting involved in building a mobile phone.

Wiki with tons of stuff you could use rss for. via

So if you're in the academic field and have a prototype or a killer idea that need to be funded those guys are looking for you. In US, of course, Sillicon Valley, more specifically.

You know that "this blog thing" became so mainstream when people (usually from the media but not only) start making rankings, lists and the rest. What makes it even less appealing to me is that some are started by the bloggers themselves - I think this is best defined as penis extension, as a friend of mine would put it in a non-colloquial way.

Also, there's a lot of ego fights, Scoble had a part of this last week which left a bad taste in his mouth. It is something inevitable I think, the problem is that the more mainstream the blogosphere will become the more difficult will be to spot the valuable conversations and interesting people out there. Lately I've seen less valuable discussions and more echos and useless noise, and that is not something I am very excited about. Probably the best thing to do as a blogger in this context is to keep your integrity, honesty and passion. My rule is that if I don't have something to say, I just don't post, period. As simple as that. Hence the "missing in action" periods from my blog now and then.

And btw, I am expecting something similar in the Romanian space as well. :) Heck, journalists started to pick up on the heat even in the Romanian media more often. The latest in line is this. (in ro)

...or a corrolary to Moore's Law. link via

Quite prescriptive but it makes sense to some certain extent. [link]

Not every day is a sunny one, so what do you do when things get tough?

I am mainly using my mobile for 3 things: voice, sms and email. Here are the results of a survey showing what other people are doing with their mobile:

- voice: 60%
- address book: 44%
- text messaging: 30%
- calendar:29%
- emails: 24%
- view/take pictures: 24%

[link]

It's a meta search engine listing the search results of a certain keyword as displayed by several engines (including the ones that index blogs - technorati, icerocket et al.). The major differences in listings makes you wonder which is actually *the* most reliable search engine out there. Take Romania for instance.

The political economy of open source [pdf] - saved it for the weekend. via

...on what blogging is. A platform for user-generated content under various forms. Simple and to the point.

Honeymoon is easy, divorce can be very painful. Applies in business as well. Nothing new here, it's just good to repeat it from time to time. [link]

...has decided upon its new CEO. Starting with next year.

So the blogosphere matters after all: the Jarvis versus Dell debate made some waves on people who are not reading blogs and all. Not that I don't disagree with Gabriel, Dell did make some incredibly economic innovations in the suply chain, that's why they got the number one spot and that's one of the reasons for which the PC is nowadays a commodity. Those innovations gave them the agility to slash costs heavily and cut off their competition and they're still doing it damn well in this respect, it's just their business model doesn't encounter customers (their needs, support, etc). And not respecting your customers affects heavily your long term strategy.

And btw, when you're in a commodity business, the costs saving as a result of getting scale and scope (operational efficiency that is) is one of the most important driver. Not quality or customer support. :)

Skype will be acquired by a broadband or more likely a mobile carrier player.

versus

Wrong, wrong, wrong - Skype will be acquired by one of the usual-suspect next-generation communications+media companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc)

My take: it's not an either/or situation, it can be any of the two scenarios, my bet though is that Skype will not sell until at least the end of the year. It is a matter of the price, of course, but I am sure Niklas and the gang want to pull out some more rabbits before the bing bang. Such as this or this for instance.