December 2005

A BBC-created list -- naturally my first thought when it comes to the Romanian version is Iliescu, the former Romanian president. Ceausescu was bad either, but somewhat further in the history and as such probably not with such a direct impact on my life and of some my fellow younger country people. [again, via Jan]

Tonight I had a long discussion with a friend about how this blog evolved in time, its advantages or disadvatages, etc and he was rightly pointing out that for the moment I am only referring to or posting about business or technology issues and nothing (or too little) about Romania. The reason is very simple -- I quit reading all the news sources regarding Romania except for RomanianDaily. And RD is password-protected for the moment.

Romanian Daily is an in-house, FourHooks-powered tool, which aggregates (most of) the Romanian-related, business mainly, pieces of news available online, is rather comprehensive (about 40-50 pieces of news daily) and English-based. Basically it covers about everything significant happens in the Romanian landscape. At the beginning we made it available to anybody; however, because of legal affairs, we need to have it walled for the moment and as such linking is not possible. Until we will figure out a model on how to make it available to everybody (read make time, we kinda know the route to take).

A Brit won 270 pounds as a result of a trial against a spammer. As my Gmail account counts 1264 spam-labeled emails I might be all set for making a small fortune :) [via]

Hiring hot chicks for some event to bend over so that their logo-ed panties could be seen. Assvertising that is -- a Kodak moment. link via

Very interesting observation (and business idea thereof) about connecting the www with the outside digital screens for broadcasting realtime info, news or any type of content given the power of internet (narrowing the "far web" and "everywhere web" if you fancy strategic terms). David mentions as a potential strategic case study Yahoo's partnership with a mall chain and a digital screen network provider.

G and Y  via

Watch some of the events going on at 22C3. For hackers and geeks altogether, though one needs rather a technical background I am considering going next year.

It's that time of the year and in its spirit of course everybody is rushing in to provide his/her 2 cents on what it will happen next year. Of course those predictions should be taken with a (large) grain of salt -- if you're too lazy you can even generate yours.

In the education system, over at Berkeley -- podcasting lectures students may not be interested to attend.

The IM landscape is starting to make sense now with Skype and Google Talk having become linked by Festoon. Also keep in mind the recent Google investment into AOL. [ more here]

For people willing to make a buck fast, or blog to flip, here's the reasoning behind the purchase of a poker blog.

Google made it possible -- if you have an account, in the search history click on trends. Nice!

What do you mean who is Guido? He is the Python creator. Btw, Andrei was mentioning this morning that nowadays the founder of C++ is just a simple college professor. link

Henriette's latest gig -- quite a good idea for fellow bloggers travelling to geek dinners.

Looks nice, I actually went to a sushi place in Amsterdam arranged in a similar fashion. [via]

Quintura -- tres kewl.

...the Romanian Commercial Bank that is, considered to be the pearl of the Romanian government. [link in Romanian]

The price tag - 3.75bn euros and the final bid was between the Austrians and BCP. I am thinking that in 4-5 years time there will be a a first-tier bank looking to buy Erste whenever eyeing market share consolidation (also) in Central Eastern Europe. Erste will probably do the dirty job of restructuring an old and fairly large organization and this should justify the future premium. Currently BCR is one of the largest bank (asset wise) from CEE.

In the previous post's context here's a good story about how to optimize your website (or weblog) for getting listed at the top in search engines inquries: basically keep posting and post relevant stuff to the topics you would like to be found for. FWIW, argumente is the #1 Dragos search on Google and Yahoo, but not on MSN. Frankly though this blog is more a learning and informing opportunity rather than a marketing tool - I blog whenever I feel like it or have the time for it rather than posting BS or useless s*** just for the sake of doing it. [via]

A story acknowledging that G has become a somewhat proxy for the human memory or as the the facto source to go to  whenever somebody has a question or two. Why bother to keep things in mind when you can google them - that also applies when dating or doing business.
bonus link: why Microsoft can't win the search game

Tactics used by Intuit over at Marketing Sherpa

PK puts it very well. Build to flip sounds circa 1999 to me.

The best interpretation of last week's deal I have read, over at Ben's.

Understanding what it is and whatnot -- looks like a rich resource. Saved it for the weekend. [hat tip]

Good observation by Thomas - it becomes more and more difficult to deal internationally if you don't know it. I guess it has something to do with "globalization" :)
bonus link: English is the most taught in Central Eastern Europe. Except for Romania (to my surprise), where French seems to be more popular.

part 1 and part 2

Over at PG's YCombinator, structured by big players. (via reddit)

From no other than Sequoia. Very interesting!

update: the deal is in the $3-$4 mil at a pre-money valuation of $9 mil.

the vertical apps

Google Zeitgeist versus Yahoo's top searches -- not much of a difference, people are looking for celebrities, chicks, cars or forms of entertainment. The www as is. :)

Nice move from XM Radio - starting with March next year Bob Dylan will host an weekly show for one of the network channels.

Learning from failure -- good points to keep in mind.

Google to acquire Opera. Should I just say that Opera switched its focus from PC to mobile landscape - earlier this year Opera made available its desktop-based browser for free.

"The best websites are highly functional. They are task-focused. Graphic design has an important, though limited role. Don't try and force the Web to be what it's not." -- from over at Kit where you can find the link to the original article.

I was a bit surprised that this year @rgumente was nomineed again and I am honored nonetheless - a big thanks to my loyal readers, I really appreciate it. The reason of my surprise is simple - this year the focus of my blog was less about what is going on in Romania and more about strategy and technology. Besides, there are plenty of good blogs to choose from around. Last year @rgumente got an honorable 2nd spot.

Over at PSD there's a pointer to a Transparency International study [ pdf] on a global corruption barometer. Romanians are there with an average of $56 per year - however the general impression according to a local survey was that the corruption level had decreased over the last 12 months.

...or the Museum of Modern Betas. :)

How do economists split a cab ride? and " short vs. long term decisions are made using different parts of the brain depending upon the immediacy of the short term benefits"

If you find yourself talking more than walking, shut up, cut the vision in half, and launch it. You can always fill in the gaps later. In fact, you'll know more about what gaps need to be filled after you?ve launched "half a feature" than if you tried to fill them in before launching anything.

read the entire thing

...this time for the so-called web 2.0 apps from around. Definitely worth having a look.

Marc: entrepreneurs are back!

amen

Saw it a few weeks ago and now I just ran into it again: Gtalkr is Google Talk's web-based version.

In Schmidt's words -- good Google-inside reading, though sounds like a PR stint at times. But that is why nowadays Google seems to be the magnet of people looking for a job. Put this in context with the 70/20/10 story, hope you didn't miss it.

The M&A timeline, facts and figures from the States. In comparison, the Romanian industry is just a joke. (in Romanian)

Self distructive text messages. Interesting.

... facing a paradigm shift because of technology. Also, a good overview of the current radio choices here.

According to my poll most people have no idea what a wiki is. Espen wrote a nice explanatory article last year (pdf) - also, this article touches upon some of the wiki meanings in biz.

It's that period of the year -- best leaders, ideas and products of 2005 over at Business Week.

People don't know what Linux is. Shocking!

solving the Slashdot effect....if that.

For all programmers out there. :)

Del.icio.us gets acquired by Yahoo. My take away is USV's gut feeling in spotting the opportunity - they  invested a bit more than $1 mil (for a 25% equity deal) and cashed it out only 8 months after. Some say the deal is valued at $10 mil. while others say about an amount in the $30-$40 mil range. Nice return in any of the cases.

Strategically, Umair provides the context, though I still fail to see 1) why Yahoo didn't build such a tool in-house and 2) how they would generate the returns for an asset investment that so far doesn't have a business model (hence it's not a business rather just an asset) -- to the moment, afaik, del.icio.us doesn't have revenues. The contextual ads model is the usual suspect but it remains to be seen if the loyal users of del.icio.us will appreciate it. So far, Yahoo just seems to be collecting cool web-based apps.

update: the deal is in the $17-19 mil. range, just like Flickr
more update: Ross says that this is a natural step for getting at Yahoo Social Search
...and more: search landscape.

Dates for geeks -- cool niche, Cnet just acquired it.

Innovation in nearshoring -- neat indeed. :)

- Ben's speech webcasted
- Marc's take on citizen journalism :)
- bloggers celebrity deathmatch -- here's only one side of the story. Then see this.
- Hugh's observations
- pictures, tons of pictures

Apparently calculations indicate that the logical answer is not what one might expect. They were made by using US data, specifically the actualized average income one would make after graduating. [ link]

...among other things in a Stanford digital journalism class taught by Howard Rheingold. It's like a hundred years back when kids were given pens and paper and were taught what they were used for. The class syllabus is available. [doc]

David's presentation webcasted. Don't miss it, he is incredibly smart and passionate - back at Reboot David had one of the best presentations from the event.

TV news model unbundled.

The French version just got the go ahead. Looks like a matter of a national pride - next thing on Chirac's priorities: the French Google. :)

on video - saved for the weekend

No announcement, so probably it's not ready yet. :)

thought provoking

Over at PK -- it is more expensive to hire somebody whom you don't feel is up to the task rather to just employ somebody only because you need to fill out a position. The associated costs (training, investment, letting him go, etc) are just too high - I'd rather sit and come up with an intermediary solution while looking for the right person.

For the entrepreneurs wannabes, the story of a kid who took it the high way in his early 20s. Warning: it is not the happy ending one might expect. :)

We created a new RSS feed for the main part of the blog and the actual one has become global as it incorporates both the main part and the side part of the blog (updated more frequently since it is just a linkdump with short comments). For all the available feeds just have a look and choose from here -- thanks.

...les Blog 2.0 is higher than 100k. Whoaa...

Battelle interviews Schmidt in biz 2.0

This seems to be the slogan of WalMart's latest initiative: Autocart. [via Iulian]

Check out who's on the second spot for the 2005 top -- Billy G. himself. :)

...is not memorizing as much as possible but having a selective memory. My corrolary to this is also being able to find the necessary bits of info fast. via and via

Interesting idea, look forward to seeing it in Romania. via Daniel

...for playing a fixed-price game altogether. The total amount for the three players (Orange, SFR and Bouygues) was $648 mil. I guess that they profited much more from the cartel play than from the value of the fine they were charged individually. [link]

Got a question the other day if I had any news about the future development of Google Talk. I don't, but I'd keep an eye on the Google Talk About, the official product blog.