February 2006

the most unusual way to use your cell phone.

This time of the "most influential 50 ones"....

"Quality of writing, audience influence, general coolness, and the ability to write engaging material on a long-term basis are all reasons why someone would or wouldn?t make the list." Oh well, at least they mention somwhere not to be taken seriously ...:)

Howdy folks, I am swamped in work and too busy to follow anything's going on. Besides, Bucharest is paralyzed by blizzard and this gives me a strange Christmassy mood. Had a minute though for glancing at Jeff's new wiki - nice idea, have a look yourself and contribute if you can.

There are 174 cities with over a million people in population in China -- as a comparison there are only 54 similar cities in the entire Europe. [from Martin Sorrell's keynote speaking at Engage 2005 - via]

It happens in Romania with Adrian Nastase, the former Romanian PM, being chased by the Anti-Corruption Department for, what else, corruption accusations. The problem is that the procedures are rather twisted and complicated because of the messy legislation (inherited from Nastase's net created while he was in the office) and besides there are several politicians from both the opposition and the government creating obstacles or bringing procedure-related criticisms (most likely because that would shake the system and bring out some nasty stuff). 

However, the political will is there and hopefully justice will be done - the Romanian Justice Minister and her staff seem very commited to do a good job. FT has a good article with more details on the entire context.

Remember me having doubts about the whole podcasting thing? Well late last night I finally jumped into the ship and produced my first one in Romanian together with Radu. The whole idea is talking about [gasp] business and technology, but the very fisrt one is about blogging in Romania. Not that it validates the (or *a*) podcasting business model but it was fun nonetheless. :)

Oh yeah , big surprise, Google's disruptive strategy to enable content creation for further indexing it. Very geocities 2.0, umm, wait, no, web 2.0.

How to do your own podcasts -- easier than I had thought actually, it works like a charm. You only need two pieces of software (free) and a mic.

With Umair

Reuters financial glossary via

Rather boring topic lately with articles in NY Mag, Slate, and FT with the "blogging is nothing but a fad" message - translated in "I don't get it" atitude. Actually I just gave an interview to a prestigious Romanian newspaper about this "whole blogging phenomenon" - am quite curious what it will look like given the lousy quality at best of the Romanian mainstream media on topic.

Oh well, they are Norwegians at a yearly 8.8 kilos per capita and 4 cups per day on average for the people older than 15.

I could've bet that the top spot is reserved for Italians or French though - the population number is larger and this may affect the per capita consumption. Also the article notices that the coffee shops are becoming very popular in Norway nowadays, in spite of Starbucks not making an appearance - this trend has probably more to do with drinking coffee as a social habit.

or how to make $25 in three months -- describe what makes your soul worth and have it out for rent. link via

  Yay, it looks like @rgumente got it, big thanks to everyone who voted! Also thanks for your emails and congrats - @rgumente turned two at the beginning of this week.

About creators, synthesizers and consumers -- online social networking basics.

It's not difficult to spot them these days actually, especially in Romania. :)

Really cool, I want it in Bucharest!! </sigh>

It's got a new logo.

Bernhard has some good questions to keep in mind for when, er, you decide that the blog initiative is meant to be something useful and not yet another thing you need to do coz everybody's doing it. It's back-to-the-basics actually, a blog is not top-down communication as actually that's why PR is not really effective except maybe for journalists too lazy or dumb to do their job properly.

It is just a reminder, not that it is something new for the long-time readers of this blog. Also those questions may come handy in the context of these days' efervescence in the Romanian internet environment with business seniors getting more involved in the corporate blogging arena.

So here we go:

1) do you have something to communicate to your customers that they may not know or understand about you or your company?

2) do you value their feedback? if you say something, expect a response. And be prepared. The feedback could be harsh.

3) do you have the time to converse with them? That?s right, converse. It?s not a lecture. It?s a dialogue.

Laurent was kind enough to drop by and provide some codes for people interested testing the service

1248-2774-1296
1577-1265-7356
4589-3496-6729
5343-9096-2312
4030-2237-5986
3473-7670-1714

Hugh's: "A Journeyman gets paid while he works. A Master gets paid while he sleeps."

While over at my Romanian blog we are holding the 2006 Romanian Bloggies (still in the nomination phase) I am honoured that over at AFOE @rgumente was nomineed among the best top 5 blogs from Southeasthern Europe (second time in a row). If you appreciate what you read here you can go there and vote for yours truly - thanks!

..RyanAir banned its staff from charging their cell phones at work as a cost-cutting measure? That's right, almost a year ago. via

After toothing it seems tha video-enabled cell phones are increasignly used by teens for filming themesleves on sex orgies.

Some took Bill Gates' statement about the 20 dollar phone from Davos as alternative to Negroponte's $100 laptop as just plain jealousy on Google's involvement in the laptop development as well as on Linux being used as OS. It seems that there's a lot of movement in the $20 mobile phone space though.

simple layout, soft neutral background colors, plenty of whitespace are among the key things to keep in mind. Oh wait, I can't see any flash-things mentioned there. :) link

Reminds me of war panicking: they're coming from everywhere! - to take on the desktop, of course. Would be curious to learn what the guys from Redmond feel like. :)

Somebody's really bored in the States these days -- Calacanis got asked not to use "for dummies" in one of his network's blog title.

Gee, can I at least say "for dummies" when speaking to my friends? Please, pretty please?

real estate search -- friggin' cool

Maid in Japan -- targeted to geeks and the like, awesomish -- via

wankr  via

So Google and Dell agree that the latter will ship Google Pack installed on every single computer it ships in a three-year span. The value of the deal? 1 billion.

Now, as far as I can think of there's no revenue side on the deal for Gooogle. Not on the short term at least. So where's the catch -- is this value creation or just a simple direct attack against Microsoft?

A little bit of both. I think that the bigger picture, if we're to consider also the recent Goobuntu rumours, indicates that this may be finally the decisive step towards what Clay Christensen put very well in theory about disruptive technologies (open source) changing an entire (software) industry landscape (Windows domination).

The rules of the game are changing fast, we're living interesting times.

"RSS is going to become a huge business"

Speaking of new apps that I have given a try lately, I also got the chance to play with 30 boxes. It is simply one of the nicest web apps I have seen in a long time. It's gotten the wow factor, still I cannot help thinking or figuring out a business model as the calendar applications landscape is quite large. Anyways, the guys from 30 boxes did a really fine job.

Got an invitation code a few days ago, just had time to test it out now. The idea is certainly very good, still it's not working on all platforms (not on 4h - the mother plaform of argumente for sure) - also cocomment is not handy to use on blogger if the comment form is a popup, or at least I haven't figured it out yet. Other than that, it's certainly an app that solves a problem in a nice and elegant way - am looking forward to the further development.

It's not a secret that I profoundly dislike Yahoo Messenger and use it just because I have to (communication with friends and customers). Since Google launched its messenger client I switched to it most of my internet voice conversation from Skype and some of the instant messaging activities. One of the major drawbacks of GTalk was the impossibility of saving my conversations.
Not anymore, it seems that now you can simply save the chat sessions by sending them in your gmail inbox. Simple and powerful, that's right!

Allegedly the ratio of money attracted by the web 2.0 companies (whatever that may mean) from Europe vs. by the ones from the States is 1 to 10. I'd take it with a grain of salt though when generalizing about web 2.0 entrepreneurship in Europe, firstly because not all European startups may go the VC route and secondly there may be not-reported deals (from Central-Eastern Europe for example).

However that's not to say that the US is a much better place for entrepreneurs, for many reasons, too many to be mentioned here.

update: TJ points to one of the reasons.

Meebo's European version. That didn't take that long, did it? The guys from Meebo already got the first outside investment. The difference might come from the mobile usage perspective, with Yamigo in a similar playing field - Yamigo has some Romanian connections, most likely the app development. I ran into it a while ago, not sure who they are though, please drop me a comment should you know more about this guys. Thanks. [via]

I was sick -- great reason to spend some time on the audio/video resources from LIFT06. Very interesting topics with a diverse crowd, lots of good people I had the chance to meet in person. Oh well, one of this years' resolutions is going to more such events - it's February already and the beginning of the year has been pretty hectic unfortunately.

27.2 million blogs up to date, according to Technorati's David Sifry, with a doubling rate almost every other 6 months. I guess it's a worldwide trend, though I could bet that most of the long tail is composed of personal and less active blogs.

It is the same in Romania for instance whereas having a blog has become kinda fashionable nowadays. Also it is notably that we have some execs from the local internet biz becoming more visible on the blogging arena in the past weeks or so. But still, I think the blogging buzz in the local business circles is weak to zero though my bet is that the Romanian internet business landscape will see more qualitative, professional and vertical blogs in the next twelve months. We're slow at innovating and/or being the grassrooters but very fast followers methinks. :)

update: oh, yeah, and a good chunk of the long tail is spam, thanks Alex.

It is called SMS Sugar Man -- link

I added a new category - mobile - given that lately I have been reading more and more stuff about the impact of the mobile phone on users, society or business. It is something new and that I am still down-down on the learning curve, but I believe that this is one area where tremendous innovation will emerge in the years to come.

The following quote is what triggered this category creation:

"76 percent of Japanese consumers use their phones for Web browsing, compared to just 12 percent in the U.S. market."

The reason is cultural-related, as expected, as allegedly in Japan a home-based PC is not a common thing.

The entire press release is worth reading. [ via]

hmm

A kewl Google meshup. [via Dragos]