July 2005

Earlier this year I had an idea of setting up a webspace as a source of entrepreneurial advice for the Romanians interested in learning more about what it is like to work on their own. I even got the formal acceptance of somebody in the know who was kind enough to jump on the idea and help me with it. Unfortunately the lack of time is killing me and most of the free time projects I am involved in. I still think the idea needs to be materialized, and I will do it, sooner or later, I have lots of resources and ideas that I just need to somewhat sort out and put in a definite structure.

In the meantime, I just found this initiative which looks quite informative.

This is a generic name given to people running their company by using limited capital and exploiting at maximum the non $$ part such as knowledge, networking or innovation of all sorts. If interested in learning more have a look at this presentation.

That's the name a social network that intermediates service providers with the ones in need. It's a marketmaker, kinda like RentACoder, but for all sorts of services.

Jason says that that's the key to the success of his business. You should put that into a manifesto man!

The prices to get internet access while flying in a Boeing airplane. Next in line should be charging for electricity.

The beta 1 version has been made available for download 5 days earlier than scheduled and with a two years delay. :) The scoop.

iFullfill.com just closed the doors and Paul Purdue, its CEO, is using the blog for communicating what happened and what's next.

...just got out in beta MSN Shopping and MSN screen savers. Btw, did you notice that MSN.com got faster and better? Since I gave up my hotmail account a long time ago, today was the first time in a long time using the related webpages. They have improved methinks.

WorkHappy - killer resources for entrepreneurs. via

Business Week published a top 20 done by BCG and which is a result of a poll among 948 executives from 68 countries. Below are the first 10:

1. Apple rated by approx. 25% of the respondents
2. 3M by 12%
3. Microsoft by 9%
4. GE by 9%
5. Sony by 6%
6. Dell by 6%
7. IBM by 5%
8. Google by 5%
9. P&G by 4%
10. Nokia by 4%

Some quick comments: Apple is obviously leading the pack with more than the sum of the next two. Microsoft is on the 3rd spot, perhaps somewhat surprinsingly for some and this actually supports very well Jeff's point that due to the constant bashing of its "fans", media or analysts Microsoft's success stories are not spread out in a proper way. (I guess that's Robert's job :))

Then the usual suspects, I am surprised that Google is lower perceived than Dell for example, though Dell's innovation in the supply chain management cannot be overseen. It may also have something to do with the business model and industries as Dell plays the low cost provider role.

The gaming industry is seriously looking into the classic movie production. And becomes some sort of a similar production, but in a more complex way, with budgets in the low ranges of tens of millions. The production costs differences come from the actor fees.

It's just like in the movies, but the action is centered on the user - that's an approximate quote of one of UbiSoft's founders I read this morning and that I'm not having handy right now.

That's a top made by Fortune magazine a year and a half ago. The 80's Yugo is the clear winner - as far as I know the car was imported in the US from Yugoslavia in 1989 and was positioned as a discounted car ($5000 or so) - the cheapest you can get.

Interestingly enough, Dacia Logan was positioned somewhat similar - a 5000 euro car (ok, 5800), but in the meantime the price has risen and a fully-equipped car can cost as much as 8000 euros. It is the low-end Renault car, obviously, targeted for the poor countries - though they say that is quite popular in EU nowadays. In spite of this. Logan's competition may come from Matiz (GM's Daewoo) also produced in Romania and sold for about 6000 euros.

Looks like the Czechs are working on that. As far as I know in Europe prostitution is a legit business only in the Netherlands, and semi-legal in Belgium and Denmark. Please correct or add other countries in case you know more.

Apparently Amazon is not the example to look at any longer. link via

An UK versus USA argument regarding coolio startups being founded, and which, to a certain respect can reduce to the right angel/VC (early stage funding) atitude and tech&business combo understanding from each side of the pond. This translates into the right environment actually and, to a larger extent, it can become an Europe versus US innovation premises creation argument. Btw, at Reboot I met lots of people running, working or being involved in cool European startups.

Speaking of Treo -- the new Q is out and ready to ship at the beginning of 2006. (via Iulian) More at Engadget.

Speaking of Google personalized home page -- check out 24eyes, which looks nice though a bit cluttered and complicated. It is a RSS dashboard though you don't have the option of adding any feed (you have a limited number of news catalogs to choose from) and offers the choice of adding any rss feeds. Currently it is available in four countries: USA, UK, Holland and Germany. via

Inspiring.

So the Danes and the Canadians have something to argue about. An island named Hans that is.

Almost forgot, I briefly mentioned it yesterday though, but there's an important event that took place in the Romanian communication market which is consolidating: Liberty Global (the UPC mother company) purchased 100% of Astral shares. UPC was the smaller of the 3 players in the industry, the heavy fight for country coverage was between Astral and RDS - turns out the Americans knew what they wanted: they wanted it all and they wanted it now. :) It's just a matter of the OK given by the State's body in charge of regulating the market competition.

This will likely lead to two things: more competition on price and services reflecting on the benefit of the consumers and an easier way for new incumbents to speculate niches as the big guys will be more preoccupied on competing against each other.

For more context and substance on the local industry, as covered on this blog in time: 1, 2, 3, 4.

A few months ago I had a discussion with somebody expressing his interest in having a webpage visually configured with the pieces of news and/or feeds the way he would like them to. Well, voila, look no more, Google just did that. It will not substitute a RSS reader but it's certainly an interesting option to consider, it's just a matter of getting used to. I wasn't able to do that with Yahoo, even though they had done it a lot earlier than Google 

Btw, I've been playing with start.com more and more, it's closer to what I think I need in terms of a webbased feed reader. Up until now I have been a long time Sharpreader user, though I had tried other options as well.

The profile of the company that acquired the trademark of Jasperreports over at a:c.

...set up an open source CraigList, which is basically a wiki for:

"Work, jobs, love, sex, networking, friendship, apartments, furniture, cars, arranging geek dinners etc etc. Go ahead and build, design, improve and contribute to it as you see fit, in whatever manner works best for you. I'll pay for the bandwidth." -Hugh MacLeod 

...is changing as it increasingly became a model involving a two-way communication and optimizing the personalized message to the individual as opposed to a general message thrown quantitatively at a "target segment". The internet (as a major driver) and blogs (specifically) play a very important role in reshuffling some old related paradigms methinks. [link]

A very specific example of how having a balanced life is better than being an workaholic. There's actually a very good point in the comments, is being an workaholic an on/off option? - i.e. you do it until you get some financial stability and than you take it easier?

My guess is that it's a fine line and it depends on the personal goals. Also it's very much to do with the lifestyle being changed after settling down, having a family and kids. Ya know, being kinda responsible in a way. :)

Or Pixoria, its mother company, better said -- that means Konfabulator will be given away for free and the last two month purchasers will be refunded. Yahoo's strategy is opening up the API and encouraging the development of complementing apps. I am actually weighing very seriously of switching these days.

I think Chris Anderson is/will be required reading for any strategy class curricula. link

Renault, Pirelli, Liberty Global, Hungarian companies. Emerging market, plenty of opportunities, lower costs, unexploited/virgin business environment, etc. Also, it's easy to spot it only by looking around in Bucharest, there's lots of new buildings and construction sites. 

W00t!! Added to my wish list. Not that I am not drooling at Kit's. :)

The folks from Yahoo are looking upon improving and adding new features to the Yahoo groups. How do I know that? They came up with a survey asking for help.

Nice post from Fred, actually an easy way to understand what the benefits of open source are. This may as well represent a clear argument for a specific friend of mine whom, whenever we meet, heavily debates about the good enough factor of open source software products. I am the nay sayer and he's the open source pro-oponent. Still, lots of food for thought.

I just ran into "the ultimate resource for the independent traveller", I guess the fatigue from the last days is a sign of a holiday need. Anyways, the website's looking interesting, it even has a couple of stories from people experiencing Bucharest, kinda shallow IMO but probably a common perspective from foreigners facing Romania nonetheless.

JasperReports developed initially by Teodor Danciu (Dori) is going to the next level. The PR gig is here. I am not expecting it to be covered by the Romanian media though.

VC, consulting, biz schools and many more. via

Michael's got a very interesting take on the alcohol consumption in Slovenia and Europe. Contrary to my beliefs, Romanians are not positioned in the top seats (almost 8 liters per adult in 2000 vs. the European average of 10.29 in 1999)  -- the periods of heavy drinking in Ro were in the 70s, exactly during the times when Romania was receiving lots of investments from the USA and the Western world as a result of Ceausescu taking a a strong position against the Russians invading the Czech Republic.

But that's a different story, you may play with the numbers yourself as well.

BBC is jumping on the podcasting ship by launching a trial. (via)

A while ago Claus was wondering what differentiates 23 from Flickr and the other dozen of websites offering photo sharing services. Here's a table mentioning a few good differentiators in this space (I am not affiliated with Phanfare).

We have Threadless in the States and LaFraise in France - actually Loic was mentioning at Reboot that LaFraise is having monthly sales in the 4-5000 euros range. We need something similar in Romania.

UPDATE: via Chris I learn about a couple of more: Punk MC and Stacks. Also, ThinkGeek is not be neglected.

Btw, I hope you're familiar with the models of Cafe Press and Zazzle, the latter just got some $16 mil in financing from Kleiner Perkins.

A professional business/financial analysis (the VC perspective) of a recent deal - required reading for entrepreneurs and VCs altoghether.

Wanna see what's cooking -- the webcasts schedule is available. (via Ed)

It looks like Romanians are not the only ones preoccupied with their way of being perceived by foreigners - Czechs are too. They want to market themselves as being part of a modern, developed and sophisticated country -- hmm, perception is reality though, it will be hard to change the idea of a country which is cool, cheap place to go to, only one to two-hour flight away that most of the Westerners have about Prague in particular and about the Czech Republic in general.

Fewer people know for example that there are more than 2000 lakes and more than 2000 castles throghout the country, a beautiful one, I should add. Actually, I would rather recommend visiting the countryside than Prague for getting to know better about what the Czech Republic is like. Prague is worth it as well, but it gets tiring from the tourists floods, unless you know the not-so-popular and yet cool places, there's plenty of them. (via Iulian)

...opened up in China. Tapping the Chinese market is the underlying context for G recruiting a Microsoft guy, obviously not stealing search technology. Showing up the guns sounds like fun though. :)

...has enrolled in an MBA program. Am not sure whether it's for the showoff factor though.

Apparently now people outsource part of their jobs overseas and this gives them time to undertake others as well, micromanaging a portfolio of jobs this way. [link]

Apparently, the educational system is not broken only in Romania. Of course there will always be pros and cons to whether spending money and 4 years for just a piece of paper is worth it, I remember that my 4 years in college impacted less my academic knowledge and more the social parts as well as the tremendous experience from the various full time jobs I had during that time. But there isn't any straightforward answer, I guess that the role of the parent is crucial in understanding the coaching role he/she has to play.

My strategy would include a long term perspective having in mind the following 3 directions: discover/follow/fuel the passion, be one of the best and make money out of it. Sounds simple but it is awfully difficult to make it in reality. :)

More on that with a North American perspective over here.

PS -- Alternative to the broken educational system: schools online, teachers offshore. Or just a a starting point for figuring out different models in an industry stuck in a much-too-old paradigm.

link via

Henriette is coming to Bucharest next week -- my 2 recommendations for learning about Bucharest/Romania, apart from the results of the usual google search crawling, is wikipedia, quite updated I'd say, and the Spirit of Romania, a link learnt from Steve a while ago. And speaking of updates, the idiots from the Romanian embassy in Copenhagen still think that Iliescu is the Romanian president. Duh!

...in Romania history is being written. You may remember that last week the PM threatened to resign if the legislative package meant to reform the Justice system will not go by. The Constitutional Court denied it, mainly because their members are former PSD politicians and guess whose game they'd play? That's right, the game of the ones who created one of the most corrupted systems from Europe.

As such, Tariceanu was firm on his resigning decision (an unique position of a Romanian politician in the last 15 years or so) in spite of last night's Basescu's trying to mediate and asking for the laws to be revised by the Parliament. An acceptable form was not agreed upon in Parliament today, and it seems like the crisis heads to the early elections in the autumn. Some more details here.

I just mentioned yesterday that I cannot see monetizable value in the podcasts, and that my daily habits don't allow me spend too much time for listening to podcasts shows.

Well, guess what, today I felt quite bad that I wasn't able to make it to the Marketing Soiree from London with Seth Godin as a guest and organized by Hugh the other night. That's ok, I just made an hour and a half available and, thanks to Lloyd, I listened to Seth's speech, to the Q&A session as well as to some brief comments from some participants. Via, of course, podcasts made available on the soiree's wiki page. It was like being there, except for the schmooze part, and, i gotta say, plenty of people that I know were there (including Ed).

So, contrary to what probably Gabriel thought, I think there is value in podcasting, marginally of course - that is not to say that I changed my mind about podcasts, I still believe that it is a nice to have feature rather than a must have one; however podcasts will most likely substitute radio shows at a maximum 5% market share cost. Long tail perspective. Moneywise, I'd be probably willing to spend just on shows similar to Bob Cringely's soon-to-be-launched NerdTV show from September 6. Yeah, the sequel for this idea.

Err, not exactly fresh news here, this has been around for a while and Stefan is one of the initiators. That's just more of a pointer that there's a lot of good food for thought about what Romania stands for and its values, both in English in Romanian. If you have any interests in the topic check out the perspectives and throw in your two cents eventually.

Carmen has had a nice initiative a while back - using TagClouds for presenting the most used words in the Romanian blogosphere, as indexed in her Romanian feeds collection. 

My only observation would be that one cannot make sure that the blog listing comprehends the entire Romanian blogosphere (as far as I've been watching in time the list is manually updated, please correct me if I am wrong) - this also applies to the RSS Mioritics I believe. And the larger the list becomes the higher the need of i) automatizing the updates and ii) indexing it for a proper search -- in other words it'd be about time for a Romanian Technorati to emerge. Anybody up to the task?

Btw, Carmen is saying that she also has some RSS and weblogs apps in the cooking. I am looking forward.

I am not really into podcasting, most likely because my daily habits don't give me the physical time to listen to them - commuting is out of question as I live a 10 minute ride from work, and don't like to listen to anything when working out, I'd rather think. That is if we consider that podcasts are to be used for filling up the voids given by deadtimes while commuting, exercising, etc. Otherwise, they're either a gig you're passionate about, and that means you have the free time to dedicate, or you make money out of it, which is something that I still haven't figured out.

But this doesn't prevent me from watching closely the space, I even have an Odeo account, which seems quite an interesting service btw. Honestly, besides not being an enthusiast I guess that I am still not seeing the money into the space and podcasts don't really solve an immediate problem of mine, even though Nicole's were quite useful before Reboot the other month, for example.

Anyways, the related infrastructure seems to have picked up frenzy -- a quick example would be Stefan's: from a row of 8, 5 had iPods on his transatlantic airplane. Also, Fred, definitely an enthusiast of the technology, seems to make a good use of the podcasts. Besides the family shows he puts out every week, he started listening to entrepreneurs pitching him on various projects while he is biking. Which is neat.

Looking forward, after blogging as push to publish podcasts may be the *next thing*, as well as online video (webcasts are a different cup of tea), but I do have my doubts, I see it more as hype and wishful thinking. For the time being - and this is what makes the difference when making early bets, right?

Just came across this, useful for people interested in studying in Sweden.

Online, offline and some of the implications from the summarry of Alex's presentation on the topic. Also, follow the links Alex is pointing to. link

Very good post about municipal wifi hotspots projects presenting some specific figures. I find the idea more and more appealing, though I doubt that advertising via the portal that stands as login point may represent a sustainable revenue stream. And yet, the required monthly $1250 for the initial phase doesn't sound like a big deal. Keep in mind though that figures vary with continents and regions.

a picture is worth a thousand words [via]

NumSum is interesting -- that's an online spreadsheet tool for sharing. I wonder how long it will take until I will make a habit of creating my written/spreadsheet docs by using web-based tools only. These days I am using quite frequently the weblog, I've also started using wikis more and more. Now I have the spreadsheet to give it a try.

It seems to me that lately we've seen several steps leading to the convergence towards web-based office tools - web substitutes for the MS/Open Office type of tools that is. In this case though the champion will not have such as a dominant market position as MS Office has/had in the desktop space.  via

Just in case, most of you probably have already your own sources: some great updates coverage for what's going on in London over at Anders, Wikinews and MeFi. For pics try this.

You gotta love them:

"In a typically British manner, everyone is sitting down, carrying as normal with the occasional gathering around the television to listen to Charles Clarke tell us what we already know; nobody knows what's going on. So why don't we just have a cup of tea, relax and wait to see what happens." (link)

"We are not terrorised.

We are just annoyed.

The Germans tried to terrorise Londoners for 40 nights. Londoners just camped out in the Tube singing songs.

The IRA tried to terrorise the British for decades. The British just used the destruction of buildings as unplanned town planning and revamped their bombed cities.

Now these amateurs think they can scare us by messing up the transport system? Bah. We're just pissed off that we can't meet our friend for coffee in the West End.

Piss off, terrorists. Go pick on someone who gives a shit.... You'll get the reaction you want from Americans. Try them again.*"

^{* not really, obviously}  (link)

UPDATE: And yet another one from Valachus:

"And when I walked by the Queen's Larder Pub, not half a mile from the Tavistock Square wreckage, at 11 a.m., a half-dozen men were sitting together at a sidewalk table, hoisting their morning pints of ale. Civilization must go on, after all."

As if what happened in London this morning was not enough, the Romanian former(?) communists wanted to show that they're some sort of terrorists as well. I find that the harm is equally idiotic coming from a bunch of brainless and reckless people.

The Romanian story is rather simple, yesterday those guys denied in the Constitutional Court the legislative package aimed to reform the Romanian Justice system. This package was created by Tariceanu's cabinet and was strongly supported by the EU institutions. (actually a simply joining precondition of eradicating the corruption). Today Tariceanu announced his resignation and most likely we will have early elections. Luckily this will not affect too much the economic growth but rather preserve its environment full of bad practices. And the EU joining moment most likely.