June 2005

I've argued numerous times on this blog that education in Romania remains one of the Achile's heel when it comes to a better national future. Well, the quality of the profs is not the highest as they're not enough motivated...but also the system is badly conceived so that the educators are not in the position of getting motivated AT ALL.

A last case is the these days high school graduation exams - it is not mandatory for all the profs to get involved and give a hand, but if they do they're given a montized incentive -- specifically that would be a fee of about 100 euros for 2 weeks, which seems (it is) ridiculously low, but which represents 30-40% of an average monthly salary an experienced educator would make (after tax money). Again, extremely small amount of money, but this is not the point. Point is that now, after the exam having started and profs having been involved, the whoever is in charge decided that the state cannot afford the lousy 100 euros and they will pay maximum 30% of what it had been initially agreed upon. Outrageuous!!! I am surprised that the education outcome is as good as it is, ya know: what you pay is what you get.

Alex describes the deal, I tend to agree with Joshua (from the comments) that the quality of the customers via pure search engine generated hits to be better than otherwise. That is if you're capable of optimizing your website.

The good (relevant, interesting, etc.) content of course. Seems trivial but there's so much crap out there.

Ross has the scoop. Also, there's more interesting info over at Silicon Beat.

Ed sent me this -- the Chinese are touring in Europe for lobby, of course. Lately there's been lots of business gigs involving Chinese, in software development, telecom, trade, etc. 

Google's that is. That's what I call Champions League. :)

Been reading a short interview over at Battelle's with Louis Monier, formerly with Ebay and AltaVista's founder, now recently having joined Google:

"Did Google recruit you?
I have known Larry and Sergei forever, I want to believe that I had a standing invitation. All it took was one email to Larry.

What might you be doing at Google? Will you be working on ecommerce?
The agenda is "Whatever I want", which is really attractive. I honestly don't know because I need to check what is going on, all the projects, the strategy, and the infrastructure."

Obviously the team matters the most - "join us and we'll figure out something." However, the organizational fit is not as easy as it sounds - works fine in small organizations, but Google passed this barrier. Just a thought.

A simple strategy of smart content creation, from MSN this time, targeted to their newly launched contextual advertising program.

On a related note today I had an interesting conversation in which I touched upon the Romanian online advertising industry - supposedly growing 2-300% yoy especially in spite of the (still poor) Romanian internet context. It is something inherently happening as the figures are rather low (in the lower range of millions as of 2004) and directly related to the increasing internet penetration rate from Romania. We agreed however that coming up with relevant content is a challenging task - there ain't too many original content creators, they're rather recyclers. :) Yet the Romanian online landscape is dynamic I believe, check out some of the ideas that were awarded at a local competition just last week.

This year Romania had 2 teams in the final 10 and got the 3rd prize. Alin told me that Bill G himself showed up and had a 3 minute speech at the final ceremony. Good stuff!

Umair says it is radical innovation in the classic sense. Worth checking it out.

You may be aware of the tension among the leaders of the EU that started from Tony Blair refusing to accept a compromise deal on the annual British rebate unless EU leaders agreed to look into reforming the farm subsidies in 2008. Schroeder, the German chancellor, took it quite as a threat to the social(istic) approach (too social IMHO) that he believes the EU should stand for. [link]

My guess is that the German took it all too personally and is afraid to tackling openly the obvious problems EU is having, but it is hard to make speculations on such things. Anyways, yesterday Blair just gave a speech to the European Parliament and addresed some of those issues. The speech was engaging and passionate - this guy is charismatic and one can obviously say that he is driven by a vision. If you read his speech or watch it (real player) you will understand why I prefer the Brit to the German, no offense intended to my German friends. :) Well worth the morning coffee. [via]

For people interested in the space -- my only observation is that with a couple of exceptions the technology combination seems to be PHP/MySQL. Also 2 out of the 15 mentioned are not free and most of them are multi-language. [via Laurent]

Some of you may know (especially my Scandinavian readers), that last month on May 17 Norway celebrated their 100th year of independence - I even went to the embassy reception in Bucharest. What I didnot know and have just found out was that on that occasion they inaugurated a bridge between Sweden and Norway for closing the relationships with the Suedes.

Also, a Danish friend of mine mentioned that the Danes are in close talks with the Germans for building a 50km or so bridge between Germany and Denmark.

Or just a new step towards building a consistent business model for blog software services. Note that Google has done it already for some time with Blogger, but, as noted here, 6A may have some competitive advantages. 

Via Jeff -- very informative, actually these days the Bucharest city hall just raised half a billion euros with a ten year maturity and the Timisoara city hall got a 5.5 mil euro similar bond raise. (both links in Ro)

...the entrepreneur of the year. Congrats to the French!!

This is an idea coming from an opinions exchange from my other blog in Romanian. The story in short is that the Justice minister, Monica Macovei (the best Romania has ever had and the one trying to make the change happen in the Justice department aka eradicate corruption), was accused by EVZ that at a private party she had a few whiskey drinks more and that she got drunk. Obviously it was a madeup and a totally irrelevant and useless journalistic venture acknowledged by the today's newspaper edition which apologized for not checking the facts and making idiotic accusations.

Anyaways, in this context yesterday in the Romanian Parliament, PSD, which is strongly against the Justice reforms (see the below article), came up with flyers with cheap irony against MM paraphrasing the whiskey slogan. Nevertheless and ironically I think the slogan is perfectly fit for the minister's endeavour and I think I am not the only one in supporting her: keep walking Monica!

The Slovakian Parliament approved on Tuesday that Bulgaria and Romania should joing the EU - Solvakia is the first EU country out of the 25 that need to do that before end of 2006. [link]

In Romania joining EU in 2007 became quite a big political stake, with the DA alliance (forming the government) indefinitely postponing the early elections choice that would probably have given them a comfortable majority in Parliament. (for people not in the know, the DA had to form a coalition with two other parties so that they would gain a fragile Parliament majority) They just realized that should they call the early elections this summer or fall they may loose focus from fulfilling the obligations towards the EU (reforming the Justice system is one of the most important). A nice compromise they made I'd say. 

In other news, apparently starting with next year the VAT quota will be risen from 19% to 22%, in spite of the optimist declarations that the income tax lowering from the beginning of 2005 actually brought in more revenue to the State's budget. The VAT increase is just a gig that was enforced straight from IMF and kinda contradicts the fiscal vision the actual government talked about. Actually this is one of the most important flaws of the Romanian business environment -- the lack of predictability.

Also worth noting is that yesterday the oposition party (PSD) tried to deny in Parliament a legislative package regarding reforming the Justice system that the Government asked for. (I am not sure about the exact English terms - Romanian readers please help me in if you know). It is obvious that the PSD is strongly against reforming the Justice since this is the main corruption point which actually PSD still relies on heavily (an outdated system still controlled by PSD people). As such they try to boycott it any way they can -- Jonathan Scheele (the EU representative in RO) actually said yesterday that anyone subscribing to the PSD's yesterday play against the legislative package is anti EU.

Finally, the rail system from Romania has been paralyzed by a strike for 3 weeks now since the unions ask for wage increases in spite of their poor productivity. Apparently this is again PSD's hand through its number three leader Miron Mitrea, who is strongly tied to the rail unionists and behind their protests. The strike already caused losses of more than $10 mil, which, of course, will be paid by the Romanian state.      

High altitude platforms, power lines, gas, cell phone, wimax, satellite, fiber to the home. [link]

I know that in Romania there are people exploring the waters of the power lines opps. Also, 3G was launched with a big fuss (read marketing $$) though its higher rates and lack of too many compatible mobile phones are not creating quite an attractive prop. All of the other above mentioned options are considered to have high infrastructure costs and hence high upfront investments (not sure about the gas and wimax though) that are not reflected in an attractive market. Yet I believe, and this is in spite of more and more people that express their disatisfaction of having no choice to the poor value prop of the two main Romanian ISPs - Astral and RDS.

UPDATE: Here's some more coverage of the upcoming wi-fi technologies.

Funny.

That's Thomas' latest gig, launched at Innovate!Europe in Spain right after Reboot and directly competing with Flickr -- or the European Flickr perhaps sounds better. :)

Romania on Google Sattelite - that's incredibly cool neat. [hat tip to Janos]

Update: after playing with it for a while the level of zoom imagery is not to the closest level. Still it's a good thing it's been worked on it - also am very interested in how the Romania digitala project is advancing.

[note to myself -- must stop using teenagers grownup expressions]

So Peter found in Charlottetown 93 access points while Ronald is complaining about Toronto. Oh well, I got news for you, today I just talked to a friend of mine who's having big wifi (business) plans in Bucharest and Constanta. Hope they work out.

So what is it after all? :) Btw, wikipedia provides a picture.

...may be having good odds to be trialed for the 1990 events. My bet is that he eventually will be declared sick and inapt for detention but a sentence still would be good at least as a moral reparation. I surely hope so.

Saved the transcript for reading it over the weekend - it's a PBS show realized by Bob Cringely a while ago with and about Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Dan Bricklin, H. Edward Roberts and Steven Wozniak. 

"Designed for viewing by youngsters who can't imagine a world without laptops, their struggling parents, the experts, the wannabes, the confused and the unenlightened, TRIUMPH OF THE NERDS puts cyberspace in a social and historical context."

[link]

...post that is. I believe quality prevails to quantity though, and am as well aware that lately the frequency of posts diminished considerably at @rgumente. Also you may have noticed that the Romanian focus shifted to more of what's of interest to me in the technology/business space.

I am not sure whether it's bad or good, after all it is my blog and I write about what gives me food for thought. I know that some of you may be interested about Romanian pieces of news, as this area, in spite of some English-based sources, is still poorly AND rather subjectively covered. While I am honored by your emails asking me to do just that I must admit that most of the time I find the change impact and its consequences thereof happening in Romania nowadays rather boring or repetitive. I will try however to mention some of the most important events from time to time.

I hope you understand and I thank you very much for being part of my learning journey for the last one and a half year.

For people who still didn't get it or got it wrong. Btw, did I tell you that this is a Strategy 101 required reading yet? :) The link for the latecomers.

I hope you didn't miss it, thanks to Jack:

"This Jorge Cortell guy has lost all creditability in Spain after spanish bloggers found out that his entire CV is fake. He doesn't even have a bachelor's degree.

http://www.acam.es/noticias_detalle.php?id=858"

Ok, this is old news, of course -- in short the LA Times decided to open up their editorials to the public by placing the articles into a wiki format, whereas they can be edited by anybody anytime. However, when trying to access it I got the following:

"Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material. Thanks and apologies to the thousands of people who logged on in the right spirit"

That means that the noble cause of experimenting with technology was disrupted by a bunch of trolls and, more importantly, by the misunderstanding of how the technology works -- the wiki idea is a bit different from the two way communication that a newspaper is allegedly better off with in the value creation process. Editorial means a finite work/message already crafted whereas a wiki is a more appropriate for the work-in-progress type of thing, whereas the content is not finite and the wiki editors would add their input for getting to the end product.

2 things here: if LAT wanted to get it right they should have looked at Wikipedia, as simple as that -- yeah right, they probably did, but only partially, jumping straight to the Wikinews level from the very beginning without realzing that what Wikipedia people leverage is a result that comes in time. And the second: a blog would seem to be more appropriate to what LA Times probably was after, probably in the open versus closed context that was underlined just recently by NYT. But then, of course, I guess that had thought that they wouldn't have been the first movers in this space.

Anyways, read also what Ross had to say about it, he is probably one of the most knowledgeable people in the wiki space.

Tom's covering it, follow the links. 

I know Henriette is getting her hands on everything related to social networks, as she's building her own thing, so here's an intro to the whole concept.

UPDATE: Read also a Japanese perspective of social networking over at a:c.

In two weeks I will go to Novi Sad to Exit. It is the 5th edition of a gathering that started just before the 2000 elections in Serbia with people counting down the days for Milosevic's regime - parties, concerts, video projections. We had something somewhat similar in Bucharest in Piata Universitatii back in 1990, whereas people were protesting about the communists practices and the way of the country was led by Iliescu and his clique. Ultimately the Romanian event was solved by Iliescu by bringing in the miners who beat the protesters up with the tacit support of the authorities. Bucharest was a chaos in those days, I was actually afraid that it could lead to a civil war. Incidentally, these days there are some investigations led, with lots of hopes that Iliescu is to be judged and sentenced for what he did at that time - Cosma, the miners leader at that time was already sentenced and then freed by Iliescu, see the stories: 1 and 2.

In Novi Sad this year there are lots of good musicians lined up and probably will bring in an interesting crowd. I think Exit is one of the most important festivals from around Central Eastern Europe, now that the one from Szeged is helding its last edition this year.

Via Peter here's a reportage from Dacia's factory near Pitesti that starts like this: "To a Western European, Bucharest has the effect of an electric shock" It ain't for the fainted hearts but I'd take it as a teaser though, Bucharest is a cool place. :)

Razvan sent me this - it is about when and how to decide not to work with your clients, particularly related to the software industry biz. There are good points in there, underlining that it takes two for forming a relationship and unilateral perspectives are not really an option.

It just happened in Bucharest - wasn't that significant, perhaps 3-4 degrees, but still it felt weird. :)

UPDATE: 5 indeed - thanks Lidia. And now it is raining, summer-summer rain ...after a hot-hot day in Bucharest. I need a holiday. :)

Suggestive diagram via

Via Kit here's a great speech of Steve Jobs that should make anybody motivated, ambitious and introspective with regards to the inner self. Worth a 5 minute read and a 5 minute afterwards thinking.

As a result of discovering at Reboot that Europeans may have some unexploited things in common Max Niederhofer launched a little project which is called the European Internet Project. The manifesto is still in an inception phase, but still, this could represent the pre-Rome Treaty for the internet. We shall see. via

...in Bucharest happening today -- too much of a short notice, unfortunately I learnt about it incidentally via Tavi. I am quite curious about how the heavy weight advertising people from Romania put the strategy terms into equation. And as Romania is not much of a mature market and strategy is more often taken as a marketing tool rather than a specific management area per se, the event is associated to a marketing industry event with high industry profiles invited to give their insights. 

Unexplicably the according website is in Romanian even though there are quite a few international speakers invited. Perhaps I'm still in the Reboot mood, but the more international an event is made the higher its returns. People from 20 countries, a self organizing mode and the direct interaction among everybody and you get what Reboot 7 was all about. :) Trick is to create the proper setting for several personalities to be comfortable with each other - actually Thomas made it clear at Reboot that bad (ego) atitudes are not in the Reboot spirit. If that.

Anyways, if any of you went to Strategic please let me know your impressions.

Is it just me or 3 looks so incredibly similar to the latest google's personalized? 1 let's you read and search news and feeds, 2 is for customizing your set of feeds (including opml import) and 3 is for...what the hell is 3 for, except for being able to have the (US) local weather on?

Last night at dinner I had an interesting discussion about whether or not the EU is in crisis as a result of the no the Dutch and the French gave in the Constitution referendum. My point was that it's not a crisis, rather a wake up call, as things are presented and speculated more in the local politics perspectives rather than into the big picture type of thing. The social(ist) approach some Europeans got used with may not be the best case scenario in being competitive on global European levels and the demographics from Europeans don't favour that.

Silviu is along the same lines saying that the no may very well involve less centralization and politics and which ultimately may be a good economic thing. He's also presenting some German perspectives and impact - read it all.

Heh, that's one of the latest concepts apparently -- my take is that it's for workaholics without much of a personal life though, it used to be easier just to be cool and pick up girls in clubs or cafes back in my days. :) via

Basically she said that most of us want more than hits, the nonhits market is larger than the hit one and the internet is an aggregator of the long tail nonhits in one way or another. Besides, it's become uncool to buy clothes from big brands -- you'd better buy them from your designer friends or wear the ones made by yourself.

I think it makes a helluva sense since getting dressed is about differentiating yourself and presenting your own personality; craftblogging let's you do just that in a very simple way. Craftblogging is presenting and selling self made garments via blogs - it's both a selling channel and a co-creation one, since feedback is incorporated into an interdependent loop ala threadless. It's still an incipient phase I believe but the early adopters may factor the first mover advantage into experience, reputation etc. Cory's put out the 6-point manifesto.

That's right -- it's either a procedure vice or just a fuckoff sign by the bad guys from the Justice system which are facing increased pressure for reforms. Either way it's not good at all. Last fall's background of the story as covered by @rgumente here and here.

WOW! Just woke up - the morning after two incredible days that constituted Reboot 7. SO many new things, so many new interesting people, so many new perspectives, I certainly agree it was pretty much of a mind blower.

I will not mention too many things about the speeches, for the most of them you can find the somewhat accurate transcripts over at the wiki page. Mine went fine even though I had only about 30-40 people in attendance as at the same time Ben was giving his presentation about the net's ettiquette. I am actually bummed that I missed Ben, will definitely listen to his podcast.

The presentation that I liked best was Ulla-Maaria's about the long tail in the fashion industry -- I made a few notes about it actually, will post later after editing them. Also, I liked very much Jyri (which is Ulla's husband I believe) about what it works in social software and networks as links among the objects.

The Reboot spirit is fantastic, I think it is hard to find such an atmosphere at any conferece, also I met incredible people, most Europeans whose blogs or work I read or I am familiar with and now I met in flesh and bones. We were already talking about Reboot 8, actually last night at dinner we were talking together with Nikolaj about a Reboot goes to East edition in Bucharest (how cool that would be!!) though a bit idealistic as Bucharest is not very well connected by the low cost carriers. We will see, there's lots of interesting things I need chew in, my head is full-full -- I need to go for the brunch now, will update later. -- reboot 7, reboot

I know, i know, I didn't update -- was too busy to listen, learn and meet people, will update when time permits. I am now at Loic's presentation about the European blogosphere -- he set up a wiki page where anybody can add data that would reveal an accurate image about what is going on. I made some brief quick additions, if any of you has any insight about Romania please feel free to add or correct. [link]

So it started: after the intros given by Nikolaj and by Thomas we just had a first session with Doc Searls and Robert Scoble talking. If you're following their blogs you will know what the conversation was about in general - Doc was talking about language and content and the big pressure impact on the media industry. Nothing new here, I must say Doc is a very good presenter though, knowledgeable, fast and smooth. I bet he gave this presentation several times though.

Robert seemed a bit nervous at times but made a good appearance, talked about the past and the future, blogging of course, Microsoft and Channel 9. At the beginning he put on the IRC conversations that were happening while he was speaking, with people ocassionally making jokes on him. He was banned after a while. :)

It's a very lively atmosphere, as a general consideration there's lots of young people, with a positive and fresh spirit, hard to come by a big crowd with such a pulse I believe. Kudos to the organizers of course. Catch with you later.

The weather here is just great, now I already finished with the business appointments for today - am just preparing to hit the town, also will go to the Thursday meetup at 7pm. The entire three days - Fr, Sat, and Sun - are fully booked, it will be hard to get hold of some good ol' memories of sightseeing, definitely I will hang out somewhere downtown with some friends on Sunday afternoon and evening. I totally forgot the names of the places but I remembered the places and found my directions pretty fast. Anyways -- I will try to cover Reboot as much as possible, it looks like a great event already - about 50 speakers and more than 400 participants.

Got an hour to kill in the Budapest airport and it looks like I have 3 free wifi connections to choose from. Which I definitely took advantage of. :) Weather here is crap, just like back in Bucharest, in Copenhagen apparently it is nicer. I'll update shortly from there.

Big PR deal lately in Romania on the occasion of the "first private hospital being open to the public". It is actually a big deal for as it follows: the Romanian health system is so crappy that the corruption is an institutionalized thing. The problems are not new - since it is a state-owned system, the financial incentives are very low and the infrastructure is not the best. (btw, while I was in Prague a few months ago I had to visit a friend of mine who was hospitalized -- I was shocked by my positive experience, state-owned again, but that's a different story).

As such, in order to make sure that you have your problems solved once you go there you need to budget considerable amounts of $$ for bribes. It's become so cynical that in most cases you don't even have the certainty that once you had paid the bribe somebody would take good care of you. It is so bad that I know cases in the emergency that they would simply ignore you if you don't make a move so that they understand it's going to be a profitable thing for them. Been there, done that - actually there is a saying: make sure you have done everything else before getting at the Romanian hospitals' hand.

So that is the context - now with the opening of the private outlets we have comeptition. Yeah, it is costly, but at least the expenses are transparent and you make sure you get what you pay for. A first step for getting into normality. Why didn't it happen before in Romania for the last 15 years or so? My short answer is Iliescu or the communist system he had propagated throughout the last 15 years. A longer one would have to consider a history full of conflicting interests out of which the patients are the only one that had to suffer, and not only literally.

11 steps for a better brain [link via]

Das keyboard with 100% blank keys - for ubergeeks only.

I guess it was just a matter of time, I think we really miss some good travel comparison engines for regions across ALL Europe. This one includes Romania, in spite of the country being served only by 2 or 3 low cost carriers at this time. SkyScanner via

Got lots of things lined up lately, and also prepare for my leaving to Copenhagen for Reboot 7, for some business gigs and probably I will take some days off afterwards.

It's going to be a very busy schedule in Copenhagen still I am available for a beer sometimes on Sunday afternoon, so drop me a line  - drnovac at gmail - if interested.

Speaking of Reboot, it's going to be a very interesting end of the week with plenty of cool and interesting people to meet and several discussions/conversations to pick up. Check out the profiles of some of the speakers and also the suggested topics to be touched upon. I also did a podcast with Nicole over the weekend which unfortunately got lost - too bad, it was a very interesting get-to-know-each-other hour of chat about internet, Romania, entrepreneurship, EU constitution and of course Reboot. Check out the other podcasts Nicole did though, it is very good stuff. Finally, besides the efforts of the organizers (Thomas and Nikolaj) it is worth noting the self organizing way of the event - the wiki page to which everybody makes the contributions, the pre and post conference events and other related stuff (such as Nicole's podcasts). I'd say it is a textbook example of complexity theory. :)

In other perspectives, I am involved in a couple of other projects that should see the light soon enough, will let you know shortly, I am quite excited about them.

"We delight in the lack of such strategy [driven by a grand vision]. We're very careful to say we're not trying to build one thing. We're trying to innovate in all these interesting spaces." Google's Eric Schmidt. So my friend was right after all. :)

Fred is one of the first that I read pointing to a very straightforward fact: there's no such a thing as a blog platform (i.e. MT, Typepad et all) - this is simply how the platform for building the websites of the future will look like. It's also related to a discussion I had with a friend of mine tonight about corporate websites heavily using flash and big pictures - they will gradually be done or used by artists or people who will rather try to demostrate their skills in using macromedia. If they're not interactive in the blog/social networking style (i know, again link to Fred) they will most likely fail to simply do the marketing job of getting the message across and getting instant feedback from the users. Getting a conversation going that is.

Next week at Reboot I will be talking about entrepreneurship in Europe and Eastern Europe -- about what it is that helps or blocks exploring entrepreneurial ideas and how the Eastern part of Europe is an untapped resource for doing business on European/global basis. I was thinking to mention some specific examples of cool companies from the Eastern part that emerged from this corner of the world and are making an impact business wise on the global level.

SKype is the first and most handy example, I am also aware of some others, but it would be helpful to get to learn about some more. So, if you have any recommendations please drop me a line. Also, if you have any input that would strengthen the above arguments please share. Thanks.

A political storm has broken out in Germany over reports that the government may be distancing itself from the European single currency. -- more here via

The Dutch were asked today to express their feelings about the EU constitution in a (non-mandatory) referendum. 63% said nee joining the 55% of the French with similar thoughts. Is it a communication problem or simply a good sign that there's a big gap between what people want and what politicians are driven by? I guess it's a combination of the two. 

Ross makes some very good points.

Have you played with it yet? It is some sort of a refined search towards commercial websites or info-based ones. More info about it on the faq. When it comes to software development Romania Krogos is doing pretty well on the balance between the two with a fourth place on the list - this is the plain yahoo search listing I guess.

Saved for before bedtime tonight. [link]

I started thinking about my presentation at Reboot from next week and have been reading a lot about innovation and cool startups in Europe and what is it that fosters or blocks entrepreneurship on the global European levels. Than ran into what Jeff sez: "As a venture investor, the first thing you consider when looking at a startup based in France is how you are going to move it out of France."