It's SmallBizPod and makes an informative break while you're having a fast lunch at the office. :) Alex Bellinger, the guy behind it, says that it's the first UK-based podacst.
March 2005
A while ago I had a comment on this topic -- well, it looks like there's another coffee shop offering free wi-fi recently opened in Bucharest - somewhere in a posh area, in Dorobanti (specifically on Radu Beller st). Well, Romanians certainly are quick in following the hype - a good context for understanding the underlying stratgey is over at Anita's Small Business Trends - also don't miss the comments.
Ross set up a wiki page with all the dream mergers out there - Yahoo acquires Disney LOL. Bubble 2.0 indeed.
A good piece explaining why TheStreet et all are going to have a hard time in the face of the emergence of providers with similar content. Made by individual analysts or money managers, or people in the know generally speaking, and of course with the blog as the underlying tool. Citizen media at work. :)
Links to science-related resources from countries across Europe.
Via the Romanian Clubul Antreprenorilor there's a link to a piece of news claiming that in Romania 41.4% (note the figure :)) of the Romanian SMEs were connected to the internet and 10% had an online presence such as a corporate website. In (most of) the Romanian acception a corporate website is just a static, 4-page tool playing a (descriptive) marketing role. For a comparison, in the US 30-40% of the SMEs have a website and the figure will will cross 50% in two years time.
It looks like in 2004 there were 1.5 mil fax machines sold in the States. I actually had an argument with my business partner about getting one - I claimed that we don't need it since the PC & internet combo plays a great substitute for our communication needs. In Romania it's still used on large scales but keep in mind that the internet penetration is rather low as compared even with countries from Eastern Europe. Things will change for sure.
Btw, are you (still) using fax machines?
From the Internet Stock blog.
A bit of a context: April 1st is the one year mark since Google launched Gmail and forced the other players understand the different perspectives from the email business. Now Yahoo joins in realizing that email is sticky and generates tons of pageviews - after an intermediary offer of 250Mb accounts. David also says that MSN will be strategically forced to join in.
I think it is a bit late now, Yahoo can hardly use the second mover's advantages - I can't see people using Gmail switching back to Yahoo as the swicthing costs are high. Probably the offer will be beneficial for the ones that haven't already switched.
On the personal side, I only use the yahoo account for registering for crap things that probably would generate spam. I dumped my hotmail account long time ago. I actually learned that MSN has a 250 offer from my brother - anecdotically the offer is valid only for people located in the USA, so it's just as well.
My guess is that Yahoo's offer is somehow related to the newly launched Y 360 - integration is the name of the game. Btw, have you noticed that Yahoo Groups changed their look?
UPDATE: Almost forgot - don't miss OM's take on how Yahoo got its modjo back. Read and learn, it makes helluva sense.
From Fred: "You can't learn real life business in school. That requires doing it, not studying it." I know many people whose ego went skyrocket just because of a lousy piece of paper saying they had an MBA. :) Being a good leader also means being involved in contexts when one has to be humble and respectful and such things are not really emphasized in grad school.
Even though I had a very busy weekend I still had time to read Brad's post about anti-dilution. Good perspectives for entrepreneurs looking for new equity rounds when, of course, their stock % will decrease.
A nice search tool for Wikipedia users. (via Stefan)
"a site for playing with colors" -- for the artist in you, tres kewl. :) (via le danois)
From Danah Boyd - "Anyhow, my general impression is that i'm wary, but i don't think that this is for me and i think it will be nice for the heavily integrated Yahoo user."
Is this a polite way of saying that it doesn't exceed the expectations? :)
If you're interested in learning about studying opportunities abroad - both at the undergrad and grad level - don't miss this event, it's the first of its kind in Romania. The event will be held in Bucharest at Sala Palatului in about a week, on April the second. I will be there representing BI's Norwegian School of Management together with Feite, the Marketing Director and Mihaela, a BI alumni. Drop by and say hello if you're around.
"The idea is pretty simple: people who create video, music, photos, audio clips and other personal media can store their stuff for free [...] forever, as long as they're willing to share their works with a global audience" [link]
Err, that includes podcasts I believe -- that's becoming an interesting space to watch, especially following the hype of Evhead's launching Odeo (a hosting/listening podcasts app) and, of course, Adam Curry's BoKu (in podcasts producing biz). All three can be/become complementors, there's more to come, who's next? :)
Sooper cool - similar to amaztype. I think I am going to have personalized posters by using those two services. That'd be a nice business idea, especially in Romania now that we can have digital pictures printed and delivered to the door. (via Jeff and BiRB)
Long time readers of this blog know that over the time I have tried to pay attention to some of the cool stuff that came up mostly in the technology space from worldwide. Now it's time to mention some cool Romanian things which, though copycats rather than blow minding new web apps, have their own merits. Even more importantly, I believe, is that they may represent the actual basis or platforms for going to cool, new or innovative directions, thus I will keep a close eye on them.
First one is a del.icio.us type of web-based link manager -- the author, Ursu, calls it bookmark online manager and can be found at fubar.ro. Ursu also keeps a blog not so frequent updated over at Note scrise la betie.
The second one is a Google News type of service for Romanian news only (Google doesn't offer Romanian news anyways :P) and is even cooler than Google's since it offers RSS feeds. The name of the service is MogNews and its author is Mihai Turcu, who recently started his own blog.
Good job guys, now let's see what's next. :)
UPDATE: I forgot to mention the one that I find to be the coolest actually, though I guess most of the people interested in the Romanian blogging space know it already. I am talking about the RSS Mioritics which is a Romanian RSS feeds repository with the reading option. If you know of any other cool stuff made by Romanians please do let me know. Thanks.
Most of you may have noticed that I didn't point to any post from the blogosphere about the bubble period circa 2000-2001 from the last weeks anniversary context. However, Umair's piece on the topic is essential reading for people interested in strategy and disruptive innovation stuff. He presents a somewhat big and hairy picture, though not very clearly explained, but touching and exemplifying the essentials. Basically the previous decade of the internet is what Hamel calls the transition from distribution economies to search economies, while Umair calls the years to come the period of transitioning from search to coordination economies. Go ahead and read the entire thing.
It's been a long weekend for me, I had lots of stuff to get done and things to learn in between. The last hour or so I just took TJ's advice and watched John Doerr's presentation (opens in WM) from Stanford's ETL program. Don't know who JD is? Check it out.
So if you're interested in what makes great entrepreneurs or a group that prevails to the lone ranger in most ventures as well as best practices on what would make a great innovative startup, make sure you have a spare hour, sit back, relax and enjoy - there's plenty of things to learn, even though they may seem to be common sense. It could actually stand as a proxy for an MBA entrepreneurship class.
So Om got it right about a month ago - Yahoo is buying Flickr after all. Comments from Jeremy (from Yahoo's side) and Caterina (from Flickr).
UPDATE: This comes in the context of Yahoo 360 launch and may have at least seven strategic implications. :)
Over the time @rgumente got a fair share of hits from people looking to toothing related articles - this one was the catch. Now Alexandru points to an old article (sub req, use bugmenot) with the quote that "We're just employing expensive, complex toys to find the most basic form of entertainment" And this reminds me of a great post of Tom Evslin about pornography being the main driver for technological development. Also for the internet.
For people understanding Romanian, over at Una pe zi I had a rant earlier this morning about how Romanian sports journalists are using sexy ladies for catching up attention to their stories or shows. WHich mostly suck.
Via Rodrigo here is a link to an interesting EU initiative for a knowledge base about how to do business in EU countries. While it is a good initiative I would even find it more valuable if I'd be able to make comparisons between different areas from different countries .
Last Sunday, after noticing it, I dropped a line to the support team asking about the opml support. Well, exactly 7 days after Steve Rider answers that opml is on the top of the priority list. It's not what I'd call a swift answer but thanks Steve for acknowledging it and good luck with it, I look forward to trying it out.
That's a paraphrase of an REM song -- over at Yeald there's a good article explaining why sooner or later the off-line version of newspapers are condemned to a slow death. Why isn't it happening in Romania yet? The sore spot #5: the paper version is STILL leading the online version.
Why? In general it's the low rate of internet penetration and in particular too few people follow the news in Romania on the internet (TV is the king). However, do note that in the top 10 of the Romanian leaders in terms of online traffic there are five Romanian newspapers: GSP (#3 - sport daily), EVZ (#4 - general daily), Prosport (#6 - sport daily), Libertatea (#8 - tabloid daily) and Adevarul (#9 -- hmm, hard to classify, it's a daily that during Ceausescu was the most important communist newspaper, and nowadays people haven't changed too much their thinking or writing style).
The long tail in the software industry (I meant to link it this week, but got no time) and Bill Burnham on software as a service - a good complement to one of my earlier posts.
Again via Seth, even though I don't find it (anymore) appealing to write about metadata (bloggin' about bloggin') the Blogads survey about who reads blogs is worth a look.
So 75% of the readers are male, the most of the readers are not doing bad financially (in the 60k-90k $$ range), they're either students (10% - highest) or computer pros (8.1%), actively involved in the community (not a surprise here - my theory is that blogging is actually about giving) and spend about 10 hours a week reading blogs (that's more than an hour a day).
Surprisingly 72.4% never use RSS feeds for reading blogs and 92.1% never listen to podacsts. If podcasts are still in the grassroots forms and so the percentage is fully understandable, the high number of people not getting the feeds in a reader may indicate that RSS are still perceived as a complicated technological thing.
The sample size of the survey was about 30k people.
The 2004 letter is out, I also mentioned the one from last year.
...is getting a lot of atention lately, I know a lot of people starting using it - actually Jeff was pointing the other day to a list of pros and cons for switching from MT to Wordpress. Btw, did you know that the dude behind Wordpress is 21? Matt Mullenweg that is.
Read what Evan talked about at ETech when revealing Odeo's demo as reported by Calacanis. Hosting fees paid by bloggers and audio sales are the main revenue drivers and Audible and Adam Curry are the early success stories. Btw, I read somewhere these days about Adam being called "the prince of podcasting" </grin>
Preople's clue is the people ranking as a result of some algorithms: "We visit a few search engines, search for your name, get the number of times your name is found online and perform a complicated calculation to extract a ranking."
I got a rank of 3540 with 7527 people having a higher ranking and 37275 with a lower. Ranking is based on how much people talk about me on the web - whatever that means.
And since these days tests and rankings don't seem to be interesting enough unless the results are benchmarked with other people's you can take the challenge and compare yourself with how the others are standing.
I find the idea interesting - how about a combination of Trendum and Preople? It seems that Preople doesn't have a business model as of yet, the founders apparently just did it for fun according to Yeald (where I learned about them initially).
Did you know that Microsoft has a wiki product?
This weekend (must) reading - Paul Graham's essay (via Ross) --- you need 3 things: good people, provide something that people want and spend as little money as possible. That's for an ideal start though I believe.
It looks like one can get decent conditions while travelling for business purposes to the Romanian capital.
The story background is like this: a while ago someone hacked into Harvard's IT infrastructure and for some time any MBA applicant was able to check his/her admission to the program status. After the story having made the headlines Harvard took drastic atitude and actually denied admission on the integrity claims to the applicants who used the glitch. I'd say that's a bit of an overreaction, the school probably just wanted to give an example even though it's exageratted and unfair.
Anyways, the sequel is that Seth makes a great point of questioning if people actually should/need take an MBA anyways - the on-the-job experience combined with 30-40 reading book list should make a rather relevant substitute. Of course this stirred some heated debates -- one of the best answers is this one.
The consultant answer (classic MBA response actually :)) is "it depends" - my take is that the experience is at least as valuable as the theoretical knowledge you get from the books. This experience may take different forms - interaction with others, proffesors, resources, networking, different perspectives, or other things you may not be able to anticipate. The doubt will of course arise when questioning the other side of the equation, or weighing in the opportunity costs - what do you gain during the time for choosing to do whatever else instead taking the MBA?
A while ago a friend of mine was telling me about what it's like to spend few good hours in endless and pointless discussions and arguments that stand, of course, for internal meetings within corporations. And now Umair links to the Office at My Space.
Cip is speculating that Yahoo launching the 360? service may be actually the next flop and makes an analogy to the UMTS' play in the telecom market.
I believe the parallel is a bit inappropriate. Why is that? UMTS represents a technology that challenges some standard technologies already present and established in the telecom market. It is a standard war that's been going on for years in the telecom space and incidentally history indicates that not always the best one will be the winner. The Betamax - VHS standard war is a case study in this respect me thinks.
Social software apps, on the other hand, emerged in a somewhat virgin teritory without a standard being already defined and accepted by the market. As such, the rush is for becoming a recognized provider at least. While I certainly agree that the frenzy for going into this social software space may indicate a future flop, I am not sure it is already quite so. It is too early to call it a loser, for now the industry is still in early stages whereas it needs the critical mass of people for using those kind of app. It is the network of people using these tools that is important here, and the larger it is the more valuable it becomes. In the meantime the vendors still are trying to figure out lucrative business models. Some may incorporate it into their present business models such as Google or Yahoo. Some already have figured out a business model - Linkedin, Social Text, Creative Weblogging or Weblogsinc, most didnot.
Now, the industry's direction may be directly to the garbage bin or may very well go to some very interesting businesses. The time's not right for telling - we are now in the process of me-too applications mushrooming and I guess that there will be a handful of smart players who will be able to capitalize on the concept and make it a success.
The two main Romanian ISPs are playing intelligently for smoothing the VOIP way and building a market. Or undermining Romtelecom's business model (the local and only fixed phone provider) which seems to be caught in inertia without a coherent play for at least building some sustainable business.
How's that? On the data transmission front Romtelecom is stuck with the ISDN offer or Artelecom's low profile play. On the mobile front Cosmorom is a dead horse for years now. (I wasn't even able to find a webpage or something about what they are up to these days :)) On the fixed phone services - the substitutes are obviously the mobile phones which are more attractive (big bets made on this market) and now the VOIP players, both disrupting drivers of Romtelecom's value proposition. The only thing that Romtelecom's users seem to be locked in is actually the phone number (which sooner or later - perhpas later in Romania given the demographics - will change to a username or IP) and the inertia of some people who are not easily to adapt to change (ya know, all those computers and the internet thing). And it may take a while for them to get things right, but I wouldn't underestimate the willingness to learn/adapt to new stuff (even though it involves technology) versus profiting from a compelling a value proposition. And relying on the users inability of understanding other offerings basically seems to be Romtelecom's play.
Interestingly enough, both main Romanian ISPs (Astral and RDS) are offering the free voip minutes as a component bundled with data services. And those minutes help in differentiating the value propositions. And while the strategy seems to be right the execution is far from perfect. Unbundling and going for naked internet is exactly what I am looking for in the future, the small niche players are already waking up. As for the voip, my guess is that it's going to become a revenue driver sooner rather than later for the local ISPs, actually these days it's not quite uncommon that I am talking to my friends by Skype when deciding to go out at the pub. :)
So Yahoo is finally getting seriously into the social software space - Yahoo! 360?. PK says that the service will start by the end of the month with hand-picked beta users. Boy, it's going to be crowded out there.
In other news Battelle describes a bit the newly Open Search A9 or the syndicated search. I will look into more details later on today. As a brief comment, things move fast, it's been less than a year since we were wondering what was A9's goal and how would it compete with similar search engines. Turns out that I was wrong with Google "exploring the lower markets" theory though. :)
Or in Mobifon - one of the Romanian mobile carriers that is. After more or less unofficial negotiations news circulated around for a while now it appears that Vodafone officially bought 79% of the shares of Mobifon from Canadian Telesystems.
What are the implications?
First of all it will be an Orange-Vodafone competition in the Romanian market. Zapp matters just marginally both in terms of market share and in the feature/service scope it provides in spite of its official optimism and a claimed 2004 good year. As for the Cosmorom --- are they still alive? Last summer the Romtelecom (the landphone provider which used to belong to the state and which owns Cosmorom) was still looking for a strategic investor for it - not too much news on this side, and not too many hopes either. (see my last year's posts - 1, 2, 3)
Then this involves a nice exit for the early investors in the Romanian mobile carrier (Copos the actual Romanian SMEs minister without a portfolio was among them afaik). Smart investors who spotted the opportunity and jumped on it. Opportunity as big as the mall business is cooking in Bucharest these days, but I will have a different post for that. (btw, Copos is involved in this too :)) Note though that this is my hypothesis - the news specifies that the transaction was between Vodafone and TIW.
In terms of features and new services offer I don't expect that Vodafone's acquisition would have a big impact in the overall strategy of new deployments in the local market. As compared to the timing from the Central Eastern Europe or Europe of course - actually it will probably be the same delay as ever in both price adjustments and new phone releases. Unfortunately, even though Romanians seem to be quite eager in adopting new services the buying power is not permitting too much room for strategic moves here (such as a place for testing new services - the market is not here). Even though it'd be cool, Romania is far from going there, actually Romania plays rather an important role in the secondary market for mobile phones.
What else? From a strategic point of view Vodafone is looking for growth in Europe and Central Eastern Europe is just the place for that - especially considering the high growth rate estimated for the next period in Romania (or the lower penetration rates as opposed to its Western peers).
For people interested in understanding and following the telecom market I believe Om, Ronald and EuroTelco blog are daily must reads.
Alex has a good point on mentioning utility computing that will probably become an impacting model in the current software-based industry configurations. In short the model is similar to the way we pay the electricity bill (at least in this part of the world) - you pay as much as you consume. I believe the industry is not there yet, Espen for example suggests that IBM's acquiring Ascential may be an indication of the industry going into that phase.
Alex's comment actually reminded me of a pdf paper on the topic I read from IBM's Technical Journals over the weekend. It's presenting 11 IT outsourcing cases and some related risks and hedging practices tied to the client-vendor relationship and the proprietory IT architecture. The paper concludes that utility computing will force companies considering outsourcing to switch from cost orientation goals to strategic agility.
And what does that mean? Large organizations don't need to run huge networks and systems any longer as they are translated into large piles of money blocked into fixed assets with low returns since those pieces of equipment are not used at their fully capacity, on the contrary - it's actually very difficult to have an optimized usage of them. As such, the solution will be the computing services and business processes used from third parties and made available on when-needed, as-needed bases. Or the pay-as-you-go model.
A good article from the new coming Newsweek issue with a fair reflection of Romania. Take it as some sort of a follow up to the Romanian president's recent visit to the USA. Note that Andrei Postelnicu is one the writers. Here are some excerpts and clear cut facts:
"[...] If graded today, it [Romania] would fail almost every objective test of admission. The economy is a mess. Standards of justice and human rights are abysmal. Corruption is rampant. Romania supposedly arose in 1989 to slough off communist dictatorship. In fact, the celebrated revolution was more a crypto-coup that paved the way for nearly 15 years of rule by the communist apparatchiks and secret police who engineered it, led by the retiring President Ion Iliescu. Romanians today call it their "stolen revolution," in testimony to the stuck-in-the-sand morass they find themselves in, so in contrast to their post-Soviet neighbors. No wonder Eurocrats in Brussels are openly questioning whether Romania can meet its deadline?or should have its EU admission pushed back a year.
[...] With Basescu, Romania has its first fully non-communist government since World War II.
[...] On its face, Romania's future looks good. The economy has grown by more than 5 percent every year since 2001. The country is a member of NATO and EU membership is nigh. Beneath the surface, the country is a disaster waiting to happen. Corruption and burdensome bureaucracy has driven roughly half the economy underground, according to experts, reflecting a widespread view that it's better to avoid a system that can be abused or bought than to do business legitimately.
[...] One can only wonder what will happen if (some say when) Basescu fails to deliver on the huge expectations he has raised in only three months. "I've been the sea captain of large oil tankers, and I always reach my destination," Basescu quipped last week. Whether he succeeds or not will soon be tested, beginning with the EU's upcoming decision on an accession timetable. But at least this much can be said: Basescu will be doing his utmost."
[via Romania-Economics]
I like it, it looks neat, it moves very nicely, I cannot find any way to import/export opml files though. Yet. Also, no much space for customization. It'd be interesting to follow how it will compete with bloglines.
I just had a look at some of the ideas Microsoft is preparing for the future. Then had a look at Google's. You make your own conclusion, my only observation is that there's a RSS feed offered by MSN. Subscribed. Google Lab doesnot have that.
And I also tried to have a peek at Yahoo's one, I know they have one, but I wasnot able to find it. Please drop me a line if you know it, thanks.
UPDATE: Yahoo's is called Yahoo! Next and can be viewed here. (Thanks Alex)
Tony Thompson reports from Caracal, Romania: virtual sweatshops exists. This time in the case of a US-based company in the software gaming business. Besides the city reminding me about the (nasty) Romanian joke about the people from Caracal, I'd say that's another case of speculating the price asssymetries or why outsourcing works in the software industry. Or a simple Sunday story about poor people from Romania. Whichever mood suits you best. :)
A down-to-earth analysis of what Google is and especially is not.
Over the last weeks I had lots of discussions about interoperability and usability issues for web- based products. And now I discover that Gmail offers a standard and a basic HTML view. Nice.
...is offering RSS feeds. Though it loads the actual page in the reader and it doesn't only harvest the content - that's a good start.
Ok, this story is a direct result of CEBIT - ya know, probably this IHT reporter was there wandering around, looking for stories and taking the pulse of the industry. It's nothing new for the people from the biz and it's a nice introduction for those who are not in the loop yet.
Note the analogy of Eastern Europe becoming the India of Europe - that's exactly what a private investor from UK mentioned in a discussion a while ago. Though I think Indians are more organized than the Eastern Europeans since they had an early start. Also, they have a massive pool of talents to recruit from (1.2bn people). On the other hand Eastern Europe has the cultural similarities and the proximity as main advantages. Head-to-head competition? Yes for the moment, China is also coming strong from behind. We will see, at this moment the cost differences are still to be speculated in EE, though it won't be for long. And this is where the innovation factor should come into the picture. Besides, the Indians started already to establish development centers in EE themselves.
That's a piece of great news and PR for Romania: some time ago, while in business school, Tiberius Vadan together with one of his Harvard colleagues wrote a study about the investment environment in Romania. A very informative one I might add. For people who are not in the know Tiberius is one of the founding members of the Romanian Business Professionals Association (RBPA), an organization with the aim of networking the world's business professionals of Romanian origin or with interest in Romania.
Turns out that the follow up of that paper is a book - Romania Redux: A View from Harvard - which will be released in NY on March 16. What is even more interesting, preceding the book launching there will be a workshop about investment opportunities and challenges in Romania in particular and in Eastern Europe in general.
So if you're in NYC next week make sure you won't miss this double event, a great chance of learning relevant stuff about Romania and of schmoozing of course.
I found out over at Rob's about a new business idea - buy, sell, blog by using an auction system. They say it's a tool speculating the complaints from eBay users which certainly will push the online classified ads to new way of doing the biz.
Actually this is an old idea of mine: empower blogs with a safe tool to do transactions. Anybody who has a blog and something to sell or in need of buying something - what is the best way other than talking with your blog readers, who are, more or less, part of your informal network? That's how I bought my new laptop for example - well, not a direct transaction but by following a recommendation of a reader.
Even though I stopped using the Google News service ever since I discovered blogs and RSS feeds it's worth having a look at how it's working - the drag and drop service is quite cool. Keep in mind though that strategically Yahoo has been doing this for a (lot longer) while now with MyYahoo and they also offer feeds.
...there's light years differences between Romania and the rest of the world, US in this case, in terms of blogging and the technology understanding in general lets say, when you read this Romanian piece of coverage from one of the most important opinion makers (a Ro newspaper that is) about what blogging means and the reaction to it (with the lame excuse that you have to write so that "the target understands you" instead of calling things on their name) and what's happening in the real world with the real problems of the real business. Or the real industry in the making.
Sometimes I am just wondering if all the effort is worth - obviously (most of) Romanians are so low on the learning curve on understanding and adopting to the cool stuff rapidly. Technology wise in this particular case and historically speaking in general. I am so trying not to get discouraged too easily sometimes.
Horia has a very good question in my previous post about the poor customer service of Astral, the Romanian ISP (and btw RDS, the other big player, is no better) and about the reason of it not taking care of the customer satisfaction. I believe that the answer diserves a post of its own.
It is very simple actually: customers are not among the operational priorities in industries that are in the early days of their development cycle.
These days such companies (and banks are in the same boat for example) are more preoccupied with expansion plans taking advantage of the increasing demand side. But in this case the demand is rather a function of the lack of the service (it's a virgin market) than a sophisticated set of needs the companies are trying to meet. Hence the costs of making the existing customer base happy are way higher than the costs of acquiring new ones. Plus that once you have the customers locked in (as it's still an ISP duopoly - RDS and Astral are racing head-to-head for country coverage) it's easier to give them the illusion of a better service.
When the market demand pace will somewhat stabilize and it will be in the few percentage range (or not increase at all) the companies will look for strategies such as stealing market share from one another, hence customer satisfaction will become a competitive advantage and they'll hopefully have to consider it.
Right now though they're after building infrastructure and economies of scale (i.e. as much nationwide coverage as possible). Still, besides that, at this moment they are competing on price and features, for example on the home user base RDS's value proposition differentiates only in terms of free-minute numbers VOIP solution bundled with the internet service. The internet offer is structured only in terms of bandwidth (which is still VERY expensive) once you crossed your surfing quota. But that will change soon, it is a fact though that while they may care (or may not is my opinion) about the customer satisfaction the present strategic agenda is different apparently.
Perhaps this is what makes the difference between a good and a great company after all.
Here's a somewhat subjective article of Romanian Pacepa, a guy who was the head of the Romanian Securitate back in the 80s and who allegedly was proven to work for the American side and consequently had to remain there at that time. There are lots of legends about him - that's not the scope of this post though.
The article tries to point out that there were several cases of former Securitate agents who were charged as guilty during Ceausescu's for simply helping the US intelligence. While he may or may not be right certainly Pacepa fails to consider that helping the US intelligence doesn't automatically imply being against Ceausescu or his dictatorship. It may involve being a traitor though. Oh, and another sign of subjectivity: the often usage of "my subordinates" throughout the piece.
I certainly agree with the ending though -- people with cojones can change the history and Basescu may be one of them.
It looks like Kottke is not doing too bad after 2 weeks of being on his own -- on his site there's a list with 519 micropatrons who donated 30 bux to see Jason full time blogging. That would result into about $15k which is not bad at all. Not to consider the cool presents he got such as gift certificates to Threadless, books or pieces of software for free.
As a follow up for the previous post -- this is a case of how it's done (or should be done). See also an example I mentioned last year.
Seth is giving a free lesson on the basics of how to treat your customers and have them involved in your working process. And that reminds me that today I spent more that 30 minutes on hold with the customer service from Astral (which is one of the largest internet provider from Romania). And after more than half hour of waiting I hang up. I was lucky that I had the phone on the speaker and had some work done in the meantime, but that doesn't mean Astral really sucks when it comes to the way they treat their customers. If there's anybody working for Astral reading this then go read and try to understand what Seth is saying, it shouldn't be that hard to put into practice - I'd say it's common sense.
Incidentally today I also went to Astral's HQ for arranging for the internet connection for our new office and it was the same bad way of client service - you go in a booth where you don't know what to do and where theoretically speaking somebody is supposed to come help you. You have no idea about the time you're supposed to spend, who else is waiting, or what the order is. Heck, you don't even have any idea if anybody is supposed to come ask you what your deal is. Again lack of organizational skills that reflect on the way Astral is treating its customers - or the ones helping them creating value for the shareholders. Why - Seth says it again very well:
"How come Astral (my insertion) doesn't have a plan for dealing with this spike? We've all heard this excuse when we're on hold. Personally, it doesn't make me feel any better. I don't say, "Oh, they've staffed up with plenty of people but this particular moment is an exception so I'll cut them some slack." What's missing from the cost benefit analysis is pretty clear: a customer just took the initiative to call in, to do business with you, to pay attention. And the company, just to save a buck or so in excess capacity, makes this eager person just sit and wait."
For people still interested in the Canadian miraje (I know quite a few
Romanians still believing that immigrating to Canada is a
getaway option, better than living in Romania that is) here's a
somewhat
helpful webiste with links to research positions and jobs. And btw, in
Montreal it's creepy cold these days. Last night
in Bucharest we had the historical lowest for March: -20 Celsius.
That's the name of a great Romanian educational site, it's been a long time since I've seen such a good idea put into practice and executed so well. In the Romanian online environment.
