September 2005

I'd rather call them signs -- they're simple, common sense and yet hard to take by at least a dozen of people that I can figure those signs on. From my experience, they're very ego-driven and fail to acknowledge simple reality bits hence being surrounded by a false reality and system of reference. Charlie has also a bonus to the list of ten.

...is a available as a web-based service at wordpress.com, by invitation only.

...announced a while ago will be launched in November.

Update: Espen has more on the implications.

I am very slow to catch up with this week's news, it's a hectic period. I hope you didn't miss the story of Bucharest's historical center being subject of a massive investment for becoming what it needs to be: a cozy place full of history and charm.

European Voice came up with a list of 50 people which had a great impact on European issues in 2004. They can be ranked based on various various categories; also, it's worth noting that there's one Romanian among those - Alina Mungiu-Pippidi who is a director of SAR. [ via]

Fred's doing it for free. Easy and handy -- lots of cool things emerging in the space, Writely and then Jotspot Live

Yeah, old news already, a while ago Opera got rid of the 39 euro fee and made available the light, ads free browser, after a deal with Google allegedly. I decided to give it a try myself, (actually it was a comment exchage with Vivi that startled me) - it certainly looks neat and moves fast, the learning curve is not too steep, though the keyboard shortcuts are slightly different than the ones from Firefox or IE.

Opera seems quite a cool company to me, I had a chance of having their marketing guy as a guest lecturer back in school and he really impressed me. For a better understanding of where they're heading at and the current strategy read Dorrian's impressions from the SD Forum where he had the chance to see a presentation from Opera's Timo Bruns.

@rgumente has a side-blog called briefly and situated on the right side of the website. It's been available for a while but to my surprise some people were not aware of it. :) You can get it via RSS as well as the comments for the entire website. Moreover, if interested only in parts of @rgumente you can syndicate it by each category - you can see all of them in the RSS section.

...about Google throughout their 7 years journey.

That's a top made by the weekly Romanian Capital. The top 5 includes 3 multinationals and 2 Romanian companies:

1. Oriflame
2. Pfizer
3. Wrigley
4. Atlassib
5. Petromservice

Atlassib is Sibiu-based group of companies involved in transportation services whereas Petromservices is a holding allegedly owned by the unionists of the recently privatized Petrom, the largest Romanian oil company (owned by OMV). Among other things Petromservice is also involved in the media industry and is behind several controversial stories as its owner, Liviu Luca, has strong ties with Ovidiu Vantu (a very powerful Romanian businessman) as well as is involved in different political games and interests. An example is Luca publicly acknolwedging the rivalry and using Realitatea TV (Petromservice property) as an attacking medium against Dan Voiculescu, another Romanian powerful businessman who runs a media empire and who is a political leader of a niche party involved in the government.

[link in Ro]

UPDATE: 1.It looks like the links for the companies info is not working. Just go here and search for their respective names.
2. Mihai rightly acknowledges that the above top is an intermediary top 5 ranking the highest paying companies.

What it is like for an expat -- Doug's got a good overview.

Apparently the project approach was fundamentally changed last summer. The man behind this change is Jim Allchin. link

The winner is from Poland, second place was taken by a Russian and the third was a Dutch. link

Over at Marc's -- follow his links. More grounds on the context have been covered here, here, and here.

Gee, I guess that simply needs to go along with the blog 101.

Good article on two business models from within the same industry whose differences primarily come from the history. "European newspaper's primary customers are readers. But American newspapers' primary customers are advertisers, not readers."

And yeah, design matters, see latest Guardian change.

We don't have a detailed Google map for Bucharest - check this out though (thanks Jake)

"The sound you hear is the sound of eBay stock going down" -- Blair Levin about the bad sound quality in a Skype conference with Niklas Zennstrom. link via

wifi.google.com - downloadable here and FAQ available. A short context here as well.

Cringely's take

For people interested in the blogging business (or online content creators) Jason is transparent with his approach, metrics, etc.

Just like the vinyl in the music industry...

Point in case is SkyEurope, starting to operate Bratislava-Bucharest just before Christmas, December 12 specifically. Whoo-hooo. That's right, competition! More choices, more tourists, more opportunities, etc. [via Tom's cheap0, a great budget airlines resource]

...and more in this interview.

Google's, in 2 versions: one associated with G aka blogsearch.google.com and the other under blogger label (probably for people more familiar with blogs and the like).

Some headlines directly from Romanian Daily:

- the story of a Romanian entrepreneur who made it in the States
- Basescu is going to the US where he will be meeting with people from the local business community
- Dacia Logan has Chinese competition
- Romania is in the top three of distilled liquor consumers. Finally some recognition and national pride. :)

Thunderbird is not as good as I have thought -- today it crashed for the 5th time and has been doing this for a few days already. I am using 1.0.6. I'd hate to return to Outlook -- btw, did anybody check out Zimbra?

Of course due to the belle exit investors got with Skype, Estonia gathered some momentum - more than 80% of Skype's operations are located in Talinn (the company is incorporated in Luxembourg and has a sales and marketing office in London). It's normal, Estonia is one of the most remarkable performing countries in the post-communism period, it has skilled labour and laidback people.

However it is not unlikely to hear more often about high profile investors or investment houses screening and establishing bridge points in Eastern Europe. The reason is rather simple: testing business hyphothesis and tapping on cheap and skilled resources, it may be a competitive advantage for the risk takers when getting away from mature and more competitive markets. A recent case was Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson (also involved in Skype before these days' exit) and whoe recently tested the waters for opening a technology fund in Ukraine.

As for Romania, I still believe it has tremendous unexploited potential. Alan pointed to some country profile that, in spite of being a bit outdated (hyperinflation?  -- we're in single digit inflation already in the second year), may have some contextual pointers placing Romania at competitive disadvantage. But those may appear to be insignificant in the face of a daily improving business environment, fairly large market, with cheap resources and plenty of under-invested niches. Whoever happens to be in Bucharest these days can see it by simply going downtown and looking around.

Of course it's not la vie en rose, far from that, but there's been a lot of positive changes happening here lately, certainly there is a lot of inertia and change resistance given that it is a fairly big country - second biggest after Poland in Central Eastern Europe. But things are improving considerably in spite of those.

The main problem, as I perceive it, is not the lack of financing (the banks are sitting on tons of money -- only the National Bank claimed to have at disposal about 2bn euros without economic projects purposes) but rather the lack of entrepreneurs -- people with good ideas and sufficient skills necessary to make them happen. And such people may always be able to overcome problems such as bureaucracy or petty corruption, things that always come up when talking about business as usual in Romania.

Working and living in Denmark -- all you need to know. [via]

With all these days' Skype hype it just popped into my mind  how many of my readers are using actually using skype - hence the new poll. I am using both Skype and GTalk currently -- ping me at drnovac.

...had elections and now has a new prime minister. More details over at Jan's.

Maybe not too many of you knew that Morten actually owned shares in Skype. Read his side of the story.

Ebay bought Skype for $2.6 bn, half cash half stock.

Academic paper on blogs and whatnot.

Bluetooth based device allows using cell phone to make calls via IM. [pointer from Andrei]

Via an offtopic comment from Frank's -- make some time to read about the impressions and experiences of an American in Romania circa 2001-2002.

According to my stats about 5% of my readers are using an Apple machine. Would be curious what the regular readers use, hence the new question of the day from above.

Estonians had a young and smart finance minister who was allowed to do his job, a damn good one I may add. In Romania, the finance minister, Ionut Popescu, was recently changed after only 9 months as a result of political games as allegedly he couldn't make a deal with the well-connected mafia from the customs offices. In spite of overall good ministerial results.

The rotted system from the customs is one of the most corrupted places from Romania, and apparently those guys created a mechanisms that is working very well since they were able to get rid of Ionut Popescu. Btw, I heard that one officer located on the lower levels of the custom offices would make an average of $55k. Per day. Not bad, huh? Sounds a bit unrealistic to me, probably the figure is somehwere lower in the 10-20k but still.....it's quite high. Also, accordingly, the bribes to get in must be on similar high levels.

Getting back to Estonia, here's a good story on the flat tax enforced by the Estonians.

These days in Romania there is a big discussion upon the oil price increase -- there was a 10% hike and they say there will be another one. One of my friends who is CFO at a multinational operating in Romania told me the other day that he is budgeting the oil price at 5.5 ron for 2006. That's about 1.5 euro per liter. Apparently the costs of Petrom, the main initiator of these price increases, have not increased as much, as such there is an official investigation going for seeing if the increase is justified.

In othe news OMV, Petrom's shareholder, after consolidating its position in Central Eastern Europe by acquiring Petrom, now is looking for a Turkey refining company.

So apparently Starbucks is entering the Romanian market. [ in Ro] Not bigadeal, incidentally though I just noticed in referrals that my blog is the first hit when googling Starbucks Romania.

You won a free ticket to see an Eric Clapton concert (which has no resale value). Bob Dylan is performing on the same night and is your next-best alternative activity. Tickets to see Dylan cost $40. On any given day, you would be willing to pay up to $50 to see Dylan. Assume there are no other costs of seeing either performer. Based on this information, what is the opportunity cost of seeing Eric Clapton? (a) $0, (b) $10, (c) $40, or (d) $50.

The answer at the source.

More specifically one third of the Western Europeans rarely or never use their laptops built-in wifi capabilities.I am wondering if they use the laptops for things other than browsing/IM, a bit of MS Office and probably photo storage. Similarly with the mobile phones -- other than voice, SMS and email, the rest of the mobile phone features are only for the power users.

Err, or perhaps I should call it latest Skype's differentiation play - Skype personalized: 1 euro for a ring tone and yet another one for a picture. I guess the marginal costs for trying it out are insignificant, so why not, but for God's sake, I believe that Skype's  losing grounds by every single day - -the momentum seems further away.

In spite of the boasted millions of downloads Skype is not as much in the mass market as the numbers would indicate. Moreover, switching costs are close to zero -it is a network externality play so give me some strong incentive to stay in the network, not a bloody ringtone. Btw, I am using Google Talk more often than Skype these days, after just a couple of weeks. [via Nicole]

Words of wisdom from an interview with a man coming from a different culture: Lee Kuan Yew. Hat tip from Valachus.

Chirality: an asymmetry property for an object or system that differs from its mirror image. Apart from the Wikipedia you can find some substantiate background over at Adi's.

..got scobeleized via Peter. The guys behind it are cool, met them in Copenhagen at Reboot.

Cory live from Singapore, when mentioning about some coolio devices: Asia is way aheah of the US, Canada or Europe.

I touched upon the sustainability of Google's biz model over a lunch discussion with Ronald a couple of days ago -- here's last week's news: Google's leveraging its power into offline advertising. The interesting speculation is Google building a pay-per-call advertising model; Battelle is making the back-on-the-envelope calculations and it seems that it may become quite a lucrative move.

A suggestive chart made considering the US market only but nonetheless very interesting - the adoption rate of things that change people's life is decreasing in time. (from here) My guess is that the mobile phone is these days what a x86 computer used to be 10+ years back.

Worth 30 minutes of reading and thinking through -- if interested in the subject, Nouriel makes his class resources quite transparent to everybody.

Rachel's: "why does chocolate take longer to cool down than to melt?" That's a good one...

If you're pitching your web 2.0 app to a private investor and lack pitch ideas here's a generator helping you just do that.  It reminds me of the people who are able to talk to you about just everything like forever without saying actually anything. My pitch would accordingly be

Web 2.0 revolutionary social-networking-aware emergent p2p decentralized disruptive hybridized Ruby on Rails AJAX remixable distributed tagging-enabled incentivized long invite-only beta open source wiki-based multi-device monetized filtered metadata-rich web-services-ready mobile aggregated dating Firefox extension that leverages existing metadata.

Impressive, huh? :) Generate yours by clicking this. If you want to see some more pitches simply refresh the page. [via]

Dave Sifry made the usual honest communication gig about what Technorati's up to but the service is truly broken. I have tried every day for the last 8 - 10 days to search for the links to argumente and got always the same response of "the server is busy".
Btw, lately I noticed that I get more and more traffic from IceRocket and Yahoo's search engine, as opposed to Technorati and Google. Goggle/Yahoo ratio is about 50/50.

Anyaways, I also started using IceRocket , still not very compelling results I believe - I know several blogs linking to mine and which are not listed in IceRocket, Blogpulse or even Feedster.

UPDATE: I agree with Jason, it may be that Technorati has a focus problem -- "eyes on the prize, guys" :)

Yeap, September 6 is around the corner and NerdTV is about to kick off. More on the scoop from Bob himself.

Writely looks like the true web version of MSFT word.Oh, and how is it different than a wiki? For one thing, it has permissions, so that you can invite only you choose to edit or view your documents. For another, it's easy to use.

It doesn't sound like a compelling argument to me, but worth checking it out nonetheless. via Umair

UPDATE: Writely's profile over at TechCrunch.

Looks like I am not the only one in this boat. However, the excuse of "we're doing it coz everybody is and if we do not do it we're at competitive disadvantage" adds more crap to the whole situation. That's why I like GTalk for example, among other things it's light and NOT intrusive with my machine's settings.

I am sure you know it already, just for the records though -- right after Yahoo was going after Dialpad and after Google talk launching...voice over IM is becoming a commodity, lots of pressure on the telcos and, of course, Skype. Om's got it better, as always.

Resource directory, no further comments needed. Yellow Pages are so 90s, we got wiki, baby!!

Over at Ask Yahoo:  how do the duties of the company president differ from those of the CEO?

It's just an ego thing for being perceived as having status by God knows who - as far as I am concerned there's only one guy in charge for running the show and being responsible in front of the stakeholders, and that's the CEO. But check out what Yahoo responds.:)

...RSS readers, I am using/testing  Thunderbird, with which apparently I can get the full feeds after all. I also found a workaround for OPML import/export, problem is that I am doing the subcategories and folders manually. Looks good so far. I have Bloglines for backup.

The rumours start to get some grounds. I knew why I postponed buying an iPod for so long. :)

93 mil euros for Sweden and the Baltics, I am wondering how much Romania is going to get after the horrible floods we had this summer. via

Speaking of a:c, they also profile e-donkey, which I was a power user of back when I was living in Norway. Quite a nice app. actually.

Fred signals that a downturn may be just around the corner in US. Not the case in Romania I think, at least for the next 18 months or so, it pretty much depends on the January 2007 deadline of being admitted into the EU.

In a postponed admission scenario, then there might be a slowdown of FDI into the country, right now there's plenty of capital available in an upward trend. However, Romania is still one of the most underinvested emerging markets in Europe, so the EU admission is really not that important. Legislation predictability and economic stability are.