WEBMYC’s Blog

First day @InternetCEE ended. There were many interesting presentations and I’ve had the pleasure to talk with many interesting and interested people. Interested in Romania, interested in developments and investments in the area. There were also some not so good presentations – some of them bound to make you call for Sandman and some other, on highly interesting topics but very badly executed. The agenda of day one is available here. I have pictures of all the slides but before I share them with you I’m waiting to see if Gemius/Internet CEE will make the presentations available, as it would save me a lot of time. Here are some random things that I’ve heard today:

• Maybe the most interesting presentation was held by Felix Bodmann (Director of Advertising – New Markets, AOL Europe):
  - AOL will launch in a couple of weeks in Poland, and by launch I mean that they have almost everything ready – they just have to prepare the final steps. They will come to polish market with email, instant messaging and mobile products.
  - The preparation was done from London and they had some troubles finding polish consultants as they could barely find any website in English.
  - polish online advertising market is active on UCG/Web 2.0 websites, sites that are perceived as entertainment
  - there are almost no players able to license and sell content
  - culturally speaking, business in Poland is like going to a bazaar – you get an initial quote and then you negotiate a price 300% lower, you get back to sign the deal and they give you the initial price again, you then renegotiate and end up signing for the lower and realistic price – so if you ever do business in Poland, don’t settle on the first offering.
  - fun-fact – when they tried to buy www.aol.ru domain, it was taken. So the natural step was to hire a lawyer and redeem that domain. Unfortunately, business in Russia is not that what you would expect, and that lawyer received a visit from 2 very tall men that convinced him “nicely” to drop the case
• Other gossip:
  - Croatia has an unusual rate of growth for online advertising – 170% - estimated for 2008
  - you can do some dirty business in Second Life  - if you own an island and rent it, you even have access to logs of discussions among people visiting you. So if you thought about doing business in SL, think again.
  - search engine market share in Czech Republic, Estonia, Ukraine, Slovenia is not entirely dominated by Google; in Czech Republic, search engine Seznam has 60% market share,  and in Estonia, local operation NETII has 59% market share.
  - social networking and games market in Romania is an attractive business for an Estonian venture partner.
  - you can get some very interesting results if you combine research on print media advertising with online advertising
  - although not officially representing Romania, the “7 years in the Romanian Web Industry” presentation had many glitches – poor language and presentation skills, data to crowded, etc. I was a bit upset that people that were expecting many things from us were disappointed to see such a disorganized show.
• 1st discussion panel, chaired by Maciej Wicha from Agora, with participants from Google, AOL, Mozilla, Trader Media East and Gemius:
  - AOL and Google don’t feel any threat from the white label email providers because they rightfully know that providing unlimited storage from 120 million people needs a massive investment that Gmail partners and other players cannot afford.
  - all the focus is on the mobile market – although there are some disadvantages – the market is not so good because everybody wants to control the mobile experience; it’s taking too long to happen (Mozilla), mobile is for users and users are for mobile; users should have the final choice on what device, network and applications they use (Google), operators take to much cut of the revenue; mobile is critical to business and should be device independent (Trader Media East); there is no standard to measure mobile internet usage – for now (Gemius)
• The theme of today: considering countries from CEE to be the same when planning to expand your business is just an illusion. Each country has it’s own individual markets, cultural differences, trends, consumers, etc.

Enough for today, because I’m missing the networking party. Hopefully they have some real drinks tonight :)

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I am currently writing this post on my blackberry and I am using the wordpress admin to do it! It’s a great mobile experience and I never thought the admin would be so friendly on a handheld device.

I am enjoying the classical 11 ron espresso that I am enjoying before every flight and I’m starting to like my blacberry 8800 more and more.

Speaking of things I love, my beautiful wife got a promotion @work and I just want to take this opportunity to tell her how happy I am for us and to whish her a great week!

Girl you take advantage that I am away and do all that crazy and wild stuff you do with your girlfriends! Love you dearly!

:) ♥

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be aware - there is some nudity involved ;)

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This is the story of one of my best friends:

2 years ago he found the love of his life. They were (and still are) extremely happy together. They are the same - young, beautiful, lovers of life - two tear drops - soul mates. In august she had to bring to this world their child, and she did so - but it was not easy. The birth had some complications and if that was not enough, my friend’s mother died of a staggering cancer. She fought until the last minute and her last wish was to see to see her son happily married. God granted her this wish and then took her with Him. My friend had to be with his wife, to support her, take care of her - she was nearly to give birth - but he also had a funeral to organize. One goes away from this world and another one comes to life. I forgot to mention that my friend’s wife is French and they live in Paris now. So imagine what my friend felt like, being caught in the middle of a situation like this, hundreds miles away from his wife, that was about to bring to life their little baby boy. In the end, everything turned out fine and having a baby made life a little bit easier.

Last week, his wife came to Romania so that their 4 month baby boy meets his grandfather. My friend could not get away for few days that easily from his new job and she had to come alone. One day before her arrival, the father of my friend died of a violent death. I will not get into more details, but all that I can say is that he was healthy and eager to meet his grandson. My friend is now here, and he just buried his last parent. Is that fair? God rest his soul!

When I heard the news I could not believe it. My knees turned soft and I could hear my friends shouts of despair. It broke my heart. I had no words to comfort him and I think that those words don’t even exist.

….

I lost my father when I was 13 and it was not easy at all. I still miss him loads and think what would he do, what would he say, what would he teach me in every single rough moment of my life. Loosing both parents should be something that nobody needs to go through but that’s life and sooner or later it happens. I remember that I had great faith in God before my dad died and I almost completely lost it when he went away. I was mad, furious, I could not understand the reasons and then I learned that you cannot understand those things.

What’s your story ?

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Since Friday, I am a BlackBerry user. I decided to go this way as Windows Mobile stability was pretty challenging when combining internet, email, messenger and regular phone usage. I am very happy with my BlackBerry 8800 and I have to tell you that this device is amazing - it hasfrig native support for GTalk and Yahoo Messenger, automatic configuration for my gmail and webmyc email accounts (webmyc has Google Aps) and probably soon, support for my corporate email account. The device works lightning fast and never had to reset it because it hooked up on some applications, like a Windows Mobile device would probably do.

A nice feature is also the integrated GPS, but I was a bit suspicious if it would prove to be useful, as I was told that I am stuck with the BlackBerry Maps application that is not quite relevant for Romania, at least. This, until 2 hours ago, when I discovered that the mobile version of Google Maps has GPS support and can locate you on the map in no time. That being said, give it a spin - you won’t be disappointed - the accuracy is amazing. However, I will not use it as much as i would want to, as the roaming costs for data traffic are not very low.

Good job Google! I think this is the future - no more carrying around large storage memory cards to host GPS navigation software that cost more than half the price of the device. Mobile Google Maps is free and it has global coverage + satellite maps + many more features such as traffic information, locations (restaurants, hotels, museums, etc)

Boss, if you will see some roaming charges on my phone bill, it is because I could not find the way to the conference and I had to use my GPS enabled BlackBerry to get there. :)

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It’s 1:45AM and I cannot sleep. At 6AM my flight for Warsaw, Poland leaves. I am attending Internet CEE, the first international conference on the Interned industry in Central and Eastern Europe. Considering that I must leave my house at 4:00 AM, I am thinking there is no point in trying to get some sleep as I have troubles getting up in 1h. I’ll just switch from Heineken to Red Bull, take my shower, and catch some sleep in the plane, that is if the wind/cold/fog will not prevent it from taking off.

Last time I was on a plane (September 07) I was just after catching a terrible cold in Oslo, a cold that brought back the sinusitis I suffered from in my teen years. That cold, together with my sinuses vulnerability and combined with the high altitude (I was in the plane) gave me the most incredible head/nose/face aches. I hope not to get those pains today.

I am very excited to participate at Internet CEE and I hope I will come back with some useful information and a good grasp of international trends in the Internet industry.  Also, I will try to do some live blogging from the conference, so if the topic interests you, stay tuned Tuesday and Wednesday. Also, never been to Warsaw before and I am looking forward in take some nice photos of the old town and having a local beer or two.

Synced my iPod and BlackBerry, charged my camera batteries and packed my luggage. What else to do?

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What is this?, originally uploaded by Gustavo Lucena.

This photo shows nothing but in the same time shows so much…

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Other girls, number 3, originally uploaded by Tin Green.

I think this girl is thinking about the date she had last night with this really nice guy. What about you?

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revealing, originally uploaded by ericnsac.

natural light is the best. look at that glow on her hair

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