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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