I bring you my newest Romanian startup: VideoGuide – Watch HD Movies of the Major Touristic Attractions in Romania and (soon to come) SE Europe.
I truly believe this initiative will help build the Romanian Touristic Brand our current Ministry is striving to create. Better than inventing jolly songs, we trust that seeing professional shots of the Romanian sights will be much more beneficial.
No beta this time, things work out of the box, dead simple: click & watch. We’ve started off with 2 major cities like Bucharest & Brasov. And we’ll soon add the seaside and other well known sights.
On VideoGuide.ro you’ll find: Hotels, Restaurants, Bars, Clubs and everything you need to see before travelling to Romania.
Amongst its cool features:
HD movies of Brasov & Bucharest wich you can
easily embed on your page (sorry I can’t show you, WP.com doesn’t allow it)
It was a great experience for me as an organizer, things went a lot better than I expected. Thanks to all the participants and especially to the lovely speakers:
30th – 31st May 2008 (Friday-Saturday), World Trade Center Bucharest, Romania
Following the huge public success the first edition of eLiberatica gained in 2007, the second edition will continue in the same tradition: to gather community and business leaders around the world to talk about the hottest Open and Free Technologies topics.
eLiberatica has its unique spirit and identity; you will learn and discover new things, meet international IT personalities, business people, high-tech professionals, you will make new friends, new partners, celebrate and truly enjoy a live event.
eLiberatica 2008 is intended to focus on these main concepts:
Business adoption – how to make/save money and gain profit using Open and Free Technologies;
Government, administration and public schools – the importance of Open and Free Technologies;
Professional growth participating in the FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) community;
Break the code – tips and tricks, things you will not find in IT books.
The presentation I held at GeekMeet #2 in Cluj Napoca on March 1st 2008. It’s a brief history of SEO from the beginning of the WWW all the way to RDF, Microformats and SPARQL.
a custom search engine plugin for Firefox (currently alpha)
And future:
youtube & flickr mashup
tagging locations
social bookmarking features
map widgets for the take
We currently offer companies who want to get listed a:
FREE basic subscription plan,
Standard plan including your extra description, logo & contact info,
Gold plan wich dedicates a custom subdomain and page with a photo gallery and video presentation.
HartaBrasovului.ro is part of a larger network of websites including Harta-Bucurestiului.ro (sorry for the dash, but the non-dash domain was taken) all of them to be found on HartaFirmelor.ro (translates “map of companies”).
Cosmin and I are working on it and you’ll find out more on our blog. Till then, go explore!
I am proud to announce the pre-launch of Softicator.com (soon to be a .ro), Romanian software directory like no other.
Softicator will promote romanian software – be it desktop application, webapp, script, of all categories – from currency converters to ERPs, and under all licensing models – from commercial to open source.
It will be web2.0 all the way, with
tags
user comments
user ratings
rss feeds from all over the place
free basic service
not to mention gradients and an arial rounded logo :)
We plan on doing big things for the Romanian software market, including a secret weapon we’ll launch once we’re all settled. With an initial ad-generated revenue model, we wish to improve our karma and drag out into the light all the geeks writing apps and scripts in their lairs. Oh, and we’ll target corporate people with CRMs also…
I say “we”, since I’m the initiator and co-founder of the project along with a gang of cool geeks you’ll meet on the softicator blog. Till then, keep in touch with our capture tool on www.softicator.com
My SEO Cheat Sheet is finished, after undergoing some hundred retouches. Free for download and usage, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Please feedback on any of it’s aspects you can think of.
I tried to keep it short, but I guess it turned into more of a “short manual” or best practice guide. I recommend you print it and use it as a checklist; it’s currently an A4, but shoot me an email and I’ll export a letter also.
Vladimir recently announced the launch of WebIQ, an SEO/Mkting diagnostic tool any webmaster or website owner should bookmark and use regularly.
Explicit, idiot-proof functionality, I know I’ll share it with my future clients. I expect this to advocate the importance of SEO and Internet marketing with the mainstream business owners building their websites with high-school kids, wondering why it won’t bring them sales.
Recently launched, jobber.ro is an excellent initiative from Filip Chereches-Tosa. Clean, simple interface, remarkable logo, offers all the functionality one might need for publishing IT jobs.
Designed for the user, provides an RSS feed and even a widget. Only thing I kinda miss are tags, but, hey, the world can do without folksonomy for a while.
Currently a free service, perhaps a Flickr/Basecamp revenue model?
transaction makes a customer – Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)
“I’d say nearly 80% of our business comes from people who start on free plans and then upgrade to paying plans. The bigger your free userbase, the more likely you are to get people to throw their chips in.”
Filip is already planning for widgets with all major engines. This is a website to stay.
The sixth format is “benefit causes story.” You conceive the ad back-to-front, by imagining a trail of events that might be caused by the product’s benefit. In the example Gunn uses, a man on a safari screams when a lion charges him. It’s then revealed, to the amusement of the man’s friends (and also the viewer), that he’s been looking through the powerful zoom lens of his Olympus camera. The lion is, in fact, hundreds of yards away.
Webpreneur with strong background in online sales, currently employed by IBM (the views and opinions expressed here are mine alone and do not represent the official views of IBM).
I now live in Copenhagen, Denmark, where I take an MSc in Engineering Management at the Danish Technical University. But my homebase is Brasov, Romania, a delightful mountain town.
Join me on my neverending conquest of the Internet and other mysteries of life.
