Initial am inceput sa scriu acest post dupa ce Vasile Petcu, baiatul din spatele lui zoso.ro care se crede fenomen mediatic, mi-a sters un comentariu pe care l-am facut acestei tampenii de articol. M-a enervat un pic acest lucru dar l-am trecut cu vederea, nu e prima oara cand tipul asta imi sterge comentariile pentru ca ii strica firma (de fapt n-am ajuns niciodata sa-mi vad un comentariu care sa reziste pe situl lui mai mult de cateva ore, e chiar hilara chestia asta). Ce m-a scos din pepeni este faptul ca am vazut cum a sters comentariul altui tip care semna Mihnea. Sa vezi pe viu cum dispare un comentariu de bun simt la 15 minute dupa ce a fost introdus e o experienta destul de nasoala…

Asa ca enervat fiind m-am pus sa scriu acest post si, dupa cum probabil ca deduceti din titlu, urma sa dau o definitie la cuvantul jeg in care sa-l introduc si pe Vasile si pe blogul lui de cacat. Intre timp m-au prins niste treburi, apoi n-am mai avut timp, etc…, s-au intamplat anumite chestii care mi-au pus in evidenta cat de 2 lei este sa te enervezi pentru niste chestii atat de efemere.
La fel de 2 lei ca si tot internetul romanesc care poate fi descris de un singur sit: wall-street.ro. Este o idee buna sa va duceti pe wall-street.com, wall-street.co.uk, wall-street.de, wall-street.be, wall-street.it ca sa vedeti in ce companie se afla wall-street.ro. wall-street.ro este fata de Wall Street Journal ceea ce un Logan tunat este fata de un Lamborghini si ceea ce internetul romanesc este fata de ceea ce vezi pe afara.

Pentru incheiere: Ba Vasile, vezi ca in curand se schimba macazul in Romania si toata clasa asta de mijloc o sa cam dispara din zona. Tu continua sa postezi articole gen `xyz.ro sunt niste spammeri de cacat, stati sa va arat cum ii fac dintr-un reverse-dns query` sau sa te defulezi contra unor tipi cu care n-o ai curajul niciodata sa te iei in gura, sunt curios unde o sa ajungi. Si tu, si toti baietii aia care acum 3 ani instalau retele Windows pentru un bax de bere la 2 litri si acum se cred genii in comunicare.

P.S. Pentru cine se intreaba daca voi mai merge pe zoso.ro le voi spune ca probabil da, din cand in cand. De fiecare data cand vad cata mizeria iese din tipul asta ma felicit ca am plecat din Romania si n-am de a face cu oameni ca el. Asta ma face sa ma simt bine.

This post is also erased.

I came back from a vacation that we spent in Romania and this would be a summary of my impressions:
Now that I think about it I don’t really care about these impressions anymore, therefore this post is erased.

Thanks for the interest!!

For some time me and my wife have been talking about the possibility of returning to our home country, Romania. It would be nice to be in Romania (I’m not using the expression “back home” because I have been living here for such a long time I don’t think I can call Romania home) and the high demand for IT professionals would raise the odds considerably for both of us. We have been talking about it for a while now and in a certain way we have started preparing for this. Except that it is starting to take on a weird feeling…
This weekend I talked to a friend of mine from Romania and I was surprised to find him happy (I know, it sounds horrible to be surprised by people being happy, but in that part of the world happiness is the exception to the rule). Things were going pretty well for him, to the point where he brought up the possibility of returning, after congratulating me for 15 years for leaving the country.
Things are going well over there. My friend spent quite a lot of time to tell me about the 9-figure investment by a major European corporation into Romania, about how everything is changing, how the dinosaurs so far in control of the country will be obsolete, etc… All very nice.

Except that right now I get the feeling that moving over there right now is buying shares in a bull-market. Not a comfortable feeling…

You are probably familiar with the success outsourcing stories heard from S-E Europe in general and from Romania in particular. A new social class rose pretty much out of nowhere to take advantage of its low cost of living and started competing globally, FDI has gone thru the roof raising the standard of living, etc…
Well, all the above is true but it doesn’t tell the whole story, I consider it to be a face-lift of a pretty dire situation. A first bad sign is the fact that the job the market is pretty fragmented, the operations are pretty small. It is not unheard of some small companies from Western Europe who hire a few people for small contracts and then let them go. The fragmentation of the market, in my opinion, prevents some bigger contracts from being passed onto Romania. Another implication of this fragmented market is that it appears that the Romanian entrepreneurs are letting go the biggest money-making enterprise in the last 50 years. It looks like the Romanian entrepreneurial spirit is locked in disputes over the latest EU subsidies or in real-estate speculation…

Another bad thing, relating to the first, is the fact that most operations in S-E Europe are captive operations (please check out this McKinsey article - requires free membership - for a definition of a captive operation. Skip the laudatory intro and go right to its end). This is another example of the lack of leadership exhibited by the Romanian entrepreneurs. While elsewhere captive operations have been let go and passed onto local entrepreneurs in S-E Europe these operations thrive. This is pathetic, there are 3-4 years that I heard in Romanian papers about making money from outsourcing and so far nobody came up to the plate. Well, let’s have IBM handle all that while we focus on the deforestation of the mountains.

A side-effect of the captive operating status is that there is a backlash happening. Reading the blogs of some middle-management types from Romania is pretty instructive. They usually refer to their workplace as the “WorkCamp” and sometimes a lot worse. The upper-management is eyeing all the profits going to the mother company with a deep source of envy. To a certain extent they feel that they should profit from that money (which is pretty ludicrous) and are ready to apply all sort of tricks in order to get a chunk of it. Lately, even El Presidente has weighted in on the matter. The fact that this political animal has chosen to speak on this matter would probably mean that it has reached a certain threshold at which it is politically profitable to use it.

Anyway, I need to close this post. I would say that the outsourcing experience is, among other things, another facet of the horrific lack of leadership plaguing the Romanian society. It’s pretty pathetic to see some people fluent in English and trained in management manning phones in call-centers rather than designing business processes for Western companies. It is just as pathetic that ALL the success stories from that part of the world are foreign initiatives… So far outsourcing is a just face-lift for the Romanian society and, unfortunately, not a sign of better things to come, it has not risen above the rank of a happy circumstance. It may not be too late to capitalize on it…

P.S. If you have worked in this field, please drop a comment, I’d like to hear from you.

I was reading this entry on Cameron Purdy`s blog about Tangosol`s Coherence being among the 10 best products for your next gen data center when I remembered Hibernate`s clustered cache being released. When I read about it I wondered how would Tangosol compete with this free product. The answer, in hind-sight, would be that Tangosol didn`t compete with Hibernate (you cannot compete with a free product) but exited that market and entered the data management market. Tangosol, I presume, continued to fine-tune its cache engine, but focusing only on fine-tuning for differentiating your product from a free product is not a long-term strategy: it simply places your product into the very high-end part of the market, sometimes against your will. Just compare Ferrari’s market to Toyota’s market.
Tangosol`s main differentiator is spelled out in one word: management. Hibernate will not manage your 200+ data cluster, will not allow you to implement transparently various provisioning strategies, etc… Coherence will give you what Hibernate`s clustered cache has to offer plus a some other cache-related issues and a ton of management options. These options are what you pay for when using Coherence and less its caching engine (which I assume to be among the best in the world). I am sure that Coherence`s caching engine is a lot better than Hibernate`s but I think its real value lies in cache management. If you have a different opinion I would like to hear from you.
P.S. Come to think about it, you could add some real value to Hibernate’s clustered cache by slapping a good management console on it. And charging for it, of course.

Later edit: Following Cameron Purdy`s comments it looks like I was wrong about assuming that Coherence serves the middle of the market for replication/caching. Coherence seems placed in the high-end part of that market. That being said I think my reasoning is still valid, so I’ll keep this post. Feel free to comment.

I’m about to write a post about the internet in .ro
What prompted me to write this post is quite unusual, I listened to a podcast on podio dot ro (do not click this link, type it in your browser) about the typical Romanian internet user. I say that this reason is unusual because I usually keep clear of the guys behind podio and the large crowd of wanna-be’s that hangs out around them. I do this because I have not seen any content worth consuming from them, they keep themselves busy mostly by throwing around English words - such as publishing online, publisher, advertising online, shuttle, Country Manager (I’m copy-and-pasting from one of these guys’ ROMANIAN blog, it cracks me up, this guy is worse than Borat) - which in Romanian sound pretty funny.

Anyway, one guy made an interesting remark about the typical Romanian internet user, it said that you cannot offer something to this user because its internet use if very limited, it resumes to browsing some sports online papers, photos of scantily dressed girls. This guy’s beef was that this type of user holds the Romanian internet industry (yeah, apparently there is such a thing) down because the feature set this user demands is so poor it cannot support an industry. There was some copious discussion about “how to mature such an user” (LOL) so that “it goes from forums to reading/writing blogs” (ROTFL).
Guys, you are beating the wrong horse. The reduced feature set is another example of the rampant poverty in that country. The Romanian society lives pretty much on 2 tiers (tiers which, BTW, have some conflicts from time to time): a small tier placed in the middle-class-to-upper-middle-class income bracket and a very large tier placed in the next-to-or-below-the-official-poverty-level income bracket. As your industry is a service to the whole society it follows quite logically that your main customers will come from the second tier. These guys are pretty much satisfied with what they have right now (i.e. downloading photos of soccer players partying like there is no tommorow) and they do not care much about putting up the photos of the stray dogs parked in front of their appartment blocks on flickr or develop social networks, or God knows what else.

If I were one of the guys on podio I would focus on providing a service to a Westerner, it simply has some more money and probably demands a lot more. The demands of the average Romanian user will probably raise along with its standard of living, while I wish its standard of living go up I wouldn’t hold my breath.

P.S. I also noticed one more thing about the podio guys. They really like to talk about sums of money involving 7 to 8 figures (euros, of course). I wonder what is like to listen to this podcast from a non-descript appartment where every utility bill comes as a knock-out blow. Surreal.

I was reading this article on the Presentation Zen blog and I started thinking about a site for video presentations. I cam to the conclusion that you could piggy-back on the current video infrastructure for storing and distributing your videos. YouTube and, even more, Google Video, exhibit very basic functionality (video storage and distribution) that can be refined into a higher-value service. For example you could put up a catalog of movie clips of Drama and Film students in Bucharest on YouTube and create a site that manages their portofolios while piggy-backing on YouTube’s distribution network. Doing so basically delegates infrastructure concerns to a third party that is dedicated to this task while you could focus on the value-adding aspects (marketing, etc…).
When YouTube got launched some saw it as a channel to distribute and promote small producers. Well, this is pretty hard to do, mainly because YouTube’s real estate is very small, which makes it very expensive. A few small-timers will get noticed, but just a very few. Once the big channels (NBC, CBS, etc…) see YouTube as a channel of content distribution expect them to price out of this channel pretty much everybody under a certain size. It would make a lot more sense to create niche sites that use YouTube’s infrastructure for targetting small audiences, I think that this would be a far better channel for exposing content. While the niche sites would delegate infrastructure concerns to YouTube YouTube could delegate content management to the niche sites, they would be far better suited for this.
YouTube’s functionality is mostly skewed to Web2.0/social networking concerns. I think that this incredible infrastructure put together by the engineering team at YouTube gets put to such a pointed (and possibly to a short-lived) use. It is like using blueberries only for making blueberry pancakes, and forgetting about the rest. YouTube could turn into the future repository for video content, but for this they should change the way they do business, starting with their terms of service. Indeed, it is possible that what we understand today by YouTube, namely its infrastructure + its social networking functionality will be a small division within a greater YouTube whose primary business is hosting video content. We will see into what YouTube will evolve, once again I think that they seriously minimize their potential by exploiting only one type of functionality related to video content.
P.S. This post didn’t cover the - some say - troublesome issues with YouTube’s terms of service.
P.P.S. This post also falls in the category of posts written on the run, sorry if I didn’t go deeper into some issues. I was pretty serious about the idea of hosting videos for Drama students in Romania on Youtube and marketing them on a different site which uses YouTube for storage, I didn’t have time to explore it.
Later edit: It would be possible for YouTube to include some sponsored links in search results ( similar to AdSense) in order to advertise small video producers similar to the way AdSense is advertising small businesses. In this way YouTube’s real estate (space on its web-pages) would grow to the point where the price for getting on this real estate would drop, therefore lowering the barrier of entry for small producers.
Later edit 2: By piggy-backing over YouTube’s infrastructure I meant embedding their movies in web-pages/IFrames/DIVs/etc… by copy-and-pasting the “Embed” textbox. The embedded YouTube component is not really meant to be used widely, primarily because it cannot be customized easily, which limits its use on outside sites.
Later edit 3: According to this article YouTube started making its content available thru third-parties, Verizon and Vodafone. It is a good start for diversifying its functionality, YouTube will basically handle the infrastructure concerns while its partners will focus on managing the content. I think that they could establish a lot more partnerships like this.
Later edit 4: Any interaction with outside systems should be hidden behind an abstraction layer (this is so obvious that I didn`t include it here). One side effect of this would be the fact that you could deploy your videos on various video hosting platforms (youtube, google video, vimeo, trilulilu.ro) and then use the appropriate platform suited to your video. One example that I thought about is hosting videos on trilulilu.ro for Romanian users (which do no want to pay higher fees for intensive network traffic with the Western world) and the same videos on youtube for Western users.

One of the side-effects of the outsourcing industry in Romania will be the emergence of private pension funds. The main argument for this is the fact that in Romania a sizable group of professionals had their salaries risen towards their Western counterparts’ salaries, while their Western counterparts saw their salaries go down a bit (this is still fiercely debated, as far as I see the salaries didn’t go down, but rather some professions disappeared). While this group of people saw their salaries rise the rest of the country saw their salaries plummet. The rest of the country was active mainly in manufacturing and, thanks to globalisation, were put in competition with the ultra-low cost manufacturing hubs in China and as a result their salaries were driven down ferociously. This group of people (let’s call them manuacturers) is for now the largest group in Romania (which is very unfortunate) and it skews most of the statistics due to its size, one important statistics being the median standard of living. So right now the population of Romania is pretty much split in 2 categories: the few highly-skilled professionals that benefited from globalisation and the large mass of manufacturers which were hit pretty hard by it. There is a gray band between these 2 categories, but we will not concern ourselves with it for now.
Well, the highly skilled group has a pretty bad problem. When a highly skilled worker (HSW) retires it will fall first on the Romanian pension provided by the government. As this pension is correlated to the median standard of living the HSW will see its standard of living drop enormously (it will mean replacing your moisturizing body foam with homemade soap made out of fat bought in bulk, replacing your 4 rooms apartment with a one room apartment because you cannot pay for the utilities and, possibly, giving up on hot water. Yes, something like this). Well, they wouldn’t like this so they will provision for this with a private pension fund. It makes sense to save and invest for your retirement while you work and a private pension fund would do this vrey well in a country with a very corrupt government. The less you rely on this government, the better off you are.
So, it looks like private pension funds will be coming to Romania in order to help Romania’s HSWs provision for their golden days and quite frankly, I think they will provide a service that is very much needed by the society.
But, this could very easily turn into one of the largest fleecings that the Romanian society has yet to go thru (as if it has not seen enough pyramidal schemes already). Currently the money resides with the HSWs and, since the scam artists go where the money is, it would follow that they will be targeted, I, for one, am convinced of this. It is very hard to be a HSW in Romania: you get to work crazy hours, face impossible demands from your bosses and basically give up on living a normal life. I can only hope that they will not see all this pain go to waste in one of the worst possible ways…
The businessman in this article is said to be eyeing the private pension funds industry with great interest (as in this article from Cotidianul, 5-th paragraph). Signing up for a private pension fund is basically trusting someone to look after your future. Would you trust someone who is accused of masterminding the ruin of a few hundred of thousands of people with your future? I wouldn’t.

Happy New Year!!!

I was talking to Derek about what would open APIs mean for the big corporations providing them. In particular we were talking about the last paragraph in this Jon Udell post:
I don’t think ads are the endgame for Gmail. The real monetizable asset will be the APIs that we’re all going to help them create, and the value-adding services that Google will be able to build on top of them.
Well, I don’t thing that the value adding services will add that much value if the come from Google. One value-adding service currently being developed would be a mash-up of GMail, GOffice and GSpreadsheet (or whatever their names are) which would try to port the behavior of MS Office on-line. Quite frankly, I don’t think that they will get really far, apart from associating some document types with some applications. What would be actually cool would be to take this GApps and create very customized applications which would target a particular business process (as I was suggesting here). The value would be in this mash-up, rather than in the free applications which compose it. But this cannot be done by Google, because they don’t scale in diversity (they don’t scale in terms of developer and customer-relations hours to dedicate to customize their own apps) to target this incredibly fragmented market. Google, at best, can provide templates for various business processes across various business lines, templates which would be used by small entrepreneurs (which could pay a fee for using such a template) and customized ferociusly. Google could turn into a huge repository of business processes templates, but I would be surprised if they do it because the revenues this business would generate would pale in comparison to their search engine’s revenues. They would not be even a drop in the bucket. It would make sense for a small-timer to do this, it would pay off.

Anyway, I am diverging. To get back to what I had in mind: one benefit of open APIs that stands out is reaching niche communities very effectively: Let’s take the group of “Chihuaua owners in the Hamptons” (wouldn’t you like to reach this group ;-)). Someone could pretty easily whip-up a site targetting them which would collect books from Amazon related to chihuauas, which could compare prices for the same book across Barnes&Nobles, Amazon, Chapters, use Google Maps for locating veterinary doctors, search ebay for latest chihuaua items, put together a discussion group on Google Groups, etc… All these APIs are pretty much open and free, what is needed is an entrepreneur that would realize that demand exist for putting all these services together (supposing again that this demand exist) and then sell very targeted solutions to these very small groups. Everybody would profit: the small entrepreneur has a business, ebay gets a cut on the items they sell, the ebay seller sells a product, Amazon sells another book they may not have sold, and Hamptons’s Chiuauas are spoiled rotten ;-). I think in the long run it is this very small entrepreneurs that would take the greatest advantage of these free APIs rather than the giants because they cannot create these applications which are very refined. To a certain extent you could say that the giants “do not scale in diversity” and that they “outsource” peddling their wares (books on Amazon, auctions on eBay, etc…) to niche groups or niche businesses to small-timers. In a very broad sense using small entrepreneurs which with your APIs target niche markets is similar to outsourcing your access to a very fragmented market.
In the example above I was using the community of head-hunters which could benefit from these mash-ups, there are dozens of other business lines that could benefit from these applications delivered with a surgical precision.
I put this posting in the ‘IT in SE Europe’ category. How could it apply to it? Well, for the time being it doesn’t apply this much, it would apply once the ‘giants’ start providing suitable services to SE Europe or when the local corporations (if there are any) start having the scale at which to provide these services reliably. The only big corporation that provides some services is Google with its Google Maps, apparently this application includes some views of the region.
I think a lot more business lies with making custom solutions for niche businesses and selling them for a profit. I am thinking the they would serve pretty well the HR industry which is currently booming in SE Europe thanks to off-shoring. Way too many secretaries are wasting way too much time because of inefficiencies… Probably there are other opportunities as well…