Bogdan Gavrila – Core Target

It’s not a secret that I’m a Ferrari fan and I’m one of the proud founders of the online Romanian Ferrari Fan Club. Although the website is very small, the fans have really big hearts. Now, because Fiat and Vodafone are brands connected to Ferrari we should be together to celebrate the last season of Michael Schumacher’s and I decided that ARBOmedia will be the ones who will bring the global Ferrari sponsors closer to the fans.

Please contact Magda for the technical details.

Now you know it! A new product will be available on the market in the near future.
The main website ( ZIUA.net – ads by Boom) will also have a new version very soon. On the other hand, both ZIUA IASI and ZIUA CONSTANTA already have their new faces online. Although ZIUA.net has ads served by Boom (one of the last contracts Orlando signed before leaving Netbridge), the regional versions seem to like ARBOmedia – ZIUACT already uses the ARBO ad server.

My friend, Andrei from Saptamana Clujeana has a new hobby and as I can see he is an event manager – thanks to him, the famous guitarist and jazz guru is coming to Romania this November. Check out the official page of the event and maybe I’ll see you there!

I remember that last October I was involved in a conference regarding the brand “Romania” – how to protect the brand and how to counteract the subversions that come through mass-media. A very interesting slide show was delivered by Vasile Paun (one of the heads of the Romanian army intelligence service), a man who has quite an impressive expertise on the electronic environment. The presentation was about the electronic threats and attacks via Internet that can affect the Romanian brands and values.

Let me give you an example: check out the Romanian orthodox pages on Google. You’ll access a few portals that have nothing to do with the Romanian Orthodox Church and the themes they debate are sometimes closer to religious extremism. Although called “orthodox advices” this websites have no author and a separate black agenda on the side.

I wrote this post because of the clip URSUS made a few months ago: A world without Romania – the clip is broadcasted on YouTube (over 400.000 views).

Short after the original film was published, a sequel was produced and posted online.

Now, YOU do the math and connect the dots.

Next week-end I’ll be in Predeal, invited by ARBOmedia in their annual teambuilding. My history with ARBOmedia started this spring.

Before ARBO, we had (and still have) a few sales deputies that covered the special accounts that are still making money. Because of the good traffic we have in our network, I decided that a good way to increase our revenues was to work with GOOGLE, NEOGEN, BOOM or ARBO.

First, we had GOOGLE AD SENSE scripts running and maybe at that time maybe they had few clients from Romania so there was nothing spectacular going on.

We switched to NEOGEN and spend some time to play with their network. They were “under construction” with some features so It wasn’t fun to have porn ads in your front page. Comparing their system to Google Ad Sense, we could see some increase in the bank but still, this is a “pay-per-click” network and they have less than 10% in the market.

So, my eyes focused on the two companies that handled over 1 mil. $ each (Romania is still a growing market and still in the beginning): Netbridge’s Boom and ARBOmedia.

As I was saying, my first encounter with ARBO was this spring. Some friends from a major newspaper invited Magdalena Zander and Laurentiu Pop for a presentation. I was invited to be the “black sheep” and make sure they were not beating around the bush. After a few hours of talking and debating, I made sure that I was a quite a pain but they carefully answered all the questions and in the end they made a good impression to my friends.

In that period I was decided to go with BOOM because they would pay a monthly fee and because ARBOmedia just lost the TVR (The Romanian Television) account and this meant a smaller influence in the market.

But then, two interesting things happened: I received an internal report from ARBOmedia AG and their approach on the Romanian market was optimistic. They were also mentioning losing TVR a risk but they predicted that at the end of 2006, everything would be quite ok. But, the thing that made me take the final decision was that I found out that Orlando Nicoara (the Netbridge manager) was not happy with the investors and had plans to leave the NCH Advisors. Everybody knew that Orlando was a “one man army” at Boom. Few people knew that his leaving will bring a small disaster to BOOM.

So, it’s September 2006, I went with ARBOmedia, they succeeded to regain their influence after losing TVR, Orlando indeed left BOOM and their network (no.1 at the beginning of this year) is now decimated and the new management tries to cut down the costs.

My spring choice meant a few thousands euro increase but this is not the most important thing when working with ARBO. An important fact is that they represent your products and raise the awareness in the field. Indeed, they are professionals with their home works done just well. They also offer you the advantage of the AD SERVER and the possibility to run you’re own campaigns and develop other online projects. But the most important thing is that they have a team that protects your business and investments (if one of the employees is to leave for another company, the network won’t crush) and they also work on raising the online advertising market and this means they have a vision.

This is why the ARBOmedia team is no.1.

(PS: also because they have clients like me )

For me, Jay Leno is the most popular TV star (I don’t watch Oprah) and probably the success of his show is due to the fact that he always presents “what’s hot” and his team is always connected to the latest social trends.

But the presence of YouTube in Jay Leno’s show is not a coincidence (note Leno’s small advertising campaign when presenting the web service). Sam Gustin wrote in New York Post an interesting article: YouTube is available for sale – the price: 1.5 billion U.S. Dollars.

We’ll have to see who takes the bait.

PS: These types of PR campaigns are also started in Romania when some company has a website for sale in order to obtain a better price (the rebranding doesn’t always work). A remember a news I heard about hotnews.ro and about Sorin Ovidiu Vantu wanting the buy it. The price was over 1 million dollars and of course Vantu reconsidered…

A new movie by Igor Cobileanski.

Enjoy the russian lifestyle of the moldovans:

This post is a about a social campaign aiming to hit the old “Securitate” agents (Ceausescu’s secret police). The communist ex-officers are now in key places both in the Romanian parliament or government but the law now grants access to the secret archives. It seems that there are over 13.000 agents still “working”. As a member of the civil society and as an NGO enthusiast, I wrote a guide (in Romanian) about how to behave when your identity and your secret file is uncovered.

Here is a link to the guide: http://www.e-scoala.ro/romania-tinerilor/index.html – PDF version for printing is also available.

Via Orlando and then Sorin, I noticed the first talks about a Romanian website dedicated to live football TV transmissions via Internet – the website (www.ligaonline.ro) should host a first live transmission in less than 2 hours and as I can see, the guys at Netbridge are still working on the layout (the website changes at every reload) and as they say, there will be a “test” going on tonight.

I found out that http://ligaonline.ro/ plans to be a great business for Netbridge. Their results from the Gemius online panel indicated that football is a “most wanted” subject for the Romanian Internet users. As we speak, the online service is free of charge but in the near future, there will be a tax for users outside Romania. A major step in their strategy will be the moment when the local users will have to pay in order to view a game. Netbridge plans to do this after 2007 and they are thinking paying over the SMS.

If you don’t know it yet, Echelon is a global surveillance system. Till now, the system generated a few scandals regarding the US Intelligence vs. EU companies. Of course, the Europeans reacted and in a resolution of 5 September 2005 on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (Echelon system), the European Parliament recommended in particular devising measures at Community level to develop and manufacture European encryption equipment and software. At its meeting on 6 and 7 December, the Council reached agreement in principle with a view to a common position on the proposal for a directive on the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in electronic communications.

I remember a few months ago we organized in Romania a workshop about Echelon and human rights. At that time, I had my team gather facts and articles from media archives. I recall that when I entered “echelon” on Google, I received all the juicy stuff on the first page. Now after the new security issues imposed by the White House in “the battle against terror” this is the second keyword “blurred” by Google – the first was regarding the Guantanamo bay pics. Because of this, probably Google is the favorite search engine of the Bush administration.

Don’t be so happy that the Google censorship affects only China – you are also a victim here in Romania.

Yet, Google RULZ and maybe this is the price to pay for our security and way of life. In a recent interview George Bush told Matt Lauer (you can see it below) he is not willing to talk about the methods the US government uses in order to protect its people – Google censorship is a method as we all are sure that the terrorists already now how to use the Internet and a search engine.

In this role he will work with the company’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to define the mission and strategic goals of Google’s philanthropy. Dr. Brilliant is a founder and director of The Seva Foundation, a Policy Advisory Council Member at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health, and a member of the Strategic Advisory Group of Kleiner-Perkin’s Pandemic and Bio-Defense Fund.

Google is the reason why the Echelon is a great tool for the American Intelligence and as you can see, they have a new approach on special operations (called now “philanthropy”).

Facts about electronic surveillance as presented by Google Watch: 

In the past, discussions about privacy issues and the web have been about consumer protection. That continues to be of interest, but since 9/11 there is a new threat to privacy – the US federal government. Google has not shown any inclination to declare for the rights of its users across the globe, as opposed to the rights of the spies in Washington who would love to have access to Google’s user data.

The privacy struggle, which includes both the old issue of consumer protection and this new issue of government surveillance, means that the question of how Google treats the data it collects from users becomes critical. Given that Google is so central to the web, whatever attitude it takes toward privacy has massive implications for the rest of the web in general, and for other search engines in particular.

Larry Brilliant is not the first person connected to the US intelligence as a member of the Strategic Advisory Group of Kleiner-Perkin’s Pandemic and Bio-Defense Fund. Also Matt Cutts, a key Google engineer, used to work for the National Security Agency and as we speak Google hires more people with security clearances, so that they can peddle their corporate assets to the spooks in Washington.

During this week-end I tried to forget all about work (although all my partners are starting to use more and more of my good spirit) and inspired by my friend Cezar, I went shopping for a good wine. Because I’m closed to the industry (after organizing Festivinum & stuff) most of the time I spend my money on the Romanian wines.

Because last week we finalized a partnership with Cramele Halewood on Vinul.ro, I felt the need to taste a Prahova Valley so I bought a Merlot. I must say that it went very good with my dinner and evening. As we speak, also waiting for me is Pinot Noir but this time from Cramele Recas – as a fact we are trying to convince the management from Cramele Recas to open a blog on Vinul.ro.

So, drink more wine – it’s good for your live stats

Sorin Ovidiu Vantu is one of the richest Europeans (his fortune est. over 1 billion usd). Vantu is a Danube Delta lover, enjoys fishing and is very discreet in doing business in Romania. This is the reason why he often manages to surprise the general public when he comes out of the silence and talks business.

If you are doing business in Romania it is very likely to encounter at least a company owned by Vantu. Regarding mass-media, he owns a trust called Realitatea and from time to time he shows direct interest in the new business, acquisitions and even new media. Vantu personally talks to the employees about the Internet and about this “revolution” and considers that this will be the field of great media battles in the future. He also encourages the journalists working for him to start writing blogs and this is the reason why we are going to see new personal websites in the near future at RealitateaTV, Cotidianul, 24Fun and so on. Starting this summer, Realitatea is also developing its websites so that in a year they would have quite an audience on the net.

Now, here is a very interesting fact for the Romanian readers of the blog: we all know that recently, ARBOmedia lost its TVR (The Romanian Television) contract to Splendid Media. It’s not easy to do this and lots of financial interests are at the middle. Imagine that the germans (ARBO) lost quite a big and strategic contract and it seems that Vantu has something to do with it. I’m not going the write about what exactly happened but I guess it’s very interesting to find out that Sorin Ovidiu Vantu is behind Splendid Media.

Although the web division of Splendid Media (called Splendid Media Interactive) run by Eveline Fabritius had a poor start this year, it is very interesting to see all the elements of Vantu’s new media grow and the moment when all of them will merge under a single management.

The players on the Romanian Internet Advertising Market initiated several discussions one year ago and the first results will be available soon. There are 2 main goals: first is growing the market and at this point, everybody is interested in this and the second goal is to create a set of rules for good practice. As we speak, we could characterize the market as a little chaos. A first big step will be setting an independent Internet auditing tool to replace Netbridge’s trafic.ro.

As I was surfing my blogroll, I found Vlad Popa discussing about the Romanian IAB and his own wishes about the organization – hope that some of them will come true but the chaos I was telling you is not easy to deal with. One of the ideas on Vlad’s post was to put together a rate card for all the Romanian websites and also to have real-time online system that will tell the advertiser certain facts about the running campaigns, available spaces and so on – now I see that Ionut Oprea opened a post on his blog in which he is trying to unite all the rate cards from all the agencies – I think that this two posts will be interesting to follow in the near future.

Mona Musca is a woman politician and since 1989 she was a reference point as she gave lessons of integrity and good practice. At a certain level, she was one of the most popular figures in Romania, competing with the president Traian Basescu.

A few weeks ago, the president decided to give the green light in opening the secret archives of Ceausescu’s secret police. You can imagine the shock encountered in Romania when people found out that Mona Musca was an “undercover” informer acting under the name of “Dana”. Everybody was more than pissed off and you can imagine how many people wanted to tell her a few words.

A very good thing for her is that she’s not keeping an online blog but she has or had a personal website. This used to be used in the election campaign and after that, was redirected to her official page at the Parliament.

As I was saying, after the storm, the party decided that Mona Musca should go offline both in the public life and on the Internet. She was thrown out of the party and her domain got shut down. As she was working as the Ministry of Culture, Mona Musca was quite a net surfer (a friend told me) and now she is probably suffering over the monamusca.ro offline domain.

Via Ionut Oprea, I found out that he went to TVR50 (the official party held by the Romanian Television on it’s 50th birthday) and I know Mona Musca was there – I wonder if they had the chance to chat about her PR approach on the net as Ionut is a talented public relations specialist.

When Jeremy Wright was in Romania, Antonio Eram was introduced to him as the “father” of Romanian blogging. This is because Eram was the founder of weblog.ro, the first Romanian blogging platform.

Yesterday, my friend Allicia (a dedicated blogger) told me that she wanted out of weblog.ro because the system is not usable anymore. She already made a copy on wordpress.com but still was unhappy because weblog.ro didn’t allow her to make a backup of her posts.

Via Zoso I found that many of his blogger friends are also moving their stuff out of weblog.

Antonio Eram (although involved with his company in other projects) is very close to the weblog and he is personally taking care of the updates. So… why the long nights? Because Eram is facing stress from other areas also – there are rumors that Vodafone is asking for many deadlines. Well, I can only wish him enough energy to take care of all the issues.

Adriean Videanu is the mayor of Bucharest. One of his projects is to build a business center in the middle of Bucharest and of course, he is facing a great opposition from the citizens. After several protests and social campaigns, the unhappy folks moved their little “war” on the Internet.

“Save the Bucharest” is the name of the group and they manage to be quite a pain for the mayor. Their latest action is the launch of the “Adriean VideaNU – Adriean Vidul Minune” blog. One of the leaders of the movement is Mariana Duma and she was the first who told me about the new Videanu blog.

Of course, mr. Videanu doesn’t know one thing: there are over 50.000.000 blogs in the world and his new personal page is probably not a very good PR example. On the other hand he is the first romanian politician to have his own blog, so I guess he is making history.

The Romanian President Traian Basescu named a new head for the Romanian ARMY: Gheorghe Marin is the smartest army leader till now, having graduated 3 superior education institutes.

Must know:

Gheorghe Marin was the head of the army’s Project-Programming office. He also wrote several books about programming in Visual FoxPro 5.0, about desktop programs and databases.

He is also known outside Romania, as he wrote several articles:
- Modern conception in the modeling of resource allotment problems, Natural Resources and Energy: Non-Dissipation and Management an International Journal, New York, USA
- Substituting energy technology, Natural Resources and Energy: Non-Dissipation and Management an International Journal, New York, USA 

As he says, Gheorghe Marin loves programming and is an Internet user. Beginning with 2007, the Romanian Army will hire soldiers; there are serious thoughts that Gheorghe Marin will use the Internet and Internet campaigns in order to promote the Romanian ARMY and recruit the new soldiers. So, prepare to see ARMY ads on BestJobs, E-Jobs or Job-Studenti.

The new export strategy for 2006-2009 in IT is now available for public debate. The Romanian Ministry of Commerce and the Department of Commerce are aiming the competitivity of the Romanian exports.

This strategy is part of the sectorial branding that also involves Romanian wines and wooden products. One of the hard workers in the project is Iuliu Winkler, the delegate minister for commerce.

Things to know: over 1.000.000 euros will be invested in PR events, international fairs, surveys and market studies.

The IT sector is one of the most dynamic parts of the Romanian economy: around 12.000 companies and a study shows that every person employed produced around 32.000 eur in the field. They are also good tax payers and probably will see good numbers also in the future.

The first annual Creativity 50 represents a multi-disciplinary account of the biggest and best thinkers and doers from 20 years of advertising and consumer culture. Many are creative directors and agency groundbreakers; some are directors that shaped the way messages look and feel; some are design gurus; a few are marketers who helped change the course of creativity. Some (like the Google duo) simply changed our lives completely.

John Carmack and John Romero Co-creators, Doom

The uttering of the word “Doom” usually spells an unpleasant end. But for Doom creators Carmack and Romero, it represents the beginning—not only of their careers as video game royalty, but for a revolutionary new era of gaming madness. The pair of programmer prodigies helped found the now-legendary game development company iD Software in 1991, from which sprung a wave of titles—including Wolfenstein 3D, Quake and of course, Doom—that defined the first-person shooter genre and inspired the imaginations of an entire generation of rabid gamers. Leveraging their programming skills to invent groundbreaking techniques in computer graphics and engine-building, Carmack and Romero forever changed the way video games are made and played, paving the way for later hits like Half-Life and Medal of Honor and ultimately serving notice to the rest of the world that the evolution of interactive entertainment had truly kicked into high gear.

John Romero is probably the most famous game developer in the .ro reign – see http://rome.ro – and now he is going to be more productive as his wife Raluca is also into video games.

First of all, I must say that the Romanian Internet market is waiting for the boom and probably 2007 will be a good year for all the players. Of course, many foreign companies have an eye on the market a plan to invest online.

A certain fact is that European/US companies have their Intelligence departments working hard in setting up contacts in Romania and ARBOmedia or Netbridge are some of the top companies targeted by the officers. As I know, inside ARBOmedia, the management is aware of the risks and raised the level of security for the employees. On the other hand, Netbridge was and still is like a naked woman waiting for the sunset. Although NCH Advisors took a big shock when Orlando Nicoara left, they still have security problems. I was told by one of their managers, that a cause is also the new wave of employees having access in key areas. Of course, after Orlando left NCH with the top brains in the company, they reconsidered first the salaries and then a certain control for their investments.

Now, few people know that a great interest in the online media comes from Russia and as I hear there are some budgets available. Of course, let me tip you guys with one line: don’t look anymore for Russians on the east border – they come from the west, they have Armani suites and sometimes speak a very good German.

ASLS is the first Romanian NGO to promote and to use the new technologies. That is probably why, today is ranked no.1 in trafic.ro .

Few people know, that the website is one of the first paid per access service – every autumn, around 1.000 members pay 3 euros in order to have access to a private section of the website where they find useful info about school, career and so on. There is also a feature that allows the members to receive important notifications over the SMS.

Sustaining the concept is a small team of volunteers that also run a call center for the members. Till now, we had great results and a very good feedback from the users – this is the fourth year of activity and all this time was quite an experience. The main purpose of the website is to provide great PR for ASLS and also to be a good info center. For me is a very good research zone because some of the features can be implemented on a bigger scale.

Another interesting fact is that the organization is probably also the first NGO in Romania to use an AD SERVER – ARBOmedia provides the BB platform and probably ASLS will have a new and interesting approach for the sponsors.

Because I promised you all the hot stuff, here are the first sensitive issues…

As I was surfing Orlando Nicoara’s and Ionut Oprea’s blogs, I’ve seen that they were speaking about Neogen reentering Trafic.ro (Romanian online traffic monitoring tool) and I remembered a recent happening.

A few months ago, a friend from a big investment fund and Internet company (European) met with Calin Fusu (Neogen) and probably had a friendly chat. At one time, he asked Fusu for a price because he was considering investing in the project. The value Calin Fusu mentioned was around 1.000.000 euro and my friend told me that this number brought a large smile on his face: “how about 100.000?”.

From this discussion, we learn 2 things: Neogen is for sale (tip for NCH) and Calin Fusu is indeed a dreamer (this could be a good thing).

Marian Vanghelie is one of the PSD leaders (the biggest socialist Romanian party) and also a mayor in the 5th district of Bucharest. As we speak, his website is HaCKeD By NADER_ES8. Of course, as a responsible citizen of Bucharest I tried to contact him and tell him about this issue.

The hacker, probably from another political party, asked the mayor Vanghelie: “You Think Network Security is funny?” – As a mayor, I don’t think that the politician worries a lot about “network security” but as far as I know, his team will soon start working on the problem (these days, PSD hosts the annual summer school and probably the php programmers are also party members).

The guys reported me a long list of problems with the newly released Internet Explorer 7 RC1. First, there are several problems with the activeX and macromedia flash code used is some website but this is something we’ll deal with in time.

One of the most critical problems is caused to the ARBOmedia’s ad server and forces some banners not to behave naturally. First of all, the “_blank” function in the iframe pages behaves like a “_self” command. This means that the new page opens in the same iframe and as a user, I see nada…

The guys at ARBO are dealing with these new facts and told us that soon, new ad scripts will be available and hopefully they will behave well also on Firefox.

I recall that I was a IE 100% addicted fan till IE7 because Firefox caused many websites to have small fixes in order to be compatible. But now, we have to do change stuff for the 7.0 and that is not always fun. This is probably one of the reasons that will help Mozilla grow sky high.

2 names, 2 events connected to the HR Industry. “Arenele carierei” – “The Career Arenas” was last year and was quite a success. This year, it seems that “Angajatori de top” – “Top Employers” will replace the arenas. As I found out today, they are the same people but they changed the company (to Catalyst Human Resources).

The event is interesting for the industry because is the top and biggest HR event of the year – lots of jobs available in very competitive environments.

A new concept for the Romanian Real Estate online market: using the video streamings in order to visit your future home or business. See it live in Business Adviser…

Ligia called me yesterday morning to tell me about their plans with StudentFM (radio station targeting the Romanian students – broadcasts both on air and on the Internet) – they had some technical problems last month and decided to change the Internet provider. This is important for us because we use StudentFM on ScoalaOnline as “fun” resource available on every page.

The users can listen to the radio while surfing and till now we had over 17.000 online radio listeners. Another fact is that we decided to promote the website via radio. One year ago we were thinking to work with Radio21 or KissFM but our choice was influenced mainly by the perspectives and by the fact that we would have the advantage to be there from the beginning. Although as we speaks there are not so many people in Romania connected to StudentFM, I think that the online radio has it’s own charm and will be probably together for some time.

As I was saying, Ligia and the guys have some plans put together and we’ll probably media partners for the concert they are planning this autumn in Regie (the biggest student campus in Bucharest).

I’m also thinking about some contests or prizes because a open air concert for students will always be a good opportunity to promote a website like e-scoala.ro (targeted on young people).

Hey guys, it seems that finally I’ve made my first big step and started the public blog. Till now, I had the Yahoo360 personal blog (written in Romanian) and probably I’ll keep it alive because I want to keep close to my personal friends and Yahoo Buddies (as you can see, I’m quite a Y! user).

Now, probably the first two readers of this blog will be from Romania (probably Cezar or Andrei) and will say “Wtf…? Why in english?” – Hell, I don’t know, I was just in that mood and I guess I find it fun in playing with the CPANEL.

I must say that most of our hosting is provided by Office INN and they have a CPANEL installed for dummies (and for me also ). Now, as I was surfing this interface I saw all this stuff in English and I said to my self “why not?”.

Another reason is probably caused by the e-mails we receive lately from companies outside Romania willing to invest in the online advertising market. As we speak we have that “little know-how” and we know “some people”, so this way is easier for them to have a blog about what’s hot and what’s not on the .ro virtual space.