You can download it from Gemius webpage:

English version of the report

Polish version of the report

The research was an idea I had after February Bootstrap meeting devoted to social lending. Initially I thought of writing a simple article, but then decided that it would be cool to have some original primary data. So I asked Gemius (leading Internet research agency in Poland) to participate, and then involved Accenture as well.

Below a couple of comments and slides from the report.

At the moment, three social lending sites operate in Poland (Kokos, Finansowo, Monetto). Compared to other countries in Europe and globally, it’s quite a lot. In some larger and more developed EU countries P2P sites are yet to appear.

After couple of months from the launch of first site, 1/4 of Internet users in Poland declared that they had heard about the social lending concept. Of those, 24% would consider P2P loan, and 8.5% would consider investing in social lending. These numbers can probably be seen as a promising result - among those aware of the concept, social lending beats specialized fast-cash providers and loan cooperatives as acceptable source of a loan.

Gaining popularity is one thing, but high risk of potential borrowers will pose a serious challenge for the social lending sites. According to the survey, group interested in the P2P loans more often had problems with repayment in the past, including 90+ days defaults.

More in the report.

If Provident’s goal was to give social lending additional publicity, then it greatly succeeded. Average reader will remember from the article that you can get cheap loans on the Internet and that Provident is expensive and therefore afraid of social lending sites.

Fortunately for Provident, Gazeta Prawna is probably read by a tiny percentage of their target customer base.

It required a manual re-class of some 300 posts. Ugh.

But there is more - in addition to categories, I now also use tags:

This allows to navigate to post related to Poland, for example, or social lending. I’m usually quite skeptical about usability of tags, but in context of my blog I like them a lot.

Unfortunately, the upgrade to wordpress 2.5.1, that I had done before all these improvements, broke the gallery section. And apparently also google ads. For photos, I’m seriously considering outsourcing all this stuff to Flickr, so I don’t have to bother with endless tweaking of spgm script. Or continue waiting for someone to make gallery that integrates with wordpress and just works. As for ads, I have no idea why they are broken.

More importantly, in short term I expect to finish an intensive Kiev project, close social lending research that I did, and have more time for blogging. And a better position to blog in general. I might even post more often than once in a month. Stay tuned.

The playwright Richard Foreman, cited by Carr, eulogised a culture he once felt at home in thus: “I come from a tradition of western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and ‘cathedral-like’ structure of the highly educated and articulate personality - a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.

“[Now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self - evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’.”

The article adds to the discussion about how the web is changing the way we think. With ever shorter attention spans, are we losing the ability to think deeply?

According to the research that we did (Accenture and Gemius), this is a rather promising idea for Kokos - Allegro is the top site that potential borrowers actively use (i.e. visit at least once a week):

(there is similar data for potential investors, among which Nasza Klasa has better penetration)

The full report will be public shortly, also in an English version.

PARIS (Thomson Financial) - France Telecom’s Orange is “in discussions” with
Apple Inc. to sell the iPhone outside France, where it has distributed it since
November.

CFO Gervais Pellissier said the company is in talks with Apple on the
subject, in particular with regard to Spain and Poland “among others”.

Let’s hope so, I don’t like the idea to buy a hacked phone.

But meanwhile, I’m busy enough not to have time for anything. Hence no posting. I even worked on May long weekend, can you believe it.

The only exception is playing with my new mac. I’m typing on it right now. Hopefully I will have time to post about first impressions & issues.

Most European search markets are dominated by Google and there seem to be no real local competitors. In Russia however, a fierce battle for the search query’s of the consumers is going on. Yakov Sadchikov from Quintura even mailed me that “the Russian search engines are coming.”

Reasons? Commenters point at different character set and language peculiarities (for example different grammatical cases).

Thanks to friends at Gemius I had an opportunity to read some interesting stuff about Internet markets in other CEE countries.. and Russian case is not the only one, even though in most countries Google rules the market.

In Czech Republic, for example, Seznam.cz has approximately 60% share in search. But, Google search is gaining share there.

“Other” search engines have also significant share in Ukraine, Slovenia and Estonia.

In Poland, on the other hand, Google has 90% of the market, grammatical cases notwithstanding.

Hints: iPhone functionalities aimed at corporates, co-existence of Windows and OS X made as easy as ever.

Meanwhile, my Mac just changed hands in Wroclaw and is set for the final ride to Warsaw. It’s been a long journey.

Mac’s purpose is far from innocent as my corporate colleagues, knowing me, could immediately tell.

I wrote recently about VC loss of attraction in Web 2.0 and the thing that was frightening about that thought was the inability to answer the basic question “what’s next?”. The Valley thrives on the new new thing (possibly one of the most poignantly titled books ever) and with every turn of a generation there is an awkward moment where we’re just figuring out where we’ve been but have yet to see where we are going? right now is that moment.

(…) I’m still left with the uncomfortable question of what’s next? When Facebook doesn’t deliver world peace, and FriendFeed fails to be better than sliced bread, what will we do?

I suddenly realized that I missed the exact moment when web 2.0 ceased to be the new thing.

Ideas for the new thing: web 3.0 (too obvious), enterprise software (Jeff doesn’t like it, I also doesn’t like it much because it is difficult to scale), AI (as in the last 50 years), gene tech, …other ideas?

Amazingly, even opposition leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski supports this decision.

As well as Lech Walesa, and 60% of the population, according to polls.

Polish government asked other EU leaders to join the protest.

This might not be the most pragmatic approach. It may damage economic contacts with China, for example. And some people argue that boycotting the Olympics will not help Tibetans much.

Still, this is Poland and there is more to the stance one would expect from it than pragmatism.