http://www.owczarek.com.pl/blog Bartlomiej Owczarek weblog Tue, 01 Jul 2008 06:24:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Report from our research on social lending in Poland is now publicly available. 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, ... http://www.owczarek.com.pl/blog/2008/07/01/report-social-lending-in-poland/ See article in Gazeta Prawna. Provident, provider of home-delivered and rather pricey cash loans, accuses Monetto, a social lending startup, of unfair comparison of interest rates on its loans. If Provident's goal was to give social lending additional publicity, then it greatly succeeded. Average reader will remember from the article that ... http://www.owczarek.com.pl/blog/2008/06/20/now-provident-accuses-social-lending-sites-of-unfair-competition/ Hey, I didn't even advertise it, but I made some long overdue changes to the blog. First of all, I changed, at last, categories that I use for posts, so now they make more sense: It required a manual re-class of some 300 posts. Ugh. But there is more - in addition ... http://www.owczarek.com.pl/blog/2008/06/15/i-improved-this-blog-a-bit/ I came upon this, in an article by Andrew Sullivan: 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 ... http://www.owczarek.com.pl/blog/2008/06/15/ideal-of-personality/ Kokos, one of the social lending sites in Poland, announced that it started cooperation with Allegro, the dominant online auction player (through antyweb). 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 ... http://www.owczarek.com.pl/blog/2008/06/10/kokos-will-cooperate-with-allegro/ See here: 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, ... http://www.owczarek.com.pl/blog/2008/05/07/orange-to-bring-iphone-to-poland/ Antyweb quoted the Next web article about search in Russia. What's interesting in Russian search? It is not dominated by Google: 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 ... http://www.owczarek.com.pl/blog/2008/04/13/search-in-cee-google-is-an-underdog-in-some-countries/ Businessweek suspects Steve Jobs of a hidden agenda, aimed at getting into corporations. 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 ... http://www.owczarek.com.pl/blog/2008/04/11/steve-jobss-hidden-corporate-strategy/ Jeff Nolan wrote: 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 ... http://www.owczarek.com.pl/blog/2008/03/28/silicon-valley-is-looking-for-the-new-thing/ Polish PM Donald Tusk, as the first among international leaders, declared that he is not going to the Olympics opening ceremony (bloomberg). 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 ... http://www.owczarek.com.pl/blog/2008/03/28/polish-politicians-to-boycott-olympics-over-tibet/