In Russia when they were explaining to me why people didn’t trust banks so much (topic was triggered by the low volumes of deposits in commercial privately owned banks) they said: “there’s been a banking crisis every two years, what would you expect. People are afraid that the bank can come down and take their savings with it”.

(fot. rosendahl@flickr)

I kind of took it in as a valid explanation but never fully internalized the notion - in Poland, when selecting a bank, hardly anyone actually considers whether it’s gonna go bankrupt or not. You never hear banks falling in Poland, except for some obscure “pocket banks” in the distant past of the early days of the market economy.

Even with the lest prestigious and smallest banks, trust used not to be really the major decision factor.

Maybe that is going to change soon. Just in (gazeta.pl):

Investors wondered who would be the next candidates for bankruptcy. Commerzbank, owner of the Polish BRE Group, fell almost 23 percent on the Frankfurt stock exchange. Trading of UniCredit (strategic shareholder of Pekao) was suspended altogether on the Milan stock exchange, after they fell 9%.

In December 2007 I quoted this passage I found in FT:

(…) two giant and interlinked bubbles burst simultaneously - one in property, one in credit - leaving banks and investors on the brink of bankruptcy, some hanging on by their fingertips

That was before the balls started to drop, and the mood was cautiously optimistic then.

It sure feels like something similar with regards to banking situation in Poland right now. Things are falling apart abroad, but at home everything is supposed to be in order, except for the performance of investment funds, which keep looking for the bottom - but this is generally accepted as an isolated and contained phenomenon.

Looking into the future of Polish financial sector in the next 6 to 12 months, maybe it’s time now to calculate in some turbulence.

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I came back from Google Day 2008, organized for the second time in Poland by Google.

The scale of the event was quite impressive, even though there were some organizational deficiencies (like, everything was running late).

Just before event the started, the light-spirited Google’s logos beamed on huge screens accompanied by pompous music, reminding of the strength and confidence of today’s corporation, made peculiar impression on me (like that of seeing a child suddenly grown into a giant but still looking like a child only a very big one).

Anyway setting was nice.

But the content I saw was rather uninspiring. At least from my perspective. Maybe the idea of the event was more community/brand building, than showcasing something truly new.

First there was a video message from Cerf who told us that innovation is important, then Mario Queiroz (Google Labs) presentation from which I remember only that Google will keep on innovating if only for the reason that Internet is growing larger and that there are still some difficult problems in search, like understanding context of the query. And reminder what is the strategic idea of Chrome, for those who missed it.

Then I endured one session structured around screenshots from Google Trends and went back to do some real work today.

Still I think Google didn’t need to satisfy itself with such boilerplate content - certainly there is no lack of opportunities to say something new. Say, display Android phones (instead there were labs of… Google Maps and Youtube). Or provide insight into details of cooperation terms for startup mashups (ok, this is self-interest).

Maybe I missed some good stuff in the other workshop sessions, but judging from the agenda, I do not think so.

The best thing to do was probably networking, but for this purpose I was poorly prepared due to lack of business cards (note to myself: need business cards). But one person turned out so relevant to my current work that meeting her just like that seemed an amazing luck (and a justification for the time spent).

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I neglected to post lately because of my ongoing adventure with Rails (apparently rails 2.0 made the book I have next to obsolete, doesn’t make life easier). Nevertheless there were some interesting things last week:

First - Google News finally launched Polish site. I use the global version all the time (parallel to Techmeme for geek news) and I’m curious if it will change the landscape here in Poland. My feeling was that we have still quite a limited set of web news sources for GN to make serious impact - even though some very rich sources have such a crappy web presence (I mean rzeczpospolita), that having GN figuring their updates instead of us might increase the readership significantly.

Second - go28days opened an English version of their site and even got covered by techcrunch.

I would love to see more companies go global. Given how few of them do, go28days might deserve more praise than they got (was there actually a Polish company covered by techcrunch before…?)

Tomorrow, actually today, Google Day 2008 (if I manage not to oversleep it).

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I’m not exactly in a stage of getting into technical details, but I already kind of decided that I will switch to Ruby on Rails for development of the current project.

Reasons: learning rails would probably be no harder than staying with PHP and learning framework like Zend, which is where I stopped last time.

And RoR promises much improvement with time-to-market.

Having sort of decision on rails, I wanted to have an initial idea of available hosting options, also for the needs of a “back of an envelope” business case.

I’m very happy with my current provider, progreso, but sadly they don’t support rails on shared servers, yet. If I wanted to host with them, I would have to buy a dedicated server anyway.

But as far as dedicated servers are concerned, Amazon’s EC2 looks much more attractive (at least at a first glance).

As for pricing, basic virtual servers are cheaper than in case of progreso (like, $70 a month excluding bandwidth and additional storage).

Additionally, path to hosting Rails applications on EC2 seems already well-beaten. For example here: Deploy a Ruby on Rails app on EC2 in five minutes. There are even Polish startups (shoptrix) who chose this solution.

And of course the most advertised benefit of using EC2 is the ability to increase capacity on pay-as-you-go basis, by easily launching new virtual servers when necessary.

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About a week ago I made the first step to formally become an entrepreneur - I went to the municipal authority of Warsaw (my district, actually) and applied for registration.

This was the first and only place that got the tip of this development, but I already received an unsolicited (but personalized with the data I gave to the office) offer from ING SME banking, and another from an accounting office.

Authority apparently has quite a liberal policy of sharing official information.

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Gemius is preparing for this year’s Internet CEE conference. It will take place in October.

(picture above of work on a promotional clip for the conference)

I did not participate in the last year’s event personally, so I cannot say anything about networking opportunities during the conference.

But I browsed the materials, and found them really interesting. Presentations from every nearby country, lots of data. I could get an overview of the whole region (from the point of view of web activities) based on this one conference.

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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, 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. (read more…)

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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 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.

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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 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.

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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, 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.

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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 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.

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After trams abusing teenager from Lodz, now Kaczynski made it to theregister with his opinion against conducting polls on the Internet:

I am not an enthusiast of a young person sitting in front of a computer, watching video clips and pornography while sipping a bottle of beer and voting when he feels like it (Reuters)

Some UK commenters actually appreciated depth of his thinking:

This is the first time I’ve ever heard a politician who seems to “get” the internet!

Regardless of his politics he seems to understand the internet a million times better then our “masshup/wiki/blogging/youtubing” obsessed bullpoop artists known as MPS.

The news will no doubt infuriate the country’s netizens, should they actually notice it through their booze and porn-addled haze.

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Monetto was kind enough to send me their press release, announcing partnership that they concluded with Nasza Klasa (Polish equivalent of classmates, but more of a Facebook phenomenon in terms of popularity).

Not that I could do anything with the material while in the Ukraine, but still a point for their PR.

One curious thing is the homepage screen shot they attached to the press release.

Some static elements are evidently in a “draft” state at the moment, and it’s not clear if the core functionality (transactions) has the same status. Placeholder for press snippets shows that Monetto has really high hopes. Folks at bankier should take note.

Back to the main point. From the press I understood that:

• Monetto signed letter of intention with Nasza Klasa regarding the partnership, which will work as the following (in my understanding) -
• Users of Nasza Klasa will be able to “confirm” their profile using Monetto capabilities (more info on blog entry: “test” money transfer and sending ID scans by email)
• Additionally, NK user will be able to indicate on his profile that he wants lend/borrow money
• Nasza Klasa hopes that it will improve credibility of the service (validation of profiles) and reduce problem of fake profiles
• Monetto hopes that users redirected from Nasza Klasa will in part get interested in P2P lending and use its intermediation
• The actual contract between two sites has not been signed yet

Meanwhile the release was picked by Gazeta Wyborcza, which reprinted it, without hesitating to spin the point about raising Nasza Klasa credibility to describe it as a site which “more and more often raises mixed feelings”. Get over it, Gazeta.

But in the end they comment that the deal has a high potential for both sites and can harm competitors a lot and especially kokos.pl.

My first thoughts on the deal below.

(read more…)

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Internet Standard published interview with CEO of Inteliwise, a Polish company which deals with AI technologies in search. On market since 2005.

The company plans to debut on NewConnect, a Polish stock exchange for high-tech companies.

I don’t have time to investigate it’s products at the moment, but the Company seems to understand what is most important for the AI:

A decent front-end.

Other thoughts: looks like an interesting company to watch (or even invest in).

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This according to Gazeta Prawna, which quotes Jan Rutkowski, economist at World Bank.

Unemployment fell from 20.7% in 2004 to 8.5% lately. Spain, apparently, took 20 years to lower their high jobless rate.

I made a nice chart about labor market once, maybe I should update it.

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