As you’ve noticed, this blog has been closed down for an indefinite period.

Since I bought the domain for a three year period, I’ll be giving some thinking about what to make out of it: maybe a business journal, a web entrepreneurship directory, or something completely different

In the meantime, if you are interested in buying this PR4 domain, feel free to contact me at the email address:

office at mobicritic dot com

PS. I’m also disabling the comments, since all I’ve got lately is just spam.

On me demande quelles sont mes projets les plus récents.  J’ai pas grand chose a dire. Ben, a part de:
As-tu lu ceci? Britney Spears sans culotte

A d’autres mots, bienvenu sur mes24h - mes 24 heures de nouvelles et divertissement

If not, there’s always my dear mobile games and software critic - Mobicritic.com  - my extra pet project - a magazine of recommendations of hand-picked best-of games for your java-enabled phone. Midlets, jars, etc. Pretty nice, huh?

In case you missed it, there is my venture blog over at Blog.GeoKeo.com. I’m actually letting digeratinc.com down, although if the opportunity comes I’ll post some more things around.

Keep in touch.

One of the first ideas I got in the last year was of building a  simple web notepad.  Therefore I created  not3s.net , which eventually became an easy-to-use though ugly RubyonRails cms. I quit developing it further when it struck me people will never get to use it on a large scale. There are plenty of web notepads out there, either as firefox plugins, as google apps or yahoo notepad websites. Not to mention draft web emails of blog posts.

The next on the list of ideas I got was to make an online rolodex . There is none out there that easily combines saving private data on your friends with sharing the public data with others or even sending remainders on their birthdays or other events. But there are PLENTY that do parts of this, in a better way. Google calendar, Yahoo calendar, etc. You name it.

Some other idea I spent a couple of weeks on was to build a website for ranking blogs and blog posts. A digg for blogs only, only in a cuter manner. This failed almost instantly after launch, since somebody pointed me to blogoree.ro, a digg-clone made using a free cms, having the same declared purpose.

Back to the drawing board. Next on my venture ideas was the one I mentioned on previous posts on this blog. A Google Local website targeted on Romania. The perfect idea for the moment, since there are fresh new high-res satellite photos of Romanian towns, but no local search engine combining them with a geolocation database(with addresses coordinates and the like). I still hope there are chances of success for it, but my enthusiasm is dropping by the hour. Indeed, there are some competitors in the area, there is not enough demand for this, and at any moment Google, Microsoft or Yahoo could jump right into the deal.

Anyway. These are my updates. I’m happy though to read I’m not the only one facing problems.  Paul Graham talks about one other case here. Refreshing.

It was so obvious it had always been there. It had always been right in front of me, but I didn’t see it until thursday.

Eventually, the IDEA came down onto me.

I passed it already through the sieve of my friends, and the idea still stands. It may not be original, it may not be sustainable. But it’s definitely doable (and some nearby negociations will decide if it’s gonna be the easy way or the hard way), and now is the one time when the momentum is right.

The one and only thing missing from turning this potential venture into a huge success? Marketing. Lots and lots of marketing. Starting big, TV ads, radio ads and the like. Turning a nation of technophobes into one giant browser.

Well… at least the idea came. From now on, it’s business, IT, management and marketing. But the idea came :D

As you can see, I haven’t updated in a while this little blog, and I’m sorry.

There are two reasons/excuses for this.

• First of all, I haven’t got too much time. Early in the week, a friend of mine asked for a bit of help for a tight-schedule Java Swing GUI development; building a front-end for a not-so-simple app, in a week. Very tight schedule, and not a very easy develpment, the difficulty of the project being increased by my being a bit rusty in Java GUI, and the innerworkings of the app. Well, that took most of my time, and I still have one difficult third of the project to go. Off course, there is some more-than-symbolic reward there, if I do a good job. We’ll see how this first freelancer gig works out.
• Secondly, I haven’t bookmarked any more entrepreneurship links, since I’m starting to believe most of them are crap.

Here is why: Every little kid having had a freelancing gig (a website for an uncle would be the perfect example for such a huge project) starts believing he is the next Messiah of entrepreneurs, and starts pulling out lists of DOS and DON’Ts for entrepreneurs wannabees.

What comes next is that other kids like him but with less projects to brag about start reading his blog and bookmarking it onto Reddit or Digg. One more list for the blogosphere to be extatic about.

Well, I dont’ want to be that kid. I start to believe that entrepreneurship is not a science, that most books on leadership and success are bullsh*t, and that life is the one and only entrepreneurship teacher.

And that’s why I don’t want this blog to be about entrepreneurship advice. I want it to be about news, personal stories and thoughts; perhaps some cool ressources once in a time. But no lists, no TODOs; we’ll see how this turns out.

Softwin, well known for its anti-virus leading product BitDefender, is hiring in the Silicon Valley. The successful Romanian company discreetly opened its antenna in Mountain View some months ago. You can see now open positions on their website. Moreover, I found out today that Softwin would be hiring engineers too and I expect these “rumors” to be confirmed quite soon.

Softwin detains 3 connected antiviral labs in Romania (in Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca and Iaşi). They are one of the most innovative Romanian companies and maybe the most famous one.

The fever of startup plans is everywhere, as proven by a controversial article from money.CNN entitled “How to build a Bulletproof startup” ; a pretty scary article, if you ask me, assembling plenty of todays common knowledge and infos on BIG IDEAS, Team, Angels, VCs, etc. Useful info for the noobies, but lousy info for the people knowing more on the subject than the average Joe. Because what they try to teach is nothing more than how to build a Internet Bubble 1.0 startup, exactly the kind of startup you woudln’t want to build.
More comments on the subject over the 37signals blog, in a post called How to shoot a bullet through your startup. Nice and insightful.

PS. as an american from the entrepreneurship conference I assisted 2 weeks ago said: when the taxi driver gives you real-estate tips, you should jump of the boat or at least not jump in; in my paraphrase, if cnn starts giving tips on successful startups, the boat is close to sinking. Who knows?

I had no idea until today when a friend sent it to me via IM, of the existence of Yahoo!Shareholder , where people interested in Yahoo can find more on its internals: financial reports, stockholders presentations, etc.

Plenty of interesting infos, of which I read an amazing pdf, pretty large(12MB download) on Yahoo’s current and future development plans. A recommended read for any digerati.

Sometimes I feel up, sometimes I feel down. The problem is that in the last month I’ve been on the down side.

The two or three of you who read this blog probably know already that I’ve been dreaming of being my own boss for a while now. I remember being a fourth-year college student, more than 3 years ago, and dreaming alongside with Sergiu about doing our own firm. Things seemed so simple back then…

In the two and a half years of studying and working abroad, the thought of creating my own business has never left me. Even more, chatting with Cezar only got it bigger(for better or for worse). It was contagious and, for the funny part, a YM talk more than two years ago with Cezar on the opportunity of launching an outsourcing firm got to the creation of K2 IT and Soft Solutions, the firm of 5 of my friends but, sadly enough, not mine as well. The point being that I’ve been an enthusiastic about going into business for quite a while. And also that always dreaming about your own business makes any other job seem crappy by comparison, and every moment spent at the job a waste of your much too precious time.
It’s been more than one month since I got back from France, closing all the doors behind me, fermly decided to become a millionaire by the time I was 30 and not look back. Well, now I look back at the last month and something and ponder:

• you should always have AN IDEA if you want to become an entrepreneur. Me? I had about 5 ideas. The problem with all of them being that they are Web2.0-based, not having a revenue model, thus making them into pretty interesting websites but with no foreseable success.
• you should have some clients, some orders, some promisses before quitting your day-job. Don’t go autside in the dark, as you’re likely to get easily depressed. As I am now.
• you should have at least a partner when getting started. Even bad partners(but with minimum equity) should do it. As Robert Maxim said two days ago: no top athletes train alone. We all need some pushers, the ones who always ask: how are you going alone? When will you be finished? The temptation of not doing anything all day-long is too big.
• you should have little ressources. Enough for 3 months, but not more. Something to keep you working all-day-long. Being hungry helps.
• you should have plenty of friends, a frequent social life and as few distractions as possible. You should keep coding, not blogging. In other words, the opposite of what I am doing now.

In my defense, I am still on holliday. In the same way I kept promissing myself before college midterms: “tomorrow I’ll start working really hard”, I’m always repeating as well: “from tomorrow on, I’ll work really, really hard“.

Motivate me, please! And give me ideas! I need some moral help!