One after another, there are new rounds of acquisitions; of companies, of web services, of web sites. I’m reading right this moment a discussion from Memeorandum, starting with an article on a 23-year-old fresh millionaire.

CHRIS SHARKEY is 23. He has just got a cool $6 million plus, his share from the sale of a holiday house booking website, Stayz.

I could say that Dot coms still pay off ; But still, you have to be a dot com to get started.

Not a dot ro, not a dot tk.
I know(directly or web-wise) quite a few  of the Romanian starting entrepreneurs. Enthusiastic, brilliant, hard working, extremely talented. One of their few flaws?

They think too damn locally.  Most of them have created interesting businesses, websites, communities. In Romania. In the Romanian language.

Don’t get me wrong, I like my language. And my country.

But we live in a networked world, with English as the de-facto online language. Most of the world’s websites and web users dwell in English-speaking countries. Most of the money to be made online comes from credit-cards printed in English.

Be your service, product or idea the best in the world, it could never take off the ground in a country with an average of 2-3 million people who occasionally go online. The few Romanian IT businesses who went international are booming. Think Softpedia, think BitDefender. Most users don’t even know they are made in Romania. No user cares.
I’m not in the position to give any advice. But what I’m saying is common-sense.

A dot.com domain can be now bought for 3$ a year(over at yahoo domains). Hell, that’s more than three beers. A reliable, international webhost service can be found at as low as 40$ a year. Hell, that’s a new pair of jeans.
No one will buy a weblogs.ro company for 20 million dollars. They did it instead for the dot com version. It’s simply better to be dot international.