Greatest thing about using public transport is that you can hear people talk. You don't want to, but you can't help it.

I just remember how 6-7 years ago when I came in Bucharest there were these kind of "old girl talks" like "Hear that, girl? Mary got hired and she's got 25 million salary" (old currency, a bit over 500EUR).

6 years later same talks revolve around 1000 EUR amount. Although I have my doubts about this kind of people actually gaining that, I wonder what is the average amount that make one feel confident in a "metro talk"?

VV

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We are all aware that Google knows everything about us. And that it never deletes information. And builds up search patterns. And tries to understand our behavior. And tries to understand now what we share and why we share. But it never freaks anyone out. But what is the point when you realize they know too much about you?

Say, when you’re looking up some data about Pablo Neruda on your Android device earlier in the day and when you get home in the evening you start searching for “I do not” and the very first sugestion is “i do not ask of the night explanations” (lyrics from one of the most famous poem by Pablo)

Seriously.. this is freaking me out!

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If someone asked me what is your most frequent IM client, I would have said without any doubt Skype.

Turns out I am wrong. According to Rescuetime, Skype stays open just 83% of my time with a usage rate of 12% of this. Although I officially ignored this,a Facebook page stays open over 90% of my working time*, rendering the chance to find me available for chat in there over 7% higher than my primary option.

Interesting, isn’t it?

What is your favorite IM?

* of course, FB chat has a much much smaller usage rate but still.. if we are thinking from the availability perspective…

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On February 11th I was proud to be one of the mentors at the first Mini Seedcamp this year in Zagreb.
It was a great opportunity to meet some fine teams from Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria and even France and the UK.

If you don’t know about Seedcamp, it is “a programme created to jumpstart the entrepreneurial community in Europe by connecting next generation developers and entrepreneurs with over 400 mentors from a top-tier network of company builders; including seed investors, serial entrepreneurs, product experts, HR and PR specialists, marketers, lawyers, recruiters, journalists and venture capitalists.”

I took part in 4 mentoring sessions with teams who approached both B2B and B2C products. Winning teams were unofficially chosen by a public vote based on their initial pitch and I’m proud to have mentored 3 out of the 5 winners. After this wonderful day of extreme interactions with both entrepreneurs and people from the “dark side” (read: VCs and Angel Investors ) I was able to highlight some of the not-so-good approaches and traps most of the teams fell into. I will try to explain them in a later post.

The trip to Zagreb itself was a great experience, I traveled along with Bobby Voicu who was also a mentor, Razvan Tirboaca and Razvan Iacob from AdCaptcher, one of the teams competing in the event. As Bobby once said, long live 4×4 and it’s prophet Mercedes Benz GLK. I’m not much into cars but this baby did a great job in harsh conditions. We traveled over 2000KM across Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and of course Romania.

Zagreb itself was shockingly nice in terms of looks and infrastructure but awful when it comes to nightlife. On the evening of 11th after the cocktail party at Fly Bar and some delicious pizza with most of the Romanian people who came to Zagreb I took the chance to walk some 8KM in and around Zagreb city centre and was shocked by the absolute lack.

We were hosted at hotel Jadran, a venue not very far from the Croatian Chamber of Commerce where the mini Seedcamp took place. This was possible courtesy of Accent Travel and would like to take this opportunity to thank Cristian Manafu and Accent Travel who supported us.

As you may easily realize Mini Seedcamps are great opportunities to make a quick reality check against your vision of your startup, but also very fun experiences.
The next mini Seedcamp takes place in Prague, a city I’m very fond of. Applications are open until Feb 16th so you’d better hurry up in applying.
I’m very curious who I’m going to see in Prague. Also, if you would like to ask questions, or share ideas don’t hesitate to contact me.

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I’m currently scanning various live news feeds for details about the new product from Google : Buzz from Gmail.

I did not quite get the thing with the auto-following. Take this scenario:

You have a Gmail account that collects information from multiple accounts via email forward. Say a big bucket containing all your conversations EVER. Some may be from your other accounts that belong to you, some may be from ex-corporate accounts, etc.

Think about mails sent with BCC. Emails sent to addresses like userxx21@host.com, where userxx21 was a colleague you knew and who resigned in the meantime and now the account now belongs to someone else. (assume host.com is GApps driven)

Don’t have time to think of more situations at the moment but I’m sure that auto-follow key feature is something that could get a lot of people in trouble or at least lead to very embarrassing situations.

Am I the only one who feels that?

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via tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com

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Enjoy!

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As I am writing this post Seesmic is launching in New york a new app called Seesmic Look

I have no intention of reviewing it, you go ahead and read Mashable or Techcrunch articles about it.

What I want to point out here is that I’m happy. I’m happy that this launch somehow confirms my predictions.What are those?

Well, everyone’s expecting the much hyped advertising program from Twitter.But we also know Twitter is not about Twitter.com website.It’s mostly about people using Twitter in various clients just like Seesmic. These clients make calls into the popular Twitter API in order to fetch your status updates or to tweet on your behalf.

So let’s put together the input data we have so far:

1) Twitter growth has apparently stalled

2) Twitter launch of an advertising-based revenue model is imminent (I suspect an announcement on Apr 14th)

3)Twitter advertising could only be displayed on the Twitter.com website which is only a small part of the whole ecosystem

Well, if you think a bit about this context you’ll quickly realize that unless Twitter pulls out a method to monetize the clients using it’s precious API they are pretty much losing a big slice of the pie.

It’s up to them how they will be doing this, I suppose (this is mearly an assumption) they will either have the client owners pay for the API usage (just like they did with the firehose) or have them display their ads in some way.

What’s the link between this and Seesmic look? The whole point of Seesmic Look is to “bring Twitter to the masses”. Want to put it another way?

If my assumptions are true, LeMeur is kissing Twitter buttcheeks big time just to get some privileged position in this client game!

Otherwise tell me a good reason for a $12M funded company who’s failed once, then switch business and succeed to be in the top 3, who now has got a Twitter (+Facebook) client on all major desktop and mobile devices to roll out such an app.

One more thing to figure out yourselves: Why deploy a Silverlight (Microsoft) app when you already have a native Windows client? Wnd why Silverlight when you address the masses? I mean Silverlight has a little over 25% penetration rate!

What do you think?

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