Andrej's Miscellany

What Google Trends terms should you watch to know about panic?

2011-08-20T08:45:00.000+01:00

This Business Insider article is trying to watch for a coming by following these terms on Google Trends (click through and you can play with the terms yourself):

the depression, guns, deflation, fractional reserve, fiat currency

How about this set? debt, gold, prices, eurozone, eurusd

See the spikes in our times? Would any of those be a good indicator that the push will come to shove?

And what would you propose as a good Google Trends keyword set to know when the public is getting seriously panicked?

A Liptov Weekend: Hotel-Hopping on a Whim

2011-08-15T22:39:00.001+01:00

Last weekend found us in Demanova Dolina, right under the illustrious Chopok peak in Nizke Tatry (Low Tatra) mountains. We drove there late on Friday afternoon more or less on impulse.

I was secretly hoping to score a room at the Hotel Ostredok - it came recommended from a friend whose agency organised some of the glamourous guests and I have complete faith in her recommendations. But when I called Ostredok only had a room for Friday.

We were pleasantly surprised to find that other nice hotel we stopped by were full for at least one of the nights of this mid-August weekend. Tri Studnicky, a four-star from the Tatry Mountain Resorts (Slovak financial group J&T) portfolio was only available Saturday (and Chopok Wellness Hotel 4* as well as the appealing Penzion Drak were full).

Hotel Ostredok
Slovak three stars guarantee nothing but I was expecting much from Ostredok. We ended up liking most everything there, finding it adequate to the price charged, with the exception of the restaurant and crappy pillow.

Room 308 on the third floor (no lift) was really, really large and would have actually easily fit four beds (it turned out there was a third fold out bed already in the room posing as an ottoman). We loved the yellow (laminate wall panelling and oversized number on the room door inside) and grey (carpet) colour scheme, which my resident interior design expert pointed out was a rare departure from the usual Slovak brown and brown ambience.

The bed was OK but the pillow and duvet where from such slippery materials that they virtually undressed themselves on contact. The pillow was understuffed with what felt like pure plastic and I found it truly uncomfortable to sleep on. The hotel simply needs new duvets and pillows (the covers were of decent quality but kept sliding off as they did not close in any way).

The hotel's only restaurant is La Collina and it serves Italian food. It let us down with incompetent staff. We were served by three really friendly and polite young waiters/bartenders but they simply did not know their job. They started us off with a great impression, promising the kitchen could do and has done in the past pasta without gluten. In all fairness, this one promise they delivered on.

The soup of the day was a very tasty pumpkin but a really small portion of insubstantial thin soup was EUR 3. And then the incompetence started. Our main course arrived and we never received any further attention from the waiters. They missed out on the chance to sell us wine (!), more beer, desert, coffee. They deprived their employer of maybe EUR 25 in extra revenue and themselves of perhaps EUR 4 in tips. When after not being able to flag down a waiter in over 40 minutes I went to pay at the bar, I was explained that I cannot put a tip on my credit card because "it goes to the company in Bratislava."

The food itself was not bad. The wine menu looked OK (though for some odd reason the years were given for foreign wines but not given for Slovak wines), the views were great. If there was a head waiter who knew the basics of serving guests at a mid-market restaurant we would have had a great time.

On other issues, if I were to nit pick I would mention the shoddy plasterwork in the bathroom, which two years after refurbishing looks like it has been there for 20 years. In the morning the water pressure in our third floor room was less than adequate as well (though my wife had a nice warm shower in the evening).

But on the plus side, all the staff were friendly, breakfast was decent, architecture was a great example that a good designer can make a place look nice and feel pleasant on a budget. We enjoyed the hotel and anything (other than the cracked plaster between the tiles) can be fixed with a little bit of training. After all Ostredok gets really hot in its main season, which is winter, when you can better appreciate being literally tens of metres from the slope and ski lift in one of Slovakia's prime skiing resorts.

Tri Studnicky
On Saturday we moved to Tri Studnicky, the 70% more expensive four-star hotel. Again, a Slovak four star rating actually does not guarantee a good hotel and there are plenty of unpleasant four star hotels around the country you would regret staying at.

Not so the Tri Studnicky. We loved the hotel and found the high price justified by their faultless service, genuinely tasteful designer interiors, great breakfast and neat if small spa.

The lobby was beautifully furnished and decorated, a rare occurrence in Slovak hotel design. Out Standard Room was small but very functional and it never felt cramped. We had a view of the stream, which was really charming. I appreciated the info packet, which is still all too rare in many hotels. There were typos to fix but at least the packet was there.

We took advantage of our free two-hour entry in the small but tasteful Spa. It is only open from 3 pm to 8 pm but was not full. We used the two jacuzzi baths (indoor and outdoor) and there were also two saunas. The fitness room looked like a place I would want to use if we were staying any longer.

We ate dinner at the Tri Studnicky restaurant (which claims to be 'excellent' on a banner by the hotel above the main road) and I must simply say it was excellent. A competent, experienced server (whose only fault was he did not come to say goodbye before he left to be replaced by another friendly and competent colleague).

If the hotel manager (who has been awarded a top national award in 2011) were to ask me about room for improvement I would maybe send her to Wellness Patince to see how every staff member there automatically greets any passing guest. On the same note the spa lady could have given us a quick tour on arrival (would not have had to leave her chair for that given the size of the spa). But that's really about the only minor gripe I could come up with if pressed. The up-market looking clientele seemed appreciative of the hotel's qualities.

Where to stay in Liptov then? You will do well with Penzion Drak, Hotel Ostredok or Tri Studnicky and there were many other place we passed by that look passable to promising.

It is wonderful to see such great tourism infrastructure in place in Liptov. This beautiful piece of Slovakia is well worth visiting as a family destination, sports or nature-lover destination, however far you are coming from.

Great Asian Noodle Bar in Vienna - Sharing Fruits of My Research...

2011-06-18T20:01:00.000+01:00

You know I take eating out seriously so when my son went on a trip and we had a chance to eat out in Vienna, I spent a good half hour looking for the right Asian restaurant to visit. We were in no mood for posh, we wanted honest Asian fare at a reasonable price, without a need to dress up.

We hit the road from Bratislava with a print out with four options and used the 45 minutes drive to make a decision.

The options were:
Saigon Restaurant at Getreide Markt

+43-1-5856395

Yellow at Mariahilferstr. 127

Chang Asian Noodles at Waaggasse 1

We landed at number three on my list, Chang Asian Noodles. This turned out to be a great choice - a well designed place on the right side of the Vienna city centre (coming from Bratislava on the highway). We had unpretentious, oustanding noodles, which put any Bratislava noodle bar (incl. Buddha Brothers) to shame, paying less than 30 euros for two noodle dished, a chicken satay starter, glass of wine and two mineral waters.

I do this kind of research (not only on food but other venues) before travelling anywhere and wil lmake a point of sharing my lists on the blog.

Austrian Tabloid Fined €20k for Lifting Girl's Facebook Photo to Illustrate her Alleged Prostitute Namesake's Murder Story

2011-01-07T23:13:00.000+01:00

Wow, writing a short headline to this one seemed tough.

Interesting tale of offline/online media interaction - Austrian tabloid paper fined EUR 20 000 by Austrian court after using a photo of the wrong "Lucia Rehakova" from Facebook to illustrate story on an eponymous murdered prostitute.

Rehakova, a Slovak student of teaching, said she had feared she would not be able to get a teaching job after Slovak newspapers widely reprinted her photo. In 1995 there were 1 183 women named Reháková in Slovakia in 2005, according to the state language institute Surnames Database . With Lucia being a very popular Slovak girl's name we would expect there to be oh maybe like 20 of them. Four of them are in fact on Facebook (in Google search results).

Is it sad or funny that you can still google a Lucia Rehakova photo on the Kurier.at website without any explanation or apology and without knowing whether it is the wrong or right one...

The real Lucia should consider suing Slovak papers too for violating her rights - picking up the photo from Austrian paper is not sufficient sourcing.

(found via Metro.co.uk story)

Blue Bay Hotel in Netanya Blues

2010-10-21T22:06:00.000+01:00

Three nights at the Blue Bay Hotel in Netanya, attending a friend's beach wedding. We chose the hotel at the friend's recommendation for convenience (a few minutes drive from where the weddding took place) rather than any impressive looking features or positive reviews.

The hotel actually has bearable architectural qualities, decorated with taste, or at least without any 'distaste'. The room we stayed in probably used to look good, like 6 years ago but it was well worn rather than in a state of disrepair. Unlike in many newer hotels, the shower worked, water fixtures worked, most lights worked.

We were annoyed with the narrow entrance space and overall the room was not well suited to having the extra bed added. Across the hall I got a peak of a room that seemed very different from ours - a hard-wood floor rather than our wall-to-wall hotel style carpet from a bygone era and more space - I would assume that's the 'superior' room.

We arrived in the dark and I was sceptical about sea view as much as to complain to the receptionist we were paying for it. He assured me all the rooms had seaview and his words turned out to be very accurate when we woke up next morning with perhaps the best view of the sea I've seen in a hotel.

On arrival I had to return to reception to mention the extra bed we had requested (and were paying a not so friendly extra amount for). It arrived carried by a man who pretended not to really speak English but he understood the request to bring an extra towel for the third guest.

Breakfast is a good Kosher breakfast. Depending on what those three words mean to you, you either know what I am talking about or it would simply take too long to explain. For connoisseurs, here is an overview: a sizable buffet with three or four warm dishes, cheeses, "salatim", some sweets, bread and three types of rolls. Coffee not to die for (or Israeli instant). Oh, and since the breakfast is milchig, no sausages or salami (but there is some fish). And the Kosher kids run amock bumping into your chair not only without apology but without as much as acknowledging your existence.

Kosher kids running amock were a recurring topic poolside but the cold water was a bigger problem.

The lobby bar service was far from impressive in terms of selection, attentiveness of staff, professionalism. But again, the decent Israeli service standards prevailed: with every order (even the misunderstood one) the linguistically challenged man brought us a bowl of pretzels and peanuts and dusted off our table. He even tried to prevent me from leaving him a tip at one point.

I would not call the staff friendly and we never had the impression anyone enjoyed serving us. A good word to describe most staff was smug (the reception staff), oblivious (wait staff), bored (security guard outside). The only friendly gestures came from the (I assume Ethiopian Israeli) cleaning staff.

But, like much of Israeli hospitality, the hotel turned out OK. Not great, not to rave about, with lots of annoying little details but OK to spend a few nights (although I would hesitate recommending it for a long vacation). The Scandinavian and Russian holy land bible trip groups seemed happy enough, as did the guests at multiple weddings and bar mitzvahs taking place.

Moods Boutique Hotel Prague - a Quick Stay and Review

2010-08-28T22:25:00.000+01:00

Hästens Bed at the Hotel Moods in Prague

I had to travel to Prague for a few hours of meetings in August and the timing warranted an overnight stay. I therefore looked for a nice play to spend the night that would guarantee a good night's sleep, under EUR 100 for the two of us.

As this was a Sunday night weekend rates applied and there were literally hundreds of hotels to choose from on Booking.com. I took advantage of their new feature that presents guest ratings in words and restricted my search to hotels with ratings over 9 out of 10, which Booking.com labels Superb (why settle for Fabulous if you can have Superb, right?).

We ended up with the Moods Boutique Hotel, a new place in Klimentska near Florence, reportedly a 'Superb' hotel, not least because it was minutes from where my meetings took place. Booking.com offered Moods for EUR 99 for the Standard Room including breakfast.

I phoned the hotel directly (though its http://www.hotelmoods.com/ website was pretty hard to find in Google). The friendly receptionist said they had rooms free, I could just come without reserving and may even be able to get a few euros of the published 'Best Available Rate'.

Did we enjoy the night at Moods? Yes. Did I think it was worth the price we paid? Sure. Is this a Superb hotel? Well let's say I would rate it pretty good.

Getting there
Klimentska is reasonably central but Moods sits at a weird spot. The street is one way from that spot, in both directions. This means that you cannot get to Moods via Klimentska itself but have to reach it the only way through a side street (which appears nameless on Google maps), coming to it from Lannova or Barvirska.

We did not figure this out until we walked the area a bit on foot so even though we saw the hotel, getting to it by car took us another half hour of circling through one way streets of Prague 1.

Prague 1 also means there is hardly any street parking - there were numerous empty spots but all marked as resident spots with blue lines. The hotel uses parking facilities in the next door Hotel Klement but these were full and we were either offered parking at another hotel a few minutes walk away (Bila Labut) or told to park in Petrske Namesti square, where there is public parking (metered on weekdays from 8 am to 6 pm with two hour maximum).

Checking in
As advised via telephone we showed up annonced. The gentleman at reception looked surprised but was polite enough. I explained that I had phoned about a room. He asked what I had been promised. Truthfully, I replied I had been told there were rooms available and we could get a discount on the published rate.

After a while of searching (which allowed me to note the Vitra chair I was sitting on) and asking his colleague from the bar to check on the state of a room (305) he said he would give us a room slightly larger than most at a rate slightly lower than EUR 99 - at 90. This seemed a great deal and we accepted gratefully, to be escorted upstairs.

The room
Let me get the good stuff out of the way. Moods makes a lot of its Hastens beds. The bed was good, but there was a crack between the two mattresses. There are free coffee and tea makinjg facilities.

The floor was hard wood (walnut?) and nice enough. The furniture was very simple, white polished surface. There was an LCD TV, minibar. The lamp is a nice Artemide, as advertised on the hotel's website (along with Hastens for beds, Apple and Bose for stuff in rooms beyond my price level).

A reviewer on booking.com talked of forward looking design but in that respect I would beg to differ. Buying an expensive bed and floor is nice and good but not really a design thing. The rest of the design at the Moods was either missing or questionable.

Artemide Lamp and Wall Decoration at Prague Hotel Moods

Perhaps what bothered me most was the overall feel - very cold and empty. The wall design relied on quotes from a book (by Czech writer Peter Sis??) and these were also interspersed in other spaces. The furniture was minimalist.

A signature feature was a colour-changing LED lamp behind the head of the bed, which had a set of (mechanically poorly functioning) controls for colour and intensity. I guess to match the colour to your MOOD, get it, right?

Where the room took turn for the cheap was the bathroom. No design, cheapish looking tiling and most importantly Roco fixtures (armatury). I have a feeling not all readers will identify with the paragaph but: in a four-star design/boutique hotel you need a Hansgrohe if you can't afford Axor, schematically speaking.

Roco fixtures are certainly not offensive looking but around the shower head at the Moods Boutique Hotel the metal hose covering was already 'unbound' detached from the handle part, uncovering a piece of the plastic hose within.

There was a bidet but the bath itself was very narrow and thus uncomfortable. This to me was a questionable choice, too. The White Company toiletries were not enough to fix the mixed impression.

Overall this was not design that worked for me and my resident design dot expert said it was because there was not that much design.

View from Room 305 at the Moods Boutique Hotel in Prague

But then in the morning our window suddenly showed what could unassaultably be advertised as a Vltava river view (there really was a bit of water visible and a floor above it would likely be much more).

The common spaces
There are some nice details in the lobby and restaurant although as a whole these spaces do not amaze. To be brief, I wouldn't go there for the design.

Breakfast
No reservations about breakfest. A small but kind buffet, with a cosy feel. Sausages, eggs, cereal, fruit, cold cuts, veggies, salads, roasted veggies, cake, croissant, good bread and three carafes of actual fruit juice. A Douwe Egberts coffe automat (good choice in its class).

I am also sold on the breakfast being until 11:30 (with continental breakfast being served per order any time during the day).

Design-wise lots of effort (including Vitra Eiffel chairs) but a result with a questionable feel.

Other remarks

As always the experience turns on the staff. Here the staff were very good (although by no means perfect). Most interactions were pleasant although I did not always quite feel understood (this may simply be on account of me speaking Slovak, right?).

The staff were very kind in lettin gus keep our luggage at reception all day and when I asked for a room to change in they offered the underground conference room all to myseld.

Verdict
I would go back to the Moods because the bed was good, breakfast was good, staff tried hard. But with the feeling that for the same rate or slightly higher I may be able to do better at some of the many Prague hotel options.

Then again, there is that other class of rooms at the Moods, the Deluxes, Maisonette and Apple. Maybe if I splurged on those I would walk away with a different impression?

Can you make money with planned Slovak tax changes?

2010-08-28T11:44:00.000+01:00

One of the proposed changes in Slovak income tax law would eliminate an exemption from capital gains on apartment sale. Currently, if you buy an apartment in Slovakia and register the address as permanent residence for two years or own it for five years, you do not have to pay tax on the income from selling it at a profit.

Slovak Finance Minister Ivan Miklos proposed a series of tweaks in tax laws to generate extra revenue as the deficit left over by the previous cabinet of populist Robert Fico spiralled out of control.

The proposal would make people pay a capital gainst tax (at the current 19% income tax rate) on gains from selling an apartment regardless of when it was acquired and how long the owner lived there. It wouls apply to all properties acquired after January 1, 20111.

If this specific proposal passes it should mean that anyone who has been thinking about buying an apartment in this down market for speculative purposes should do so before the end of December 2010, boosting demand this year compared to the start of next.

I am not sure how you could estimate the magnitude of this effect and whether it could be significant enough to trade on given transaction costs. But nonetheless anyone considering selling an apartment in the near future should do so in December rather than January (assuming there isn't a strong upward trend in place of course that would overpower the tax change effect).

Wellness Patince: Well Done

2010-08-09T23:05:00.002+01:00

On a whim we decided to spend a long weekend at the Wellness Patince, a four-star hotel with thermal baths in the South of Slovakia at springs dating back to the Romans. We came back very satisfied with the experience and I have since recommended the wellness to several of my friends (and at least one went with her family).

The location
Patince is at least two hours from Bratislava travelling along the south of Slovakia and can be longer depending on traffic. There is a shorter route crossing though neighbouring Hungary but we did not feel like negotiating the highway toll system.

The area itself is pleasant, near an old thermal swimming pool although some of the older facilities around are run down.

We rented a small human-powered bicycle car from the Western Saloon (an establishment near but completely separate from the hotel) but returned it early as the nicer unit recommended by staff seemed close to falling apart. Similarly, the lunch at a nearby restaurant (two minutes walk from the hotel) was a disgrace (we did much, much better at Diva Kacica in Landor - Hajlas just outside of Komarno propper, a tastefully decorated pension with classy cuisine of the kind I feel should exist around Slovakia but rarely do).

The hotel is near a small lake with thermal water. It is a bit smelly (mineralised smell) and murky looking but pleasant enough. You can walk around the area and see the remnants of bygone glory (including an open air cinema and interesting looking cottages) of a Communist-era resort, which we liked.

The hotel
Wellness Patince is only a few years old. It is nice and quite simple though by no means an architectural masterpiece. The hotel connects to a large indoor wellness pool, a sauna world, outdoor pools and other facilities all open to the public and accessible to hotel guests without limit at no extra charge.

The staff were nice and everyone greeted guests as they walked by, which I had not been used to in Slovakia.

Our stay was the Summer Package and should have included several extras (free bike rental, free trip on the Wellness 1 from the Patince Marina, on the Danube some 2 km from the hotel). Noone made an effort to offer us these and we did not feel like demanding.

We had been told in advance part of our stay overlapped with a corporate event but this had no negative influence on our stay oru access to facilities at any time.

The hotel's own internet presence is poor - so much so in fact that I had to write them an email about this, pitching Pizza SEO's services.

Rooms
Our room, a Classic room was a generous size and fit the three of us more comfortably than most double rooms would. There was extra floor space to play and desk and closet space to store our stuff.

The decor was tasteful enough (yellow and brown) with reasonable laminate flooring, quality windows.

Some construction details showed small structural problems - bits of the wall in room and hallway were stained, apparently near water pipes of bathrooms.

There was a large piece of spider web hanging from the ceiling in our room. The room cleaning was so unobtrusive as to appear unavailable and our room ended up not cleaned on several of the days though no doubt if we had asked the friendly cleaning staff would have quickly obliged.

The bathroom was not the most practical in terms of offering space to hang up three sets of towels. The water pressure had its moments but was ok through most of the stay.

Food
We ate a half-pension at the unpretentious but good quality restaurant. The buffet breakfasts were more than satisfactory and dinners were always at least satisfactory. On one of the nights a grill on the terrace was in operation and those in the know (including people who seemed to be the owners) ate from the grill. Great chicken, veggies, fish (though I noticed at one point the lady used the same serving tweezers to place raw marinated meat on grill and serve finished grilled meat on plates).

Dinner started with a large board with finger food including smoked salmon, different ham and cheese canapés, veggies, etc. There were two soups and four main dishes with additional options. Fruit and small cakes were for dessert.

The wait staff removed used dished very rapidly, sometimes too rapidly to my taste but everyone was polite, pleasant and friendly.

There was a good selection of wine, Slovak and foreign, served with grace.

The restaurant only served very limited options for lunch and we never took that but ate a few meals at the poolside wellness bar. This had a bit of a factory canteen decor and the food would also have suited factory workers - many items were deep-fried and the salads, the wellness 'option', were unspectacular.

Outside of the wellness a few stands offered simple food - some serving fish with chips or bread as fast food seemed appealing.

A lobby bar, in an unappealing room secluded from the actual lobby served specialty coffees with a very eager and willing bartender. The other bar, open late, was in the bowling alley downstairs.

The wellness
The pools were nice and clean and even at their fullest did not feel crowded. The large indoor pool allowed for a bit of swimming and the warm sitting pool was undemanding. The outdoor pools were alright too.

The sauna world was appealing and pleasant and the gym seemed well equipped (and never used).

The verdict
We thoroughly enjoyed our four nights and would not hesitate to go back. Having said this there were small aspects that disturbed me and would have liked an opportunity to be asked by a manager for my views and seeing these things fixed.

The wet walls do not seem sustainable. The cleaning service needs to be more efficient because the four stars bind: the room needs to be cleaned daily, ideally before lunch, we need towels changed (and would appreciate extra towels). The Wellness Bar could try to live up to its name a little more: having seen the cars in the parking lot I think there is a clientele that would appreciate this (sophisticated salads and sandwiches instead of french fries with fried meat).

Inevitably comparisons with Hotel Therma Dunajska Streda that we visited came up. The distance (since Dunajska Streda is about half the distance of Komarno) works in its favour, as does the price. The staff attitude is comparable across the two (and a big part of the good experience in both cases) and our room at the Therma was cleaned daily as it should have been.

But Therma is in the middle of an industrial zone in a former office building and feels very outdated with the ashtrays on landing you pass through going from the elevator to your room.

Wellness Patince is cleaner, nicer, more readable architecturally, with a larger pool, healthier food.

The weak web presence is a genuine shame - the product on offer deserves to be communicated better.

I am determined to go back to Patince, look forward to my stay already and I will also make an effort to tell them what could be better as a friend rather than a critic.

Seen this ad format before?

2010-06-09T22:30:00.000+01:00

Spotted this cool ad format in Zemanta on Blogger - a promoted Related Article you can add as a link to your blog post. Clever.

Reminds me of an old idea I always liked and still haven't seen although it's trivial to implement: a contextual hotel search (admittedly inspired or at least stimulated to think about by the now very defunct Auction Ads - an eBay contextual ads network).

Say for Bratislava hotels you could send dates and a location as a parameter to display a selection of hotels in a given area available on certain dates. There could be any number of optional parameters. Obviously, there are more than a few websites that could implement something like this on a global scale in days not to mention Google itself.

These contextual ads could be shown alongside event information - for conferences, concerts, sports events, etc.

We've blogged about Zemanta, the Slovenian startup on the experimental Pizza SEO blog before.

Is to. Simply the Shortest URL Shortener Ever?

2010-02-07T15:03:00.001+01:00

My Definitive List of Shortest URL Shorteners on this blog is now completely obsolete. All of them were four characters long (including the dot) but a new winer has appeared:

to.

This shortener leaves much to be desired in terms of interface and features BUT: it generates REALLY short URLs such as:

to./jre (which incidentally takes you back to this very post).

That's a total of seven characters. And you can get to it by typing mere three (to.) and hitting Enter in your browser.

This in fact is the shortest URL shortener I am aware of at the moment. It should be easy enough to emulate by other TLDs should the choose to.

I discovered this shortener randomly through a blog comment from Sal. The .to country top level domain (TLD) belongs to the Kingdom of Tonga (H.R.H. Crown Prince Tupouto'a seems in control) and you can register these through tonic.to, the registrar.

PROKOP 2010 - the new Slovak PR Award

2010-02-05T23:06:00.000+01:00

PROKOP 2010, Slovakia's first ever PR awards, will be announced on February 11, 2010 at the "design factory" in Bratislava.

Jury shortlisted 13 projects from seven agencies for the competition organised by the Slovak Association for Public Relations and the advertising trade magazine Stratégie.

SEESAME, an agency from Bratislava, leads the nominees with four shortlists, followed by Neopublic Porter Novelli from Bratislava and Košice-based Communication House with two each.

The competition is divided into three categories: Corporate Communications, B2B and B2C PR, Community Relations and Internal Communication.

The jury is composed of six men and two women and is chaired by Vladimir Bystrov, the Strategic Planning Director at the agency Bizon & Rose in Prague, Czech Republic. The criteria judged are innovativeness, creativity and flexibility, with a view to demonstrated results.

Tickets for the awards ceremony cost EUR 10 and can be purchased by contacting waradzinova@gmail.com.

People to follow on Twitter in 2010 #follow2010

2009-12-19T01:52:00.004+01:00

UPDATED May 21, 2010 with a link to @matushiq's Who to follow on Twitter article (in Slovak)

Technological progress can make your life better. I watched closely the growth of Twitter in 2009 and it has allowed me to listen to (and even communicate with) some amazing people.

They can be found in my follow stream but here is an incomplete annotated list sorted by topics:

Online marketing
@DoshDosh are some of the cleverest and coolest internet marketers out there. @Halfdeck is a SEO with a capital S. @JustinBoland (as @brainsturbator) can run circles around most people. @melanienathan is a very personable Canadian linkbuilder. I am not smart enough to always understand @memeticbrand but when I get it it's amazing content. @rishil rarely posts an uniteresting tweet. @rustybrick, the smart voice in SEO and author of the iPhone Siddur. @WesUnruh is another gem, a clever guy if there ever was one.

Online travel
@alexbainbridge and @hotelblogs are two people in the online travel industry I greatly respect. @travolution is another account worth following for online travel news.

Other English content
I find @mindhackblog tweets always succint and interesting.

@notcot posts lots of fun stuff. I am happy to have met @trendycrew in person thanks to Twitter. @HarvardBiz posts links to great stuff in the Harvard Business Review. @tmbchr is in a class of his own.

The honour roll
These are people who are legends on and off Twitter and justifiedly so:
@andybeal @dannysullivan @dcurtis @fredwilson @johnon @leeodden

Slovak (and CZ) tweets
This list includes a number of people I know in person but know even better thanks to Twitter:
@dusoft who has a well deserved cult following on Twitter, @baoding who converses intelligently in English, Slovak and Hungarian, @braque, the most genuine Slovak marketer on Twitter, @kamelka, a funny Slovak studying abroad, @jurajjavorsky who seems a great guy on and off Twitter and @kvasinka whose several social media streams are well worth following. @madciapka has lots of followers for a good reason. @MarekP is worth following for online marketing stuff. @dmagician is also genuine and smart. @MarkoKolar is a smart and ambitious graphic designer who is a pleasure to work with online. @matushiq is a budding scientist and funny. @seocentrum is good at both domaining and SEO and would make a top class domain broker. @PxPxE are friends who are going to do well on Twitter. @radobato is a massively experienced journalist and a good guy, @TiborHoloda is the best tweeter among Slovak DJs and a genuine, great guy. @tobiasr sometimes has interesting stuff to say (in English).

A few more people/brands good at internet marketing @sifra @ataxocz @cuketka

Personal
@brendenwhalley is a long lost close personal friend I am happy to be around again on Twitter. @nanotweets is a friend I hope to never lose touch with.
@georgin is a profile that won't be updated any time soon but luckily the last tweet is recursive. A colleague and friend who we tragically lost (in Slovak) this year and really miss.

People I've left out
I've left out many great people who are not such great Twitterers (but have accounts and should use them more often in 2010). I've also left out some great Twitterers who I don't know personally or whose signal to noise ratio is inconsistent or unfavourable. I am sensitive to anyone who posts stuff that I find sexist, racist, rude or aggressive in a stupid way.

Who do I tag to share their people to #Follow2010:
Anyone I have mentioned is welcome to share a list on Twitter or elsewhere - let me know if you post one so that I can link to it. I want to see @dusoft's list (true to form, came through first here), @alexbainbridge's, @matushiq's (better late than never - Matushiq posts his list in Slovak on May 21) and @ataxocz's.

I will also update this post if I come across any omissions or errors. Happy holidays!

Don't Waste Your 'Potential', American Express

2009-12-09T22:20:00.000+01:00

I saw an intriguing (to a search markering professional) ad in the underground in London and @dusoft was kind enough to snap this shaky photo of it for me.

American Express urges you to "realise the potential" by using the membership rewards programme. The ad contains a URL (www.americanexpress.co.uk/potential) but also another interesting bit: it says you can just search for 'potential'.

We had a small discussion with @dusoft what that meant. I thought maybe they had optimised for the probably not terribly competitive KW 'potential' on google and ranked. He said the top spots would definitely be taken by dictionary definitions.

I followed up, first trying to search for potential on google.com but nothing related to the campaign came up. When I tried google.co.uk, here is what I saw:

American Express uses Adwords to serve an ad for searches for potential. Surprisingly, the URL displayed with the ad, http://americanexpress.com/Potential fails to resolve. The UK version (www.americanexpress.co.uk/potential) does work, but redirects to the hideous http://www212.americanexpress.com/dsmlive/dsm/int/gb/en/personal/membershipbenefits/rtphomepage_pr.do?vanity=americanexpress.co.uk/potential&vgnextoid=be57afbe98603210VgnVCM100000defaad94RCRD

So here is my free advice for UK's American Express:
1. Do not waste your potential!
2. Optimise organically for 'potential', maybe the top position isn't achievable but a top 5 should be for someone with your resources
3. Make sure the display URLs you use for Adwords ads actually resolve
4. Users appreciate clean URLs

Danny Sullivan mentions two examples of entities using a call for search for navigation - Matt Mullenweg says to search for 'Matt' on Google on his business card (see here) and Sony said to search for '2012' to find the film. Unlike American Express, these two seem to work.

Someone with their resources should really be able to do better than this, right?

Professional deformation makes me leave deformed rants on a great website

2009-11-25T00:56:00.001+01:00

I was leaving a rant on a Polish graphic designer's blog about the poor usability of a flash-based site they have produced.

The website Voices from the Center covers an amazing project by Janeil Engelstadt, an American artist who spent time at the Bratislava Academy of Fine Arts and Design as a Fulbright Scholar. She interviewed people around Central Europe on the end of Communist Rule - very topical since we are doing a lot of soul searching for the 20th anniversary of the "Tender Revolution" (that's what we call the Velvet Revolution here in Slovakia).

My mother sent me a link to the site and I first couldn't understand why. Later she showed me the site, since both she and my father are interviewed there. I enjoyed browsing around but I shared her frustration with the user experience - a Flash site by obviously talented graphic designers but with little regard to conventional usability principles (this is not my first Flash rant, of course).

I was frustrated enough to leave the rant and the authors were nice enough to reply, saying they disagree, since the site isn't strictly informative and aims to encourage exploration.

Of course, my professional bias made me respond again: drawing on Nielsen I argued that a more usable website would better encourage exploration (and sharing of this great content).

By the same token I admitted that they would find many of the sites I am involved with ugly. I tried to explain that harping on usability was for me what we call a "professional deformation" in Slovak. I realised though that this expression did not have the right meaning in English. I googled for the right English equivalent, since I 've had a need for this phrase repeatedly. I came across this great discussion on wordreference - shows that there really is no functional English equivalent. The best they come up with is saying you're biased by your profession, which I guess is a reasonable substitute but does not quite cover the connotational meaning of the "deformed" or "distorted" professional. You can lose a bias but once something is malformed it is harder to put right.

So apologies to the talented Poles for party crashing their blog and kudos (and some link love) to Janeil for Voices from the Center.

Ameritania Hotel NYC Paying Indian "SEO's" to Post Comment Spam?

2009-11-14T21:56:00.001+01:00

The comments on this blog are moderated. I was surprised yesterday when this comment on my post about my 2008 stay in New York landed in my box:

Amsterdam CourtHotel,belvedere hotel new york,boutique hotels new york,manhattan hotel rooms,boutique hotel manhattan,ameritania hotel new york-http://www.ameritanianyc.com

from a blogger.com user without a public profile.

My post does mention the Ameritania, a hotel in the Theater District where we spent a few nights. But I would not expect a company of such stature to resort to such obsolete tactics as blog post spam.

When I checked my blos stats today, this is what I saw:

In other words, Ameritania in New York hired an Indian "link builder" to help improve its search engine rankings. He or she searched google for blogs on blogspot containing the words ameritania hotel new york and posted comment spam containing a link to the hotel.

As an experiment a little while ago I paid for a few links to an Indian link building company. I was apalled with what they came up with. The quality of these links on a variety of fake blog sites was beyond poor and they could easily hurt rather than help.

The same applies to comment spam in 2009. It's not going to help Ameritania and it's quite embarassing. If I did actually want to leave comments with URL I would make a comment that speaks to the content of the blog post. Or at least one of those usual spammy coments, that sometimes look genuine (along the lines of "Wow, what a great site. Enjoyed reading your stuff. Why not check out XYZ.com").

With that kind of assignment, at Pizza SEO we would have contacted the blogger and tried to convince him to turn the mention of Ameritania into a link. Often this is doable and results in great links. But then agan we cannot afford to offer something like 20 links for $100 the way many of our Indian competitors do.

You need cool things to put on Facebook?

2009-10-25T15:42:00.001+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

You sign up for an account on Facebook and you try to excel - you see that the people who post lots of fun stuff are popular. Since it's 2009, you Google it: Cool things to put on Facebook is aparently a searched term and gets this blog post on Facebook ads a steady trickle of traffic.

Unfortunately that post is no help in answering. So before Demand Media get the "Cool Things on Facebook" video out, I decided to dig a little, have some fun and think of and research sustainable ways of generating fun things to put on Facebook.

1. Start following funny video sites, joke sites, etc.
There are tonnes of these, search for them, follow them, repost the really funny stuff. A good twist on this is to track sites few other people know. Maybe look for niche humour sites or foreign sites.

2. Befriend various people who post cool stuff and repost their stuff to friends who do not know them

3. Know that you are not alone in this quest. Check the replies in the following Yahoo Answers threads: What funny things can I post on Facebook?
BTW, the user was looking for things as clever and funny as "I have just woke up, i would of woke up earlier but i was asleep." or "right i think it is time to check the inside of my eyelids, ill be back in 8 hours."
What are some cool things to post as your status on facebook?
What are some cool things i can add to my facebook page?

Do you have any other ideas of cool things to put on Facebook to share with the readers here?

Can Apple afford to be this unresponsive?

2009-10-23T23:18:00.000+01:00

Image by ensign_at_e233net via Flickr

This was supposed to be a tweet but it's too twisted of a story for 140 characters.

I visited www.logofogo.sk, a friend's site. A weird pop up appeared (and I've seen it somewhere before):
User name and password are being requested by http://www.logofogo.sk. The site says: idisk.mac.com

When I clicked on Cancel, the site continued loading but the error popped up several more times and I had to click it away.

I coppied the error message and searched for it in Google. I was amazed to find a discussion of the problem on the official Apple site forum going back a month, to September 23. Another users asked in mid-October: Why is my site requiring a password to view?

Aparently, for users browsing with Firefox, the bug affects sites using Apple's Mobile Me service (www.me.com). The service synchronises info between iPhone, mac computers and other Apple devices. I have come across reports going back to 2008 on the problem.

Something seems amiss at Apple if user after user of their pricey software and hardware complain about a massive bug that hurts their websites for weeks, without anyone from the company responding. And I had for a moment considered getting a Mac (kidding, not really).

Some people obviously use the Mobile Me platform for ecommerce publishing. If I was one of them, this would definitely make me reconsider.

Oh and a bonus: when I was composing the tweet that never materialised I wanted to "ping" Apple's Twitter account but they actually don't seem to have one (other than @itunestrailers).

Is the conference discount on hotel room sometimes a surcharge?

2009-10-01T23:00:00.001+01:00

Image by leozaza via Flickr

You stay in a hotel room. The man in the identical room next to yours is paying 40% less.

You are attending a conference. The organisers gave you a code to use when booking accommodation in the official conference hotel to receive a discount.

You make the reservation at the alleged discount and maybe never find out that the same room reserved through the hotel's public website costs far less and comes with better terms (I stumbled upon a Prague hotel offering a conference rate of EUR 88 during a recent editors' conference, the hotel website showed a rate of EUR 58 for the same date).

There are a few possible economic rationales:
- the hotel is simply using the pricing power gained from being the 'official venue'
- an intermediary marks up the rates (although sometimes the hotel itself does)
- the rates for accomodation subsidise lower charges to organisers for other services

I found a nice clarification called Why stay at the conference hotel on the website of a US computer association. They say:

On occasion, one of the many internet providers or sometimes the hotel itself will offer a few rooms in their inventory at a lower price than the conference is offering. There are often restrictions and penalties associated with these rates.

So next time you are attending a conference make sure to crosscheck the rates with the hotel website and third party sites.

Dell in Bratislava's Largest Illegal Building (Legalised Ex-Post)

2009-09-26T00:44:00.002+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

I thinks these stories need to be told. We went through a period of massive illegal construction here in Bratislava. Toothless construction authorities had no way of making builders remove illegal buildings, if they were able to prove they were not against the public interest. At most, they were able to fine the builder a few million crowns, which in the context of a construction budget is a small price to pay not to have to wait to get all the required permits.

So around the city aggressive developers erected buildings without permits and without regard to their effects on the area. Local residents occasionally protested but generally there was no recourse.

The buildings would get legalised and then occupied, often by big name tenants. At one point I realised that this may be a way of putting pressure on the developers - if tenants will be reluctant to occupy these questionable buildings, developers will care a little more about building things by the letter.

The Bratislava seat of Dell is a great example. Dell, a publicly traded US-based company, which undoubtedly has a CSR department, moved into a building constructed without a valid permit. This building, an unseemly modern edifice in Fazulova street, a fairly central address, started out as the largest illegal construction site in Bratislava (this article by the highly respected Slovak economic weekly Trend confirms both that the building was illegal and that it was long before legalisation known to be the future seat of Dell). The investor of the building actually paid the highest ever fine for illegal construction in Slovak history.

Later on the company had a permit for a three-story building, meanwhile building the 12-story Dell Bratislava seat.

There is little doubt Dell knew about all this. Of course it has no direct legal responsibility but it should have never moved into a building like this, if it really means the whole CSR spiel seriously. Implicitly supporting illegal actions goes against several of Dell's Seven Key Tenets:
"Integrity: We do the right thing without compromise. We avoid even the appearance of impropriety." - looks improper to me to have someone build a building for me violating laws even if it gets legalised later
"Honesty: What we say is true and forthcoming, not just technically correct. We are open and transparent in our communications with each other and about business performance." - this implies Dell should admit they knew what was going on was illegal.
"Courage: We speak up for what is right. We report wrongdoing when we see it." - in this case, Dell supported wrongdoing by buying into the Fazulova building.

BUT:
"Responsibility: We accept the consequences of our actions. We admit our mistakes and quickly correct them. We do not retaliate against those who report violations of law or policy."

Based on this Dell should apologise to the people of Bratislava and consider donating money to make Bratislava a nicer place, don't you think?

(To be fair Dell is not the only company who supported illegally constructed properties by renting in them. HB Reavis built the Aupark Tower (in the photo above, since I could not locate a decent photo of the Dell building on Fazulova), which ruins views of the Old Town and dominates views of the architecturally valuable New Bridge. The Chief Architect of the City of Bratislava Stefan Slachta called the 22-floor Aupark Tower "an exclamation mark of arrogance". The city part of Petrzalka then led by a Mr. Bajan, permitted this tower despite disagreement of the City of Bratislava and in violation of existing regulations. Which respectable tenants reside in the controversial building (and undoubtedly agreed to rent way before the building was legalised): Telefonica O2, Eset, GTS Nextra and IBM, to name but a few. Great corporate citizenship, guys.)

How many Twitter followers do you need to qualify?

2009-09-25T21:55:00.001+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

250+ to become the Senior Manager of Emerging Media Marketing (via Conversation Starter). BTW, Brett Tilford proposed the number of Twitter followers as a hiring signal in a comment on Dan Schawbel's blog.
Oh yeah, this is old news. I missed it.

Oh, and I would not qualify.

Warning: ApartmentsNYC911.com may not deliver what they promise

2009-09-15T07:28:00.022+01:00

UPDATE September 1, 2010 - just a heads up to potential victims - I am investigating what I suspect is another alias for Izumi von Hardenberg. Similar apartments with similar descriptions (seven) are now being offered on a site called NYC No Fee Apartments Rentals (nycnofeeapartmentrentals.com) and via Tripadvisor (and the related FlipKey service but also, in keeping with Izumi's old MO, on Craigslist) with the owner name given as "Mariko Okada", contact phone 1-347-856-8817 and creative email addresses such as "hotdog2389@gmail.com", "hotdog2389@lycos.com" Those familiar with the Japanese film industry (or Google users) will know that Mariko Okada is a well known Japanese actress. On request, Mariko will share a list of bogus-sounding references from people (see it reproduced on Positively Michael forum and if you need further proof, Google the phone number listed as a reference). If you've had positive or negative experience dealing with the Mariko Okada or NYCNoFeeRentals.com, do share in the comments!

In October 2008 Izumi von Hardenberg nearly ruined our New York vacation. Since then, literally hundreds of people have found my blog post on the experience. I have no doubt this has hurt Izumi's business that has reportedly caused trouble for many unsuspecting New York visitors.

I was therefore amused but not too surprised to find out Izumi and her pals have abandoned the ApartmentsNYCity domain name, one of the websites they used to operate from (the site was not working as of today and the domain registration has lapsed in July 2009). Instead they are now trying to attract customers on a new site ApartmentsNYC911.com.

How do I know it is the same people? Well, for the start they have simply taken the template from apartmentsnycity.com and forgot to change the page title (see screenshot). In addition, the email adresses are the same (cheapartmentsnyc@gmail.com) and the voice on the voicemail of the contact number listed at apartments nyc 911 website is the same as the Izumi I communicated with last year.

This post, dated to literally a few days before my 2008 trip, actually describes the modus operandi I had experienced:

She baits you by telling you the apartment is available then switches the apartment and wants more money and wants to put you in a different location.

The author also says she's already changed company names three times. I wouldn't be a least bit surprised if she even stopped using her personal name in business correspondence since anyone who Google's her comes across many negative reviews and warnings. The possible reincarnations include luxsuites.biz (with the new contact number (917) 575-0623), luxurysuites911.com, TheCheapApartmentsNYC and the seemingly legit HHRDEVELOPMENT Corporation (on hhrdevelopmentcorp.com).

Here is my advice: DO NOT USE APARTMENTSNYC911.COM unless you are aware of the risks. Based on my experience a service associated with Izumi von Hardenberg could be very unreliable.

(I have updated this article to be more neutral in tone and present a more balanced view).

The shortest, 3-letter URL shorteners - The Definitive List

2009-09-05T13:47:00.005+01:00

Welcome j.mp, a new 3-letter shortener "powered by bit.ly" and the 8th addition to this list, as well as re.p.ly (promising near real-time tracking of comments in social sites regarding the shortened URL) and now also the russian 0.mk:

1. 3.ly
2. z.pe
3. u.nu
4. a.gd
5. a.nf
6. r.im
7. l.pr
8. j.mp
9. p.ly
10. 0.mk

See my earlier post on URL shorteners for criteria on choosing the one to use.

Hotel Therma Dunajska Streda - the Good and the Bad (There is No Ugly)

2009-07-20T14:47:00.008+01:00

We spent a long weekend at the Hotel Therma in Dunajska Streda, a small wellness hotel. I've been working with hotels for six years now and I have become a very picky critic so after visiting the Therma, I really felt like doing a short write up to benefit other picky potential guests.

How We Chose
We decided more or less on a whim to spend a long weekend outside of Bratislava. We did not want to travel far and wanted a nice hotel, reasonably priced, with a swimming pool.

I've had my eyes on the Therma ever since they were reviewed in Horeca, a trade magazine we subscribe to. I don't remember the details of the review but what stuck with me was the management response. I remember distinctly the manager was very welcoming of all criticism and saw it as an opportunity for improvement. That's not always the attitude, of course. More often than not managers get defensive when they are criticised and look for excuses.

The Therma webpage is beyong complicated - at one point I almost gave up on making the reservation because I couldn't load portions of the page in Firefox. I called their info line, where the (Hungarian-accented) lady was very friendly but ended up reserving online anyway since I could tell from her voice she dreaded the idea of taking all my personal details over the phone.

I liked the extra night free deal - in effect we spent three nights with breakfast for two adults and a baby for EUR 238, including some treatments (a Thai wrap, solarium, which we never used). All in all I think this is a good deal.

Location
Dunajska Streda is a mainly ethnic Hungarian town little less than an hour from Bratislava (unless there is rush hour traffic). The Hotel is very well signposted around Dunajska Streda, although there was a bit of confusion and signs lacking at a few points near the main road. But we found the hotel easily enough.

The first surprise was the hotel was located in an industrial zone surrounded by warehouses and assembly halls. This meant that the neighbourhood was not very well suited for walks - a big minus for us. The view from our window (pictured here) was of trucks followed by a green horizon.

The hotel itself is a compound consisting of the residential building, which looks like a rebuilt worker hostel, a new lobby and restaurant, wellness and the garden.

There was ample parking right in front of the hotel with a few out of town cars (Bratislava and Czech) and several cars of locals, apparently visiting the wellness.

Look and Feel
Upon entry, there was an odd, but not unpleasant faux-Asian ambience with a little wooden bridge, fountain, large fish tank.

The hotel itself was done up in colourful pastels with a lot of orange, yellow, blue. The furniture oscillates between traditional, tacky asian, colonial. It looked a little cheap but inoffensively so. All in all I see why the photo gallery in the hotel website does not really show very much (there are lots of photos but many of them show details of food and such).

The hotel's true highlight were the staff. Every encounter we had from the first receptionist who welcomed us, through restaurant and bar staff was pleasant. We genuinely felt welcome throughout our stay and there was never bitter taste of feeling that someone was trying to cheat or short-change us. When we came for breakfast or dinner buffet a waiter ushered us in and showed us around the buffet. On several occasions we were offered service that went beyond what we could reasonably expect (e.g. a head waiter offered to bring our unfinished bottle of sect to our room, at self-service dinner a waitress said I shouldn't wait for the grilled fish and brought it when it was done).

Every breakfast there was a fresh issue of the "Morning Post", the hotel newsletter. I loved the little touch (I haven't seen this done anywhere else before). The alliteratively named Hotel Therma General Manager Tihamer Tamas Toth welcomed arriving guests by name in the newsletter (I though some people may object on privacy grounds), there was weather info, info on temperature of water in the pools, special offers, lunch and dinner menu, a joke (not sure about copyright on these but they were genuinely funny: A frog with a paper bag on her head comes to a pharmacy. "Oh, my god. What's wrong?" the pharmacist asks. "Damn. Can't you tell this is a robbery?" the frog replies), local tips, wine suggestions...

In the lobby there is a large table with sofas and lots of newspapers and magazines, as well as a free computer with internet access.

The Room
The room we were assigned was a large corner room - nothing the designer should brag about but definitely solid and with quality furnishings. American-style high beds with box spring the hotel brags about had quality bed linens including an oversized pillow and another nice small pillow. There was a large desk, large closet, a few chairs.

The room was not air-conditioned (unlike a family-suite, which we asked to see and declined at EUR 20 extra per night, which had an air conditioned bed-room section but too small to fit the baby cot). Instead there was a very effective ceiling fan. The room was extremely warm most of our stay so the fan was a necessity and it was sufficient to make the room livable (we had to move the baby cot under the fan as well though, since away from the fan the room really was too warm).

The bathroom was also generous with a huge bath tub, two sinks, toilet, nice clean tiling. The fixtures were of good quality, which is definitely not the standard in other Slovak hotels, including other four-star hotels.

The minibar was very well stocked and extremely reasonably priced - soft drinks were less than EUR 1.50, which actually surprised me as cheap.

I never saw the housekeeping staff but I though they did a good job (though I did notice they left the drinking glasses unwashed).

As an avid reader of everyhting I liked there were ample little instruction materials on things like how to use the bathroom fixtures, minibar, safety, etc.

Dining
You know food is very high on my list of priorities. Generally, in the south of Slovakia the food is better than in the rest of the country. The Therma met my expectations in this respect.

First there was the breakfast buffet. Without exaggeration this was the best breakfast I've seen at a Slovak hotel (some four-star or five-star breakfasts abroad have been better). The selection was incredible. Just off the top of my head I will try to list what was on offer:
- a Hubert sect or Vilmos as aperitif (poured by the waiter)
- warm selection (sausages, grilled vegetables)
- goulash soup
- cold meats, cheese
- fake caviar, fake salmon
- treska
- fresh fruit
- selection of cereal
- warm and cold milk
- bryndza (surprisingly, given the region, some of the best I've had in a while)
- 4 or 5 kinds of bread
- fornetti pastries
- pancakes
- egg bar with eggs made to order
- different salads

Other than the stale bread one day the breakfast was perfect.

The dinner buffet was served at EUR 9.90 per person. At first we thought this was too much but the food was tasty and again there was great selection every day including two soups, several salads, cold cuts, three main dishes + grill. The dinner buffet moved venues every day, which was a nice change as well.

The wait staff were excellent. Genuinely welcoming and friendly, just the way waiters should be.

The hotel claimed several dining venues but I thought they all served the same menu. Also, everything closed by 10 pm so you were left with the minibar afterward. The nice bit, if you had effective enough mosquito spray on hand, was that you could take all your meals on the outdoor terrace (pictured here at breakfast with the egg bar).

One of the nights we ate fried fish and chips at a place round the corner from the hotel, this was also delicious and great value.

Wellness
The wellness at the Hotel Therma was fairly small. A warm pool with a small jacuzzi section, three other even warmer sit down pools, a Kneipp foot bath (a warm and cold elongated pools you are meant to walk through, alternating), a small power shower back massage room. There was also a nice but small outdoor thermal pool.

The nice part was that the wellness was clean and there were very few people at most times. I did miss a kiddy pool (but liked the funnily named Deckoland with toys on the ground floor).

In addition there were saunas but I never discovered these since there were no signs (there was also a bowling alley at the hotel I never discovered).

Outdoors there was also a tennis court and the Japanese gardens. I didn't quite understand these, they seemed a little unhygienic and pretty small and there were tons of mosquitoes so I never spent much time wondering around.

The highlight for me though was the "Asia Spa" - with Thai massage therapists. With a 60-minute Thai massage for EUR 25 (cheaper than the EUR 40 Bratislava standard or the budget EUR 28 massage at Michalska, with an additional 25% discount available if you register at the hotel webpage). I had a Thai wrap (peeling followed by warm oil and being wrapped in plastic, which is not quite my kind of treatment) and a traditional Thai massage, which was painful but superb. This alone makes the Therma worth going to, in my view.

Verdict
At the end of our stay we felt that while there was little remarkable about the Therma, we actually enjoyed the stay. I appreciated the scale - the fact that the place wasn't packed, the good food and decent enough wellness facilities (with special mention for the Thai massage). What carried the experience for us, though, were the remarkable Hotel Therma staff - for once, I felt welcome and appreciated as a guest at a hotel in Slovakia.

A few cool things to try with Facebook ads

2009-07-04T21:29:00.008+01:00

I've been playing around quite a bit with Facebook ads over the last few weeks and have some interesting theories to test. I have to say I like the system a lot for its simplicity, targetting possibilities and the ad format with picture included (one negative to mention is having to wait for manual review of your ad text after any, even very minor change, such as capitalisation).

I first played around with Slovak and English ads for BratislavaHotels.com. The Slovak ads featuring a toilet bowl (from a guest photo taken at a hotel in Bratislava) did generate some interest, but I have no way of gauging their actual effectiveness (their objective was to let Slovaks know BratislavaHotels.com is a good place to get help finding accommodation for their guests). The English language ads performed poorly - the two campaign had a total of 42 clicks, since there was no reasonable way of targetting them to a qualified crowd.

A few months ago I ran a campaign to sell my car. I was trying to sell my Alfa Romeo 147 in the middle of the Slovak car-scrapping craze in May. I advertised on Autovia, a leading Slovak car classifieds site, but was not receiving too many calls.

I then put and ad on Facebook with a photo of the car and managed to get almost 1,200 people in Slovakia over the age of 18 to visit my Autovia ad for $125. I did end up finding a buyer, as well.

For the past 10 days or so, I've been running a (massively successful) campaign for designDOT, a new Slovak school of interior design for hobby designers (the 'client', due to personal ties, gave me almost unlimited freedom in experimenting with the campaign and let me have input into landing page design as well).

I've had a chance to play around with targetting (separate ads for women and men, breaking down ads by age groups), budgetting, landing pages, etc.

Two things really intrigue me about the Facebook ads system:
1. Due to the wealth of info Facebook has on its users, you can play around with crazy targetting. You can target ads by very narrow age bands (e.g. you can advertise specifically to 26-year olds, 30-year olds, etc.), by employer, sexual orientation. This lends itself to creating ads that mention the user's age or exploit the other detailed info.
2. This is a hypothesis, which have to test a lot more, but it sounds reasonable. Since advertisers set maximum daily budgets and (at least based on my experience) sometimes use them up in full before the end of the day, a given demographic should be cheaper to reach towards the end of the day in its timezone. There is no "day parting" at the moment, so this can only be done manually. But for some advertisers this could be worthwhile - turn on your ads in the evening and let them end at the end of the day.

I am going to try to entice my colleagues at Pizza SEO to take part in (and bankroll) some more experimentation because I think there is a lot of value in Facebook Ads at the moment.

Were you looking for information on cool things to put on Facebook?

Five more three-letter URL shorteners

2009-06-09T08:39:00.004+01:00

Last week I posted about the three shortest URL shorteners I found.

I browsed a little more and discovered several more three-letter (plus dot) URL shorteners with a single letter domain name and a two-letter TLD.

Two of these short URL services seem to share the same interface: a.gd and a.nf. They both offer a few extra features: own url, tracking, expiration date for links, password protection.

You think, therefore r.im, says the shortener site. No extra options but a Twitter account to follow, which publishes every URL added, it's r.im short version and information on what percentage of characters was saved in the process.

Then there is x.vu, currently in beta. I like their tag line: Because every character counts! The options are limited at the moment.

Finally, I discover l.pr (via Techcrunch). Their twist is you can add any text after a slash (basically to comment on the URL) and it still resolves: http://l.pr/a414v/My_Blog,_Peeps (Techcrunch notes this sort of defeats the purpose, of course).

So my full list of three-letter URL shorteners currently stands at eight and I have a feeling there are more to be found.

The three shortest URL shorteners in the world

2009-05-31T20:45:00.004+01:00

I have been interested in URL shorteners for a while - a good URL shortener helps a tiny bit in squeezing as much thought as possible into 140 character tweets on Twitter.

I have taken a liking to a Swedish shortener x.se (not only because it spells sex). Sadly, the Swedes are making a huge mistake - their canonical urls require a www, adding four unnecessary characters to the URL.

Recently, I spotted a URL in my Twitter stream with a single-character domain name and two-character TLD. I went ahead and searched around for other shorteners of the same length. Surprisingly, several of the most prominent lists of URL shorteners (hongkiat's "ultimate" list, 6uold's long list or the list of 90+ services at mashable) missed the three I am about to present, although these are probably the most effective shorteners around.

So here is Andrej's list of the world's shortest URL shortening services:
1. 3.LY - THE WINNER
3.LY, the three-letter URL service says it is the SHORTEST in the world. It generated a URL with ONLY TWO LETTERS after the / - a total length of seven characters. Obviously, they can't keep up the URL length for long but three letters come next and that's still pretty awesome. The creator can be found on Twitter (@threely) and the service apparently only launched on May 24, 2009.

2. Z.PE - THE RUNNER-UP
Z.PE bills itself as the shortest URL shortener, seems like they are wrong, though. They generated a URL for me with three characters after the /, making the complete URL a total of eight characters. Still pretty neat!

3. U.NU - SECOND RUNNER-UP
U.NU is the third and final URL shortener with a three-character (or four if you count the dot) URL. "the shortest urls. period." is what u.nu says. The URL it generated for me had four characters after the /, so it is longer than the previous two (quite possibly simply because it is more popular). Of the three, I like the sound of u.nu best. I find it neat as the URL reads like words with meaning (you knew), sort of like is.gd, another neat-sounding URL shortener.

Of course, I haven't explored the shorteners' tracking capabilities and other advanced features. 3.ly promises tracking is coming soon, there are limited capabilities at u.nu (you can find out the number of times the link has been used by appending a ? at the end of URL) and none at z.pe.

What do you think? Know of any other three-character shorteners? Or would you like to be the first to start the URL shortening metaservice?

Tatra Banka: Beating a Dead Horse

2009-02-25T15:15:00.006+01:00

The creative folks at Tatrabanka are back, this time with a new card reader device. They have listened to the multitude of user complaints (so far even heeded my warning about single-sided moves). So they have introduced a key-ring card reader (called a minicitacka) as an alternative to the calculator-size reader (without calculator functionality).

Well, guess what, Tatrabanka: people hated your heavy handed tactics in introducing increased security with massively increased hassle and judging by the discussion with the eTrend article (in Slovak) announcing the new device, adding a key ring isn't enough to make things OK.

The images published by Tatrabanka are limited, but from the instructions it appears this little wonder is controlled by the combination of a dialing wheel and a button. Must be fun to dial and button in a 12-digit account number followed by say four digits for the amount to transfer...

If your sentimentometer tells you I am too harsh on Tatra Banka, check out what this poor American thinks about using the calculator.

My pledge holds: if you make me sign in using this ugly little device (or its dysfunctional larger twin), I will close my accounts with you (all six).

And a side note, just to get this off my chest: in mid-February I came to a Tatra Banka branch to deposit a cheque from the USA. We receive checks from our US partner at BratislavaHotels.com every month and Tatra Banka has happily charged us 400 crowns (approx. EUR 13.30) for depositing each for five years.

Suddenly, the teller announced that as of February 1 they no longer allow depositing checks in accounts. What should I do with the check, I asked. "Mmmm, do you have an account at another bank?" No, I don't (but soon I likely will). Well, then I don't know.

A brief lesson in customer service, dear Tatrabanka: if you want to discontinue a service that some of your long-term clients use (even if the service itself is loss-making, since I imagine that is the reason to discontinue it), notify them in advance. Someone at Tatrabanka should have pulled up a list of customers who deposited a check in the last say 24 months. Someone should have taken the time to contact them (phone, email, internet banking) and give them an advance warning of say a month or two, so that they can talk to their correspondents and arrange for alternative means of payment. It's not so hard to do and all it takes is a bit of customer-centric thinking. Sadly, the one-time leader in banking innovation in Slovakia has little capacity for that.

Things I noticed giving up the Crown for the Euro

2009-01-28T23:14:00.005+01:00

On January 1, 2009 the Euro became the official currency here in Slovakia replacing the Slovak crown.

1. Before the switch
There was nervousness long before the D date about price increases. The government and media kept telling people how worried they are about businesses "abusing" the switch to enact "unwarranted" price increases.

One of the key economic news topics in December was what was not going to work after the switch. The banks had arrangements in place to shut down some services (internet banking for a few days) and ATM machines for a few hours.

Oh, and Google screwed Slovak Adwords advertisers (while Moneybookers didn't (in Slovak).

2. The giddy Day One
I shopped at my local Tesco on January 2 (January 1 is a holiday). I paid in crowns but received my change in euros. In this way within two days all the crowns in my wallet were gone and I was 'switched'.

The cashiers asked everyone whether they would be paying crowns or euros. Some people said Euros with a proud smirk. It was a funny feeling, yet another important marker on our way to become 'first class' Europeans.

ATM machines here supposedly usually have slots for four notes. The banks reportedly fed the euros in two slots a few days before the New Year, minimising the downtime required to switch. For a few days you were only able to get EUR 50s and 10s in some machines or 20s and 10s.

3. Nominal schnominal?
I am trained as an economist and I know there is no money illusion and nominal does not matter to a rational person. Nominal of course does matter (and there are loads of evidence in behavioural economics literature).

We tipped by rounding up in crowns before. E.g. you'd leave 100 on an 82-95 crown bill. Traditionally people would simply round up to the nearest 10 and in recent years in classier establishments to nearest 20, 50 or even 100.

With euros, even rounding up to the nearest euro sounds cheap to our ear yet a euro is 30.126 crowns. So people first did not tip at all, I believe out of fear of under or overtipping. I tipped a taxi driver who delivered sushi a little over a euro towards the end of the first euro-week. He told me this was his first tip in the New Year and other taxi drivers confirmed people had ceased up tipping.

With the government sponsored price abuse hysteria, many businesses are keeping weird an uneven euro prices to avoid any semblance of the derided 'machinations during switch from crown to euro'. This is inefficient and annoying but sooner or later I am sure this will stop.

There are some data probably interesting for economists on what portion of currency in circulation was withdrawn within the first fifteen days through retail shops. There is other data on people bringing in cash to the bank days before the switch to have it converted seamlessly and legends of dodgy cash buyers of expensive apartments helping fuel our real estate bubble.

We have made the switch now complaint of the day seems to be that we have to now carry too many coins and they don't fit in a normal wallet (I would add the bills don't fit in the beautiful and RFID-fraud safe Flipside Wallet (TM)).

Crown to Euro Brings Along Fines for Abusers

2009-01-28T22:55:00.005+01:00

The Slovak Commerce Inspection will issue the first fine to a company that abused the currency switch from Slovak Crown to the Euro to unjustifiedly increase prices. The Inspection "proved" there was a 50% increase by a children's game machines operator in the Trnava region.

Euro became Slovakia's official currency on January 1, 2009 when the country became the 16th member of the Eurozone. For 15 days the currencies circulated in parallel but now crowns can only be exchanged in banks.

The Inspection reportedly (in Slovak) received 460 complaints from citizens, 260 concerning price increases (the rest probably on issues such as not posting prices in both currencies as required).

There is a Price Board/Council in place, led by an older guy from old-school employer association, to monitor prices. The Council identifies sensitive areas. They have now promised to take a close look at changes in taxi prices, hairdressers, restaurants and school dorms.

I did tell you they were crazy!

P.S. I am required by law to disclose to you here that the official conversion rate is 30,1260 crowns to the Euro.

Five Bs I loved in Istanbul

2008-11-19T21:27:00.005+01:00

I just spent five days in Istanbul with my family (I am doing another post on the travel details since I have a few useful Istanbul tips). We loved Istanbul, even if it was a challenge with an eight-month old. So here is a quick rundown of the things I really appreciated there:

1. Baby-Friendly
Istanbul is definitely not baby friendly in any conventional way. The streets are steep, pedestrian sidewalks narrow at best (but often non-existent). In the hilly neighbourhoods (all of Istanbul we saw) there are often uneven steps on the pavements, forcing the stroller onto the road. There, cars and motorcycles speed by, honking horns.

But Istanbulians love babies. Everywhere we went with the baby the people were unimagineably warm. When I walk around Bratislava with the stroller (and especially with the baby sling) I get a lot of smiles and some friendly comments but few people would engage with the baby. In Istanbul the BABY was the centre of attention. Everybody everywhere smiled, made sounds (in the photo the guard at Hagia Sophia baby talks the baby in the sling), people would come up to pat him on the head, sometimes kiss his hand. Waiter and shop assistant would pick him up and carry him around, entertaining him. Every parent (unless, of course, you are particularly worried about communicable diseases) knows how gratifying it is when people show love for their child.

What struck us was that this was most often men (in Bratislava it will usually be women) although the explanation may simply be that most people out were men. Our baby loved the attention but also this made our job of keeping him happy throughout the day a lot easier.

2. Beyoğlu
Whether luck or my obsessively extensive, professionally biassed travel research, we picked the right neighbourhood in Istanbul. We stayed in Cihangir, a part of the Beyoglu district between the well known Taksim Square and Kabataş.

Beyoglu was once the seat of Greeks, Jews, Levantines and Armenians but aparently declined after all of these people left Turkey. But it is now a vibrant mixture of gentrified and run down, residential and commercial, Turkish and Cosmopolitan.

We loved it from the amazing Art Nouveau architecture, through stunning Bosphorus views through neighbouthood shops, bakeries, restaurants. There was such a healthy mix of modern and authentic. People out late into the night and just a good vibe.

We simply enjoyed walking around the neighbourhood and that's what we did the most in our five days in Istanbul. We briefly ventured into the glorified Sultanahmet across the river but felt much more at home in Beyoglu.

3. Bidets
The Turks are so civilised. In our hotel but also at the Airport, in restaurants and at the Grand Bazaar there was always a bidet built in to the toilet (or a separate water outlet for the same purpose in the so-called Turkish toilets).

A bidet is used for intimate personal hygiene - it is a stream of water directed at your behind, which lets you wash rather than just wipe after using the toilet. I am embarrassed to say I had never used one prior to this visit to Istanbul but now I am determined to have one installed as soon as we get a chance.

Having seen their ubiquity in Turkey I am sure Turkish people must look funny at the rest of us when travelling abroad. Of course, the above assumes that people actually use the facilities but then, if they didn't use them I think they probably would not spend the extra to install them everywhere?

In the photo from our hotel the bidet attachment is running (the stream of water in the middle of the bowl). You operate it using the valve on the left.

4. Bad Driving
Especially on our first day I was always worried for our safety - you have to be constantly on the look out because Istanbul taxi drivers drive fast, as do other locals. There is no courtesy in traffic - you see an opening, you move. If you wait everybody starts passing you by.

Cars will make U-turns in the most unlikely places. There will be cars parked on pavements or so close behind each other that you cannot cross the road in between.

Yet in this aparent chaos there seems to be order. Perhaps the lack of rules keeps people on their toes but everyody we saw driving did really well. Cars would squeeze through narrow constrictions and drivers skillfully maneouvred their way through traffic.

My theory (which I first explored in Holland where as a pedestrian you had to be constantly on the lookout for bikes) is that the heavy traffic helps preserve people's faculties into their old age. After getting into the every man for himself mentality I actually liked dealing with the traffic - I felt every road crossing made me a stronger man.

5. Baklava
I am a fan of cakes, which are less sweet. I like my chocolate dark and my bananas green. I constantly harass the baking (read older female) part of my family to cut the amount of sugar in their cakes (usually, using half the sugar in the magazine recipe works just right). This would, of course, make me an unlikely candidate to enjoy the ultimate in sweet cakes - Turkish baklava.

Thin layers of filo dough, chopped pistachios and other nuts and rich sugary syrup. Sometimes chocolate, sometimes (I am not sure about this one) condensed milk? Amazing stuff. The Turks really have this down.

On about day two of our Istanbul stay I bought two pieces of baklava and was hooked. Every subsequent day the number of pieces of baklava I ate grew exponentially. I tried baklava from a large commercialised bakery, from numerous smaller vendors and ended up liking the locally made fress Cihangir Bakery baklava best.

We bought about three boxes to take home as gifts and for our own use the night before departure, then felt this was not enough and bought another few boxes on the day of departure. In duty free, we bought two more just in case.

Come see me, I will show you what I'm talking about.

Countdown to 2008 Elfyourself

2008-11-13T13:11:00.003+01:00

This year the elves will be back - only three days to go! On November 17 you can again upload face shots of family and friends to ElfYourself.com and turn them into dancing elves.

The problem with ElfYourself last year was that it was unclear how this massively successful viral campaign benefited its financiers (an office supply chain I still prefer not to name here). Simply said very few of the people who liked the campaign actually remembered the office chain - many in fact thought it was the other (better known) office chain that was behind the campaign.

I can't wait to see whether and how the makers of ElfYourself have taken the criticism on board this year.

Disqus Now Installed

2008-11-05T13:44:00.002+01:00

Having seen Disqus in action on avc.com I have decided to experiment with it a little on this blog.

Renting an apartment from Izumi von Hardenberg, apartmentsnycity.com? Beware.

2008-10-24T10:03:00.007+01:00

UPDATE: This story had been up for a few hours and already people have been coming looking for "Izumi von Hardenberg complaint". There seem to be many of us! Please leave a comment if you've been ripped off by Izumi.

I have been meaning to write up my recent experience trying to rent an apartment for a week in New York through an Izumi von Hardenberg of the website apartmentsnycity.com (also operating through thecheapapartmentsnyc.com, advertising on vacationhomerentals.com, craigslist, and many other places). This is a frustrating episode that takes a good half hour to tell in person and is filled with twists too funny and weird to believe.

At the same time, I wanted to get this information out to other potential victims of Izumi's crazy bait and switch antics and perhaps save someone from what we had to go through (and possibly save them a lot of money). There are other reports on Izumi von Hardenberg on Rip-off Report (a search for Izumi von Hardenberg on the website shows up more and yet more can be found with the alternative spelling Izumi von Hardenburg), based on what we experienced I believe every single one of them.

Izumi advertised an apartment at apartmentsnycity.com on Craigslist. I emailed her on September 8 asking about availability from October 2 and she confirmed it was available but suggested upgrading to another property she called Most luxurious Times Square 3-bedroom 2 bathrooms Apartment No. 1, quoting it at $440 per night for three people.

I confirmed I wished to book. She suddenly increased the price to $460 per night, claiming that information on her website was out of date (conveniently ignoring that she had quoted the rate herself in email a day prior). After a bit of negotiation she agreed on a price of $3075 for the whole week (works out $440 per night) and requested that I send her a deposit of $1050 on PayPal (the deposit was to be 30%).

I felt uneasy simply sending money to a random address. I asked that she at least send me a PayPal request specifying what apartment the deposit was for, ideally from an email address associated with the website I was booking through.

"No need to worry we do this as business, we have many apartments, just sent money request email us after you pay. Izumi",

came the reply.

Following her PayPal request I sent her $1100 to secure the most luxurious apartment on September 11.

On September 19 Izumi wrote requesting our names ASAP for authorization in the building.

On September 23 suddenly this message arrived:
Thecheap Apartmentsnyc to me - 10/2-9 SORRY THE CHANGE OF APARTMENT N4K

We're sorry we have landload problem at the apartment you booked, can you instead take a 3bedroom 2 full bathrooms 43rd street and 8th avenue? It is basically the same, except for 4 block ddiffence and it is close to the Times Square . We're sorry let us know ASAP

I think I can let our subsequent email exchange speak for itself.

Andrej to Thecheap, Sep 24

Hi. This is a very unpleasant surprise. Can you please send photos and description of the other apartment?

Thecheap Apartmentsnyc to me, Sep 25

Can you email me about the pictures tomorrow? I will get them then

Andrej to Thecheap, Sep 26

Hi, I am emailing about the pictures.
At this stage we have little choice due to timing - we will take the apartment unless there is some major problem with it.
Please let me know how and when we will get the keys. We are arriving at Newark at 1 pm on Oct 2 and making our way to the apartment.

Thecheap Apartmentsnyc to me, Sep 27 - Re: 10/2-9 SORRY THE CHANGE OF APARTMENT 3w $380 and 58th 2br $380

We're so sorry We lost the 3bed as well. So now what we have available is 58th st 2br 2nd ave, 3 nights 10/2-5 $380/night and 10/5-9 2br 47th st and 9th ave, also $380/night. If you can book this I'll arrange transportation between apartments. Pictures attached is 47th st and 9th ave 2br

Thecheap Apartmentsnyc to me, Sep 27 - 10/2-9 I'm working on if you could stay at 3bed 2 bath whole time

Please email me your phone number. 3bed 2 bath whole time, as originally planned, so please give me 1 day and I'll email as soon as I know. Please fill out meantime.

Thecheap Apartmentsnyc to me, Sep 27 - 10/2-9 n4k 10/2-9 3p 3bed 2 bath $3075 including cleaning deposit $1050 Everything is set at this apartment

Everything is set at this apartment 360 west 43rd st, apt.n4k Please fill out below, do you need airport pick up?

Andrej to Thecheap, Sep 28

Hi Izumi,
Thank you for sorting this out.
If you are charging us the same price, we expect the apartment to be of the same standard as originally agreed (high speed internet connection, conveniently located near public transportation – access to many major subway lines is available within few minutes, luxury 600-thread count 100% Egyptian cotton sateen sheets and premium Avanti towels, views). Please confirm this.
Regarding the airport transfer, how much do you charge?
Kind regards,
Andrej

Thecheap Apartmentsnyc to me, Sep 28

Hi, the problem is the internet, since it is a new apartment, cable is not there yet, is this a problem with you? You can get internet at starbacks, about $35, which I will pay and you get access for the whole month, or I'm sure there is wireless from neighbors in the apartment, let me know ASAP. If this is absolutely important to you then we may have to change the apartment.
(high speed internet connection, This is a new apartment and cable service is not installed yet, but I believe you can take neighbor's wireless conecction --Is this very important to you?
conveniently located near public transportation – access to many major subway lines is available within few minutes, Yes, 42 nd and 7th ave, 7 lines there, 2 blocks away
luxury 600-thread count 100% Egyptian cotton sateen sheets and premium Avanti towels, Yes
views). Just city view, 4th floor
Please confirm this. Neark $55 each way

Andrej to Thecheap, Sep 28

Hi, we will be three persons each with a computer and will need to connect at least twice per day each. If we can reliably connect to a wifi in the building, we will be fine but if not it will be a major inconvenience. In that case we will need three starbucks memberships and some compensation for the coffees we will have to keep buying to be able to sit around.
Also no cable means no TV?? Either way a discount is in order, since you had advertised views, roof deck and what not.
Regarding the airport pickup, if the price you quoted is per vehicle (not per person), we would like to order the pickup

Thecheap Apartmentsnyc to me, Sep 28

Please contact Adonis for pick up, $55 for the entire car. We'll check out the wifi, and I'll buy you 3 starbucks connection, and I'll give you $10/day for coffee. However this is more expensive apartment, rent there is $5000/month since it is closer to Times Squrae. Is this o.k with you?

Andrej to Thecheap, Sep 28

Thanks for the prompt reply.
1. How or where do I contact Adonis?
2. Ok on the rest
Best regards,
Andrej

Great, right? Izumi did cause us a little stress but she did get us sorted in the end. WRONG.

On Oct 1, a day before our arrival, Thecheap Apartmentsnyc wrote:

Sorry somebody who booked 8 months ago contacted me today. I didn't have them in my booking, but they did pay 8 month ago. So I have n4k 3bed available 1 day, buts can you take other apartment apt. 1 below 10/3-9, it is not as nice or as big, but only $360/night and it does have high-speed internet ready. We're very soory, just let us know:Pictures attached

Andrej to Thecheap Apartmentsnyc, Oct 1

Hi, Ms. von Hardenberg or whoever sends these unsigned emails,
This is beyond belief.
Please provide us with what you have repeatedly promised or provide us with adequate compensation for having to exchange over 20 (!) emails to book an apartment to find out two days before arrival that the fourth apartment you have offered us is not available and you intend to move us between two apartments neither of which meets the criteria of what you originally confirmed and took over $1000 Paypal deposit for!
This is the worst accommodation service I have experienced.
Please let me know ASAP.

Thecheap Apartmentsnyc to me, Oct 1

adequate payment, how much you can pay for the 2br below? normally $360 the 3bed is $460/night, how much total are you willing to pay?

Andrej to Thecheap Apartmentsnyc, Oct 1

Hi, we are willing to pay the $3075 including cleaning charge for a 3 bedroom apartment of the standard you originally took our deposit for! We were not looking to save more money.
We do not wish to move apartments and we were not looking for a 2-bedroom. We will stay the week for $1500 and just forget about this whole experience or we will pay you the full price listed for this 2BR place on your website ($299.99 plus $20 per night per person more for more than 2 people), which makes it $2240 but will feel at liberty to publicize this ordeal in full detail.

Thecheap Apartmentsnyc to me

Hi, I will look for a better place to stay because I can't do $2240, give me till tomorrow I just asked my assistant to look for a place.

Thecheap Apartmentsnyc to me, Oct 1 - 10/2-9 Really sorry we messed up

Really sorry we messed up, right now only apartment we have is 2br below 10/6-9. I will find a place for 10/2-6, if Ibed is o.k, then I have a place 6th ave and 50th st, sleeps 5 people 10/2-6 and if you can take the 2br then we can do $250/night. Just so sorry our booking system got so messed up. Or I can recommend you a hotel 10/2-6, and I pay you $100 relocation fee, just let me know ASAP, we still have time to locate an apartment 10/2-6 Really Really sorry.

Thecheap Apartmentsnyc, Oct 1 - 9/2-9 Very odd proposal 4 days $900 Can you call me 917 362 9280?

Very add proposal, and I know you'll be very inconvinienced, however the price is really good. We can do 3bed 2 bath 1 night 9/2, then 2br 34th st 3 nights 10/6-9 and for the total of 4 nights I can do $900 Then I'll find you a hotel 3 nights. The best is priceline, you can pick up stuff starting $200/night, even if you take 2 rooms, still like $400, let me know if you need my help locating a hotel. We're really sorry to put you through this. Sincerely apologize. Can you call me?

Andrej to Thecheap, Oct 1

I just tried to call. It is now the morning here and you're probably asleep.
I insist you provide us with accommodation for the seven days we have paid a deposit for. We will move once, if necessary.
My phone number is XXX XXX XXXXXX, call me as soon as possible.
Andrej

Thecheap Apartmentsnyc to me, Oct 1 - 10/2-9 I found a place for 3 nights 10/2-6

W18th st and 8th ave only $300/night, so your total is $1800 oppesed to %3075 It is inconvinient to move, but you save lots of money you can use it for dinner etc. Let me know ASAp, I have to make a deposit to secure this

Andrej to Thecheap, Oct 1

We have money for dinner. You do not mention size of place, etc.

Andrej to Thecheap, Oct 1

Hi, I have been trying to call at the number you sent me yesterday since about 8:15 your time this morning.
We will take any reasonable apartment you can get us. Please call me at +XXX XXX XXXXXX ASAP.

Finally, after hours of trying (from 8 am Izumi's time, got through to her about 2:30 pm) we spoke. I was livid. Izumi suggested we take a 3-bedroom for one night, find a hotel for the next three nights and move back to a 2-bedroom for the final three night. "You find us a hotel!" I insisted. "You took over a thousand dollars as deposit for a week, now you are taking no responsibility!". Izumi hung up. I called back. She never responded to anything I said, beyond saying "Right, right, right, right, right" a few times.

She then suggested she would book a one bedroom apartment for the three in-between nights for us. I said ok, if the apartment is of decent standard and there is room for the three of us (adult males) to sleep. She said something about sofa beds and then asked if one of us could sleep on an air mattress. I said fine but then she said we would have to pay for it, because she would have to buy it and bring it there...

After we hung up, Izumi called back. She politely asked that when we arrive at the apartment N4K on 360 west 43rd street, we should not tell the doormen we were renting anything. "Just say you are going to N4K. Call me if there is a problem." This reassuring exchange of course meant we were unsure the whole way on the plane whether we would even get into the building... This blog post, titled Beware of Izumi von Hardenberg, explains the reasons clearly, though.

Anyway, this was the final arrangement:
Thecheap Apartmentsnyc to me, Oct 1

I booked 1br, they have my credit card info, so please don't cancel:If you have any problem with this call me 917 362 9280 while your stay, but we already comfirmed everything right now, you have nothing to pay except $900
1.10/2 360 west 43rd st apt.n4k Alley will meet you there Call Adonis from the airport, if your flight is late you have to call adonis and aleey, otherwise $30/hour late fee check out before 11:00a.m
2. 10/3-6 1br balance $900 cash 304 west 18th, apt.1 11:00a.m at the apartment
XXXXXXX XXXXX-Contact (o) XXX-XXX-XXXX check out 12:30p.m
3.10/6-9 605 2nd avee, apt. 3 check in 12:45p.m 33rd and 34th street, please press apt.3 combination key downstairs 6052
alley will meet you there, call him if you're late check out 11:00a.m 10/9, leave the keys on the table, DOOR UNLOCKED

We were met at the airport by Adonis, the driver recommended by Izumi. A really nice and friendly guy (mentioned favorably by others in one of the rip off reports) took us to the first apartment. On the way he called Izumi's assistant Alley, who was supposed to meet us there. Funnily enough Alley had no idea there were guests checking in - he said he was there just to take pictures. This probably explained the perfunctory cleaning obvious on our arrival, as well as the obviously reused sheets...

Next day instead of sightseeing we made our way to the one bedroom apartment. No one was there to meet us at this decrepit looking Hell's Kitchen building a superintendent simply let us into the apartment. The place was small, contained just one double bed in the bedroom and two extendable sofas, which seemed too old to extend. Moreover, there was obviously not enough room to actually extend both.

We waited around for 25 minutes. I called the number given to me by Izumi two or three times but there was only voicemail. I called Izumi. "How come there is no one there?" she asked. She asked for the number for the owner she had given me. "Izumi, you will call me back? We are waiting here, we have other stuff to do." "Yeah," she said.

We waited for another 45 minutes, anger building up. At 12.15 we split, checked in to a Starbucks, bought wifi access and started looking for a hotel. We ended up at the Sheraton Manhattan for three nights (later moved to Ameritania near Times Square).

We tried to get a portion of our deposit back through the PayPal dispute resolution procedure (#PP-557-215-363).
"Our investigation into your claim is complete. As stated in our User Agreement, the claims process only applies to the shipment of goods. It does not apply to complaints about the attributes or quality of goods received. Therefore, we are unable to reverse this transaction or issue a refund." (I resent how PayPal handled this - their dispute form contains no fields covering payments for services, so I had to check weird boxes relating to goods and had no way of knowing my claim was lost from the start due to these choices).

I have emailed Izumi today asking for $700 back (the $1,100 deposit less a payment for the one night we did stay at her apartment). I will also, based on one rip off reporter's recommendations, try to contact PayPal again. Friends of mine have recommended a New York-based lawyer who will review the case and see if there may be legal recourse. In addition I have thought about writing to coop boards at the buildings whose addresses I know that Ms. von Hardenberg is renting out the apartments (most likely illegally).

I had never thought I could fall for this kind of scam, having extensive experience with the short-term apartment rental industry here in Bratislava. Although expensive, this is indeed a lesson for me. I had seen some of the rip off reports before I sent Izumi von Hardenberg money (unfortunately only those under von HardenbErg, not the ones under von HardenbUrg) and actually felt reassured (since they indicated Izumi was for real, even if she smoked inside her non-smoking apartments). Finally, there was a definite cognitive bias at work - I wanted to believe in this Most luxurious New York apartment even though I had a feeling in the back of my head that it was too good to be true.

We still had a great stay in New York. Even if we end up not getting any of our money back, I will remember Izumi warmly for the lesson she's taught me.

If you've managed to read this far, please help! Link to this post with the anchor containing the name Izumi von Hardenberg so that other people will be able to read this if they Google Izumi.

Google to Slovak Adwords advertisers: cancel your account with us now!

2008-10-21T17:00:00.006+01:00

Google emailed its Slovak Adwords advertisers today to tell them that before the country changes its official currency to Euro on January 1, 2009 they must cancel their accounts and create new ones manually.

"Since you Adwords account uses the currency SKK, we request that you cancel this account and create a new account using the currency EUR" (my translation). And if you do not do this by November 30, your ads will stop showing.

Your new account cannot use the same login as your old account (unless you change it for the old account first), you will lose whatever history your ads have accumulated and have to reenter all your campaigns manually.

Come again, guys? I know we are not the largest market in the world but still, saving thousands of your customers

hours of frustration
losses stemming from each ad having to start anew without its history and quality score
hassle of not being able to access your account history

could be worth you while.

I think some advertisers will not bother - the kind of people who have had a small campaign running unchanged with a relatively small budget for months without monitoring or changing it. But there are some websites which have little choice and must use ads on Google to remain competitive. Their owners will have to give in to Google's caprice.

Google, let it be known that your failure to invest the day or two of programmer time required to migrate the accounts to the new currency without inconveniencing thousands of users is BAD KARMA.

Five things I disliked in New York

2008-10-18T21:37:00.008+01:00

1. All the ice
It's not healthy! I used to go to a gym. The owner once saw me drinking cold water while working out and came to yell at me. He said drinking cold water was like pouring cold water in a furnace. I can sort of see the logic. In traditional Chinese medicine (which I am a fan off) cold is also seen as potentially harmful (of course, my mother knew that long before I met my first acupuncturist). Since so many Americans don't even have health insurance, they should lay off the ice for their own good.

2. Aggressive salesmen
"Hi Sir, How are you doing today?" "Fine. Thanks." "Do you have any questions?" Shit. Dude, if I had any questions, I would have come up to you and asked. Right? Now you've actually chased me away from this section of the shop. I know it's arrogant of me but I just tend to assume the sales people will be there when I need them without introductions and the like.

3. Hidden taxes
This happened to me over and over in New York: I decided to buy an item and it turned out more expensive than labelled. I bought a computer at J&R, received a special discount and still ended up paying more than the original price. Or I would get the correct change ready to try to get rid of all the useless one cent coins just to find out I will actually end up with more of those coins. I know the taxes go to the state and not to the seller but still, why not just include them on the label? In our neck of the woods, THE STATE would step in and make this mandatory (the way mobile operators can not advertise prices without the VAT included).

4. Tipping
In 1997 I was in New York as a poor student. At one point we simply could not afford leaving the (then) requisite 15% tip. The waiter came running after us to ask very aggressively if there was anything wrong with the service he had provided. These days, many places will add on a tip (18% I saw this time) automatically for parties of five or more, or six or more people. I understand that waiters are paid less than the minimum wage. But to me the tip should remain an instrument to reward extra effort, not an entitlement. Like with hidden taxes decent waiter wages (perhaps reflecting the pretty much mandatory 10% tip level) could well be included in the sticker price. As a side note, only on my last day I realised the percentage should be calculated from the PRE-TAX price so I had been actually tipping more than I wanted to the whole time.

5. Overwhelming size
I will admit it. I am bumpkinly (definition: awkwardly simple and provincial, as in "bumpkinly country boys"). I used to think of myself as an urban dweller but defining urban on Bratislava's scale. In New York I felt outnumbered. So many cool places to go (NOLITA, anyone?), so much to do, so much going on, so much choice in everything... I think if I lived there I would end up becoming a very local resident of one of the neighbourhoods. But the idea of so much going on so nearby all the time frustrated me.

Coming up next on this blog's New York debriefing series: getting screwed out of a $1,100 deposit by an Izumi von Hardenberg who had promised us The Most Luxurious Three Bedroom Apartment in Times Square.

Five things I liked in New York and miss in Bratislava

2008-10-17T11:23:00.009+01:00

1. Free water in restaurants
I am a fan of good hydration. Here in Bratislava you have to keep ordering small (0.25l) bottles of water at EUR 1-2. In the US they charge more for your meal but keep your glass full (although I wouldn't mind if they eased up on the ice a little).

2. Nice food priced reasonably
Unlike here you do not need to eat at posh places to get great food. Moreover, there is always not one great restaurant of each kind but several to choose from (which, of course, explains why they are priced reasonably). I ate outstanding Thai, Ethiopian or Sushi, all at places that weren't expensive.

3. Regulated taxis
Never thought that I, the free market champion, would admit this but taxi regulation seems to work. Unlike here in Bratislava you will not be picked up by a rattling Skoda Felicia and you know what the price will be if you hail any of the thousands of yellow cabs. The drivers always knew the way and the bullet-proof barrier allowed you not to converse if you did not wish to.

4. Easy credit card payment everywhere
You can easily charge a cab ride, charge up your Metrocard to use on the subway or pay for a bottle of water. For smaller purchases you don't even need to bother with entering a PIN Code or signing, you just swipe and go.

5. Compliments from random strangers
This happened a number of times during my 12 days in the US. The bartender the day after my arrival told me I had a great jacket, as did a TSA screener who helped me put it through x-ray (credit belongs to my wife Sona who chose it for me). A barrista at Starbucks thought my Threadless Urban Goddess t-shirt was "dope" (pick one up for only $9 right now) and a Northwest flight attendant told me she loved the hat Yuval gave me. Two hicks on the subway asked a young man with ~~silicone~~collagen-filled lips for the name of the next stop and then complimented him on his sunglasses. Couldn't really imagine strangers in Bratislava complimenting you on anything.

Look out soon for my list of five things I disliked in New York.

Google Chrome Market Share by Year End?

2008-09-02T21:38:00.004+01:00

I do not particularly care about the new Google browser called Google Chrome but I was told by my sources soon there are going to be people searching for information on Google Chrome's market share. Hopefully, they may stumble across this humble blog ;)

The launch of Google's browser is interesting in the light of its financial support for the Mozilla Foundation, the makers of the fabulous open source Firefox browser, which is massively popular among the web's chattering classes.

Wouldn't you be a cheerleader for competition?

2008-08-12T13:12:00.003+01:00

You know how the new BMW 7-series was designed? Teams WITHIN the company competed on individual design elements. Makes sense... (via BMWBlog.com)

Rebiana from Stevia is Coke's New Sweetener

2008-08-11T14:02:00.002+01:00

Something big is going on if Coke replaces a key ingredient, huh? Diet Coke is now going to be sweetened with an extract from the Stevia plant.

I read up a little on the Diet Coke sweetener history (courtesy of Wikipedia) and learned that Coke had started using Nutrasweet in 1983 but used to blend it with saccharin to reduce cost. Apparently, saccharin is still used in Diet Coke in drink fountains to make it last longer.

Coca-Cola Light outside of the US may contain different sweeteners (and hence does indeed taste different, as Americans living abroad like to complain) such as cyclamates, aspartame, and acesulfame potassium. I'd rather not know what those things are.

In my Brandeis years I went through a Diet Coke binge period - used to buy 1.5l bottles on sale for $0.79 (and sometimes even cheaper) at the Waltham Shaw's. I am glad to say I have gotten over this but nonetheless, I look forward to taste-testing the new Stevia-sweetened Coke.

By the way, there is a political angle to the story: stevia supporters say there is an Aspartame lobby, which had worked hard to delay FDA approval of stevia's safety.

Towel battle looms

2008-08-02T08:07:00.003+01:00

I've only ever read about the battles for sun beds taking place at holiday resorts around Europe. Apparently older German holiday makers are willing to get up way early to stake out their bed by placing a towel, even if they never use it later in the day. The English are usually their arch enemies in this arena.

No idea where Slovaks stand in these but should get a chance to try in Mallorca later this month, according to the hotel reviews. We are by no means early risers so our only chance may be to use our cute baby to befriend an older German couple who would then claim sun beds for us when they get up at 6:30.

UPDATE: A middle-aged Swedish couple (the woman was topless the the hotel pool) helped us. She commandeered her husband to move the sun umbrellas around for the baby. Bliss.

Surely they ARE crazy - Slovakia's Price Board before euro adoption

2008-07-28T21:33:00.002+01:00

For personal and business reasons I try not to follow current Slovak news in detail. But occasionally a detail passes through the filters...

The Slovak government is excessively concerned about businesses abusing the currency change to increase prices.

In comes the price board. They will clamp down on them Euro-introduction profiteers! The Minister of Finance will report to the board monthly and the board will take action should a business try to increase its prices around the end of 2008.

At least the government gave up on trying to make price manipulations during switch to the euro a criminal offense.

Slovakia will officially adopt the Euro on January 1, 2009. For two weeks both the Slovak crown (koruna) and the Euro will be used. The exchange rate was fixed in July to SKK 30.126 to the Euro.

Markets are tough, Slovak bank clients learn

2008-07-11T11:29:00.007+01:00

Before the Slovak crown's exchange rate to the Euro was fixed (to 30.126 crowns per euro) two major Slovak banks offered clients deposit instruments with high guaranteed interest rate.

Of course there was a reason these deposits carried rates over 5%, well over one percentage point above any other similar guaranteed deposit. The deposits included a speculation on the Slovak crown's eventual fixed rate to the Euro.

In July the exchange rate was revealed. The crown ended up stronger to the Euro than most had expected even a few months ago. Suddenly, Slovenska Sporitelna bank Grand deposit clients are finding out that they will be making their 5+ % interest but their deposit will be converting at the fixed rate of SKK 32.5 per EUR (the same rate applies to clients of the "Premiovy vklad" at Slovak Volksbank).

At Slovenska Sporitelna a 100,000 Sk in the Grand Vklad (which also drew a 500 Sk fee at the start) will become EUR 3,231. Had they kept their cash under the mattress they would be converting to EUR 3,319 (via eTrend). Aside from the fact that these deposit reportedly attracted about 3 billion crowns, a 2.65% loss is not a bad price to learn a bit about how the markets work.

People and companies are coming forward claiming they were not properly shown or explained the fine print. The obvious lesson: if it sounds too good to be true (or is so much more attractive than the competition in a relatively competitive market) there is a risk. And risks sometimes do materialise.

When you get sick in Croatia, do as the Croats do?

2008-07-10T23:57:00.003+01:00

Once on a trip to Croatia one of the group needed treatment for a sore throat. A friendly seaside town pharmacist matter-of-factly recommended propolis drops. Croats take them and apparently experience relief.

In Slovakia we use an aluminium acetate and tartrate ointment (a vinegar and wine-related substance, judging by name) to treat swelling. Fair enough, except the internet only contains some 20+ references to the compound by its Latin name, all coming from Czech pharmacies. Does not seem to be used anywhere else.

I am not talking grandmother's recipes rakija compresses here (traditional wine brandy compress used in Croatian homes to reduce fever) but the kind of stuff a doctor prescribes and pharmacist recommends.

You can only dream of what health benefits would come from interchange of these guaranteed-to-work 'national' remedies.

Tatra Banka, careful about any single-sided moves!

2008-07-08T16:43:00.003+01:00

I have complained about Tatra Banka's new, secure but user-unfriendly "solution" for logging into its Internet Banking: the Tatra Banka Card & Reader (I have even had to apologise for insulting Tatra Banka's PR agency, because I had thought anyone writing favourably about the card & reader must have been paid off).

I never activated my card & reader after learning I would never be able to deactivate it again - I will not let my bank force me to lug around a calculator that doesn't fit my wallet just because they think it's secure.

Things have been pretty quiet on the Card & Reader front since the initial campaign introducing the ugly device. I sort of hoped the bank had backed down after learning customers were not all that excited about the new "solution". I noticed they started putting the calculator inside their branches in a glass case on a marble pedestal, which was exactly where I thought the device belongs.

Suddenly, in language reminiscent of orders from the politbyro I learn that Tatra Banka is going to force clients onto the new solution: they have issued "binding procedures" with the threat of "unilateral automatic changes by the bank" (that's my translation, their translator says "the mentioned settings can be changed automatically by bank single-sided." - their bold)

Here is my pledge: once you try this on me I will automatically and single-sided close my current account, move my mortgage to mBank (which can authenticate me pretty well without any stupid devices), return my credit card and never look back.

Welcome to the dot anything world

2008-06-27T09:22:00.002+01:00

A paradigm change in WWW navigation is coming (though different from what I had imagined) - ICANN will soon start selling rights to new top level domains (TLDs). The potential ramifications are massive - for surfers, marketers, SEOs.

What's a better domain to market BMWs:
a. www.bmw.com or
b. www.bmw?

How about the .club or .air to market clubs and airlines respectively? Personally, I would love to get my hands on a good .video site, for example.

The pricing has not yet been announced although there is speculation that setting up a new .something could cost between $100,000 and $500,000. Obviously a modest sum for large brands, which can then use TLDs to create sexier URLs for individual business divisions (us.coke, diet.coke...). Imaginable for larger cities and regions, which can recoup the cost by reselling domain names (think skiing.tirol or disneyland.paris) and of course for attractive generics (.casino, .mortgage, .hospital).

Depending on how liberal ICANN will be this could hurt the value of existing domain real estate (pizza.com vs anything.pizza) but possibly also help it through drawing broader attention to domaining. I expect users to warm to the new URLs fast as they actually may be easier to remember and make more sense.

Veoh's got guts

2008-06-03T18:45:00.003+01:00

...to show me this screen:

Apparently, Veoh has ended service in my country (and about 165+ others) due to a low concentration of users (!?). These users are now crying out - witness the 500+ posts on the Veoh forum thread.

Who gets blocked? Most of the world including populous places (Malaysia, Brazil), influential places (current holder of rotating EU presidency Slovenia) and rich places (Luxembourg, United Arab Emirates).

Users reported they received no advance warning and were unable to move their videos hosted at Veoh elsewhere.

Since Veoh seem to maintain official silence about the move beyond repeating the low concentration of users non-explanation we can only speculate. Are we talking bandwith problems? Copyright issues (non-US distribution of content Veoh has from CBS, Viacom's MTV Networks, FEARNet, Billboard, Ford Models, NCAA Football, US Weekly, TV Guide according to Wikipedia)? Something else?

Whatever it is it seems like a desperate move. Obviously it is going to hurt and anger many innocent users - including users from the "chosen" 33 countries traveling abroad and living abroad. This undoubtedly carries a cost in loyalty and the people who view and post videos on Veoh do have a choice when it comes to sharing videos.

I wouldn't be all that surprised to see Veoh go down completely if they are doing badly enough to mishandle this sensitive issue (via Newteevee).

Competitive Webmastering in the 21st Century - How much is your domain worth?

2008-06-01T21:18:00.007+01:00

Do you own any internet domain names? How much do you reckon they are worth? How do you figure out? Who do you ask?

The market is becoming more liquid but perhaps the overall economy matters a lot. Especially in the US. And perhaps we are living the age when the petrodollars migrate online. Bypassing us, going straight to web 2.0.

Perhaps you own a website. Perhaps your registrar owns it.

Perhaps you could own a website, still get a decent address. Maybe the same type of area as where you live - a little run down, perhaps, but a lot of cool people around. Perhaps not.

Website valuation is not a science, it's an art. There are markets and you can sell to them. Some of the smart people do.

Anyway, this rant must end now.

Up in arms over Vegetka

2008-05-30T15:14:00.005+01:00

I've been meaning to blog about this for a while (in fact adraft version of this is about a month old). There is a very special place in the centre of Bratislava at Laurinska. Is is called Vegetka and everyday at lunch time you will see a long queue outside.

Tourists stop in surprise trying to figure out what everyone is waiting for (Let's Go 2002 readers know). For years I had walked by feeling sorry for the people in the line - I thought they couldn't afford or were to cheap to go for one of the 119,- Sk lunch menus at various central restaurants.
Boy was I wrong... One day Daniel (who blogged about Vegetka in Slovak recently) convinced me to come along and since then I eat my lunch there as often as I can, usually at least three times a week.

Vegetka is like a canteen. While in the line you have to look at the menu posted in Slovak (and English) a few times along the walls. After waiting in line for 10-15 minutes you order at a cash register. The blond lady at the cash register (Majka) is extremely efficient and doesn't suffer slow people gladly. When I manage to rattle off my order really fast I see a little approving smile. She hands you a receipt which you then hand in to the two Anickas at the window. Hope that they are having a good day since otherwise the main Anicka occasionally hurls mild abuse, especially at regulars.

20 different meals, freshly cooked, in the very centre and at a reasonable price. A loyal crowd of office people (including local Rolex-wearing lawyers and bankers on days when they don't send their secretaries to bring in a Vegetka lunch), students, pensioners, artists, intellectuals come daily to eat delicacies like (quoting from today's menu): Springs roll with sauce piquant and salad, Mushroom goulash with sauekraut and dumpling, Spinach dumplings with cheese and sahmpignons, salad... There was a lot more of course.

Anyway, our development-friendly city leadership (led by Draco Malfoy look-alike Andrej Durkovsky) decided there was better use for this prime space after decades of dietary dining (in Vegetka and the adjacent Dietka with dietary meals) when the lease ends for the owner of Vegetka. To justify an end to the popular restaurant the city played along with a clever ploy of the majority owner of the Motesicky Palace building: CDC "voted" to increase payments in the reconstruction fund from all owners of spaces in the building to the point where the city would have to pay SKK 900,000 (USD 45,000) per month (!) for the Vegetka space. The city then said it will give preference to a tenant who will pay this absurd sum on its behalf. Conveniently, CDC, is willing to do that - no surprise since as a majority owner it can decide on the use of the money in this fund. Lest you should be confused, CDC became a majority owner in the building not through buying at market rates but through series of purchases at sub-market rates indirectly (?) assisted by the city.

Slovaks in general and Bratislavians are complacent and rarely rise up in protest. The city has ruined our sky like by allowing construction of a skyscraper by the New Bridge, sold off various attractive pieces of real estate under questionable conditions but no one has done much.

But now that the bullying mayor figuratively speaking tried to take our lunch (saying the reason was the qeueing people didn't look good in front of tourists) there was an outcry and a petition can be signed online and in person in front of the restaurant. Newspapers are up in arms (no surprise since the journalists eat with us too). There was a band concert to support the restaurant and several well known persons spoke up publicly.

Whether this will save the restaurant from a money-hungry bunch with no respect for anything but their own account balance is questionable but perhaps it will teach us to take initiative earlier next time someone tries to rob us of something as dear.

Must take stance on China

2008-04-17T00:27:00.004+01:00

I spent over a third of my life in a country that wasn't free. Although I was a child I can clearly remember some aspects of political ill-liberty. I also remember how much it mattered to us that people on the outside cared - if someone jumped the fence they were welcomed as political refugees and there were people in free countries openly calling out the totalitarian acts of the state.

I therefore feel an obligation to say publicly I believe it is not OK to pretend things are OK in China. I desire to learn about China. With the little I know I long to learn more about the country, culture, cuisine. I know there are massive differences in cultural attitudes to both individual and collective rights and some practices that would be unacceptable in a Western liberal democracy are the norm fully accepted by the people.

But I don't care who wins the Olympics and I don't care if parallels with Berlin 1936 are realistic or not. Whether the Olympics are big, lavish , flawless doesn't matter - they still take place in a totalitarian state, which suppresses many individual freedoms and executes people without due process on a massive scale. Any leader of a liberal democracy who appears at the Beijing games, and perhaps even every sportswoman or sportsman who takes part dignify the Chinese communist regime.

P.S. The photo is from an award-winning campaign for Slovak Amnesty International by MUW Saatchi & Saatchi.

PR agency posting fake comments? Don't get caught!

2008-04-15T19:17:00.004+01:00

Just read an embarrassing Czech story: a blogger uncovered four non-existent girls posing as 'members of the public' blogging from the IP address of a PR agency to promote a bank's new product. Of course, it does not take an Edelman screw up to know this takes place all over the place - although only a portion of the cases are ever uncovered. In this case, like often, this was a 'private activity' of an intern and the PR agency (Bison & Rose) had no idea.

Fake reviews of all sorts are rampant in the travel business and really, logically anywhere stuff gets reviewed (semi-)anonymously online. My pet peeve is the website of the UK Guardian newspaper on travel called Beenthere. I follow the reviews on Bratislava ever since someone posted a genuine review of one of our websites (here). Soon our competitors went crazy posting their own reviews of their own sites.

Now you ask how I know they are fake? And why should you trust me ours is real? Easy, Sherlock, real easy. Our reviewer MikeP has actually posted other reviews, some are lengthy and they cover a number of destinations and his profile contains a photo. The other reviews are usually one off affairs or the 'reviewers' have posted a few short spammy 'tips' on the same day.

The lesson here? If you wish to give yourself favourable publicity in the social media either make the effort to be a real user or at least work shrewdly to cover your tracks. Here are a few important tips to help PR agencies avoid embarrassment:

1. Keep a few active social media profiles around - some social media sites (e.g. Digg) discount inactive users algorithmically, elsewhere it is the community that shuts up the abusive new users. The best way to make your posts credible and make them stick is to have profiles that are or look real - regular posting, consistent behaviour.

2. If you must pick names or photos, be careful (not like the Czech blogger who used on of the top Google image results for 'girl', showing the Debian girl posted here, which was easy to track down - the girl in the photo is a Cambridge PhD. student quoted as being "pretty upset"). If you are going to do this on a grand scale, plan ahead with changing your IP addresses or at least not using ones easily traceable to your company (lots of fake Wikipedia entries get uncovered through IPs traced to the company doing the embellishing).

3. Watch your language - real people don't talk like PR pros, so if the review contains PRish funny speak it is probably written by someone who speaks it.

4. If you ask who cares probably no one real does - in the Czech bloggers' case these young women were raving about a new banking product, but I mean who (other than a few geeks) would care about this stuff?

5. Along the same lines if it sounds too good to be true it probably is - again real people don't go around raving about boring stuff.

Your competitors are clever and will dig deep to undo your efforts, so you might as well not bother if you are not going to do this right.

Don't Elfyourself, buy a stapler instead

2008-04-14T21:13:00.005+01:00

I was a bit surprised to see that you can no longer Elf Yourself and your friends at Elfyourself.com. This campaign generated quite of bit of buzz in general over the Christmas holidays and some criticism in internet marketing circles since many marketers couldn't see how the massively popular campaign was benefiting the office supplies chain who made it (I will not name them or link to them here just so you can guess who they are because research shows most people don't remember).

Elfyourself was hilarious (see this random video or search Youtube for elfyourself if you by any chance missed the elfs completely). Through a very innovative and usable flash interface it allowed you to enter face shots of your friend, fit them onto elf bodies, and send out links to the elfs singing and dancing.

I am not sure I like the current move: I went to Elfyourself with an objective and instead I was told Elves are gone and the office supplies store is still here. Of course, no 'elf scent' on the landing page and a disappointed potential future client who did not care for a stapler.

Now I wonder, are the elves gonna be back for the third year in a row next Christmas? Should they have left the application alive during the year? Should they have dealt differently with telling us the application is not on during the year? How would you play this?

Ryanairisation of Skyeurope?

2008-04-10T11:24:00.004+01:00

Skyeurope is my favorite airline. It is a Bratislava based low cost (although less Bratislava-based than it used to be as it shifted many of its flights to Vienna) and has done miracles for tourism in Bratislava and for economic development in Slovakia.

Once I visited Milan with my UWC classmate Bela. We flew Ryanair one way and I returned on Skyeurope so I was sort of able to compare these two airlines head to head. My conclusion was that I will never fly Ryanair again if I can avoid it.

I prefer paying a little extra for:
- not having to stare on an emergency evacuation chart printed on the back of the seat in front of me,
- being able to recline my seat back that very little bit,
- not having to spend hours in the cabin decked out in aggressive nasty yellow plastic,
- being treated with a little respect and not having to pay absurdly efficient charges for everything like having a check bag.

Skyeurope was better on all of the above counts, with comfy leather seats, friendly staff and a reasonable pricing structure.

I was therefore very disappointed to learn today that Skyeurope is introducing Ryanair-style charges for checked bags. You pay EUR 5 if you register the bag online, EUR 10 through the callcentre and EUR 15 at the airport. Of course this is essentially a price hike in a world where you can't really travel with a carry on since it is not allowed to take your shampoo, toothpaste, etc.

I know Skyeurope has had to work hard to turn a profit and a lot has changed but this seems to me like it's the spirit of Skyeurope changing. Perhaps I am old fashioned or spoiled but I hope there are more of us who mind and the move will not make sense economically in the longer run.

Happy to be an Orange customer today

2008-04-01T22:58:00.002+01:00

I am happy my mobile phone is from Orange rather than T-Com today, having read this. Wow.

Get rickrolled while rickrolling is still in!

2008-04-01T22:46:00.002+01:00

I was rickrolled today as part of an April Fool's Day blog post. If you have been rickrolled within the last 48 hours and know exactly what it means, please don't click through!

You shouldn't click on any Youtube featured videos today either, since you could well get rickrolled.

Also, if you have not rickrolled your friends and family, do so now because the word is out both in the New York Times and Wikipedia.

Real estate lies with short legs - Bratislava apartments for sale

2008-03-28T12:27:00.005+01:00

There is a Slovak saying "A lie has short legs" - meaning it will not get away very far. I find it so hard to understand why lying is endemic among the real estate agents here in Bratislava. There are just so many misleading adverts for properties on sale. Over the last few years I have looked at hundreds if not thousands of real estate listings, especially apartment listings in Bratislava, I have dug around looking at the same apartments on offer from various real estate agents and here is a brief list of how they usually mislead:

1. Apartment size - it is very common to list square metres including areas that definitely do not belong. Most usually the cellar will be included, often balconies, too. It is pretty common for the agent him- or herself not to know if the metres cited include cellars. In my book saying that a 73 sq.m. apartment is 84 sq.m. because of a cellar located four floors below is a blatant lie.

2. Floor - advertising often omits to state clearly than an apartment is on the ground floor, it simply does not mention floor at all. This is just misleading.

3. Location - for apartments near and even far from the Old Town, the agents check Old Town as location to make people searching for Old Town Apartments look at their offerings.

The frustrating thing is that you will eventually find the truth out and inevitably lose faith in the agent. Why do so many of them take this short-sighted view?

Two ways to date a beauty queen - or three brunettes

2008-03-11T16:18:00.005+01:00

Rich men date beauty queens more often than average, I would assume based on my cursory reading of the Slovak tabloid press.

Perhaps it is my naivete but I had always assumed it is because beauty queens are after rich men more often than average women and of course, succeed in befriending rich men more than average.

Today I realised there is a whole another mechanism at work: rich men make the women they date into beauty queens. A Slovak journalist/blogger claims he found out in advance (Slovak blog post) that No. 12 - Sandra Manakova would win the Slovak 2008 Miss Universe (ahead of two other brunettes including my favourite, 2nd Vicemiss Lenka Hindicka).

The blogger and journalist for a leading tabloid tells an entertaining story of how he reported on a regional round of a beauty contest by the same former Miss Czechoslovakia Sylvia Lakatosova where the jury was handed down the 'correct' result at the end with the three winners being either the daughters of influential businessman or girlfriends of contest sponsors.

He also claims that objectively there were more attractive blonds in the final 12 of the Miss Universe Slovak Republic deserving of being in the top 3. Of course, letting three brunettes win a beauty pageant in a nation that believes pure Slovaks are tall blondes is political - many commentators are up in arms.

Don't believe what you read - this is just the Internet

2008-02-26T10:00:00.003+01:00

I abhor the Slovak UPC. In my book they are the most customer-unfriendly provider among the telecom/internet/cable operators I've had to deal with. They provide miserable customer service and have been doing so for the many years I've been their client. I remain a customer (and have in fact even signed up for a new two-year contract) because I presently have no choice (UPC is the only broadband provider with speed over 1.5 Mbit in my part of Bratislava).

It's not that problems arise - that happens with all sorts of service providers. It is that UPC is a mean, malicious company that likes to resolve problems by the book where its book calls for screwing you over where they can. Their behaviour draws on their local near-monopoly position - they change their prices all the time but only announce them a month in advance where it takes a month to withdraw from old contract.

I have a looong list of complaints that have been dealt with incompetently. I have been given conflicting information by different people on the same day and have been talked down to by mighty customer service reps.

Here is my latest: I wanted to transfer my old landline phone number to UPC (yes, I keep a landline for reasons I have explained before). I was told by someone from UPC (I don't know if it was by telephone or in person at their customer service centre or by the technician who installed our cable modem) that I can transfer the old number. They said UPC does not charge anything, only the old hegemon Slovak Telecom (now going by the name T-Com, I think) does. Fair enough. I checked on the internet today - the UPC's official price list for the UPC Telephone service contained no charge for transferring a number from another provider.

Today I called about the switch. Suddenly it costs SKK 1500 + VAT (about EUR 55) to transfer the number on UPC's end. Yeah, really? Why is it not in their price list? Well, because it's only on the internet. The whole 'internet' is in internet provider UPC's mind only for informative purposes, anything they publish on the internet is not binding and does not have to contain all details - you find out if you click the Legal Information link on their site. They are happy to provide more detailed (read 'correct') info in person or by telephone.

Well, I think UPC sucks, big time. I think any customer-service oriented company should stand by the prices it publishes on its internet website, especially if the company is an internet services provider. Therefore, if you are in Slovakia and have a choice, I genuinely recommend that you look at the alternatives. Of course, this internet post is only for informative purposes and does not have to contain all details - talk to me in person or by phone if you need more information.

Slovak Consumer Culture in 2008 - Not Quite There Yet

2008-02-25T09:15:00.004+01:00

I get my car serviced not in Bratislava where I live but almost an hour away in Dunajska Streda. The man who sold me the car strongly recommended I drive there because the dealership is a lot smaller than the one in Bratislava, has a family atmosphere and treats the Alfa Romeos with the loving care they deserve.

I've been to Dunajska Streda's Dunauto to get my car serviced twice and was more than satisfied both times. There was a family atmosphere and everyone I dealt with was extremely polite and professional. During my second visit for a quick winter check up a friend came along. The service technician drove us into the city in my car so that we can have lunch and came back to collect us later, of course at no additional charge. He recommended a restaurant as well.

The problem with Dunajska Streda is the distance. Especially when I have to leave the car there, it will cost me four hours of driving plus the cost of a rental car plus gas. And time is tight these days.

So I was pleased to hear Bratislava's only Alfa dealer Auto Impex received new competition in October. Auto Valusek, a large dealer in all sorts of cars, entered into Alfas and opened a new dealership. They advertised on billboards.

My Alfa is now overdue for the 80,000 km checkup and not having to invest that half day to go to Dunajska Streda would be nice. So I called to ask whether they offered any incentives for new clients to switch from their existing service providers. It's 2008 and Slovak consumer culture is maturing but staff at the dealership still found my question rather surprising. You mean a discount so that you switch to a completely new dealership from the one you have been always going to? "I am not aware of such an 'akcia'"... Oh well I guess it's back to Dunajska Streda for the family atmosphere :)

I love competition - watching Slovak ING and mBank fight it out in savings accounts

2008-02-16T22:21:00.003+01:00

Although we have quite a few banks in Slovakia (12 retail banks according to a list on the National Bank's website) I believe competition in some segments is quite weak. Even the best among them can sometimes cause its clients quite a bit of frustration. (also see my column in SME about banks not being nice).

It was therefore with high expectations that I and many people I know watched the entry of mBank, an internet bank based in Poland that entered the Slovak market late in 2007 based on EU legislation allowing banks to offer services in other EU member states without needing to obtain a national licence.

In a (Slovak retail banking) world with fees for the wildest things (such as receiving money in your account or closing the account) mBank introduced a current account and savings account without any fees.

I opted for their savings account eMax - it's an account without any fees or major limitations even allowing a debit card. It launched last year with a very competitive 3.4% gross interest. I don't actually have the account because mBank procedure worked through a courier which never actually reached me with the account contract (called on a weekend and then once during the week and never called again).

Luckily for me mBank's offer obviously attracted a lot of clients away from ING Konto, ING's product very similar in scope (unlimited savings account, which however only allows sending money to your designated transaction account at another bank). ING once offered very attractive interest rate but in late 2007 they were running at a not-so-appealing 2.7% (less our 19% flat tax, of course).

So mBank launched and a few months later suddenly the long stuck ING Konto rate moved to -- you guessed it - 3.5% (compared to mBank's 3.4%).

That was a while ago and it was a relief for me - it meant I did not have to go chasing after the courier to actually sign that mBank contract.

Today I was driving through the New Bridge and saw a new mBank billboard: they have now raised eMax's interest to 3.7%. Obviously not worth it for me to chase after the additional 0.2% (works out as 0.162% net after taxes or 162 crowns p.a. on a 100,000) but nonetheless: I love competition...

What will happen when Yahoo Site Explorer stops to function

2008-01-30T22:34:00.000+01:00

There are not that many functional tools for finding links left - Yahoo Site Explorer rules and is the most frequently referenced tool.

Google Webmaster Central is great for finding out your own links but what about finding your competitors'?

Back with more Tatrabanka ranting - the Calculator

2008-01-22T11:17:00.000+01:00

UPDATE Jan 22, 2008: I have corrected the text below to make it clear that I have no information that someone paid bloggers to praise the Tatrabanka 'calculator'. What I meant was that I saw several favourable reviews of the device, which seemed as if they were paid for without any disclosure of the nature of the deal and found a blogger (linked to below) who felt the same way.

A representative of the PR agency, which carried out the calculator's PR campaign emailed me saying that the agency simply provided the device to bloggers for testing. My contacts confirm this.

I apologise to Tatra Banka and its PR agency Neopublic Porter Novelli for the unintentional insinuation - it seems that unlike me and synopsi.com, the bloggers praising the 'calculator' genuinely liked it.
-----------------------
What better way to get back to blogging in 2008 than with more ranting on Tatrabanka - my bank. I am being forced to use an immensely impractical 'calculator' to access my internet banking under the pretext of making my transactions safer. Tatra Banka is the first in the Slovak market to introduce this ingenious 'card&reader' solution - they brag about it all over ~~and even apparently paid young and naive Slovak bloggers to 'review' it and say how great it is.~~ and have provided the device in advance to young bloggers who have given it pretty good reviews. So what if it makes a few clients angry?

Anyway, as soon as I realised the details of this evil device I've come to call the calculator (it looks like one, with buttons and a screen, but of course no calculator functionality) I called Tatrabanka's Dialog phone line and gave the poor soul on the other end of the line an earful - I asked them to pass my complaint on to someone in charge and received no response. I also visited Tatra Banka's website devoted to promoting this ingenious solution and submitted a complaint through their form (no response). Hence I am unloading here.

I believe Tatrabanka has a special position among sophisticated clients in Slovakia (although I have no hard statistics on this). Having started from scratch in the early 1990s after the end of one party rule Tatra Banka used to be very different from the post-Communist banking dinosaurs.

It had a fresh, blue image, young friendly faces and a functioning internet banking platform. Having a Tatrabanka account is almost de rigeur among web savvy Slovak companies for these and other reasons. At our company when we send out invoices about three quarters of our clients who are all web-aware have Tatrabanka accounts - a network effect must be at work here, since having an account in the same Slovak bank reduces bank transfer time from two days to instantaneous.

I have been banking with Tatra Banka since 2000 and after a brief and aborted experience to switch to Unibanka (now Unicreditbank) Tatrabanka remains the only bank I use (not count the ING Konto, a super and unmatched savings account). Ocassionally I get frustrated with them but usually a trip (or two) to the branch resolves matters - that's what puts them apart in my mind from other Slovak banks I've had experiences with (there were many - Ludova banka, Slovenska sporitelna, Vseobecna uverova banka, Unicreditbank).

Enough of an introduction. Right now, Tatra Banka has made me very frustrated - they have made a move that directly inconveniences me and makes their award winning internet banking unusable for me.

Over time authentication procedures for Tatra Banka internet banking have evolved - from using a Grid Card to sending a code to my mobile phone by SMS on login. For payments no additional authentication was required. However, to get over a daily transfer limit of Sk 100,000 a SecurID was used - a small credit-card sized token displaying numbers on a LED display.

SecurID had its disadvantages - notably the one Daniel found where once you used the number for a payment you had to wait up to a minute for a new number to appear for your next payment even if you were fast enough to enter two payments within that amount of time. Nonetheless, a satisfactory solution for my needs. I carried it around in my wallet and used it to make transfers whenever needed and wherever I needed.

Then, suddenly a few weeks ago I pulled my SecurID out of my wallet to find the LED display cracked - fair enough after carrying it in my back pocket for several years.

Enter the Calculator

Tatra Banka no longer issues SecurIDs - it is now pushing its new, market leading solution, which is much safer, much more overhyped and much more bulky. You get issued a card reader (made by Swedish Todos), size of a credit card but five times thicker. Why does this make me angry?

The 'calculator' cannot be carried around in your walet because it is to bulky and fragile. Unless you carry a purse you must keep it in one location - at home or at the office. I bank at Tatrabanka both privately and with the company so I would like to use it at both locations but the bank will only issue one of the little miracles to me.

The 'calculator' makes you work harder - to enter a payment you must type in the account number and the amount to generate a verification code. This is a hassle - account number often have 10+ digits and it is bad enough to have to type them in once. Of course, this would be no big deal because you can turn the use of calculator on and off - you can keep it off unless you need to exceed the SKK 100,000 per day.

But here comes the catch: once you turn it on for authorising individual payments it will automatically become the method of authorisation for logging in to the internet banking and it CANNOT be turned off anymore. In other words, once you use it you are stuck either carrying it around or stuck without access to your accounts online.

According to a press release of the calculator producer the calculator "in the future will be the only authorization tool for all its banking channels". Well let me tell you: this is not a future I look forward to and I will start looking for a bank that cares a little more about the comfort of its clients.

P.S. Apparently I am not the first to notice (link to blog in Slovak) that the 'calculator' is a hassle ~~and that someone apparently paid bloggers to rave about it without disclosure.~~ although several Slovak bloggers have given it highly favourable reviews at launch time without stating explicitly whether or not they have been rewarded for their efforts.

Slovakia's Best Barman

2007-12-08T09:44:00.002+01:00

...is a barwoman. I was pleased to read the results of the 2007 Slovak Bar Awards at the eTrend website.

This is old news (cleaning up my Drafts folder). Her name is Alexandra Lipcakova, she works at Jerry's Bar in Zilina, which I will not link to, because their website is crap.

I presume she is one of the three women in the photo (from Jerry's site) but I am not sure.

Why good domains cost much and for how long?

2007-12-01T00:34:00.000+01:00

Diamonds never lose value, the guy at the jewellery shop tells you. He would say that, wouldn't he, with shelf-fulls of diamonds on his hands.

Slovak realtors always tell the newspapers Slovak real estate is going to keep rising, it's still the right time to buy. They would say that, wouldn't they making a living from commissions on actual sales.

Quality "meaningful, powerful or generic" domains are going to keep rising in value, Frank Schilling, a star domainer tells us.

They give you free type-in traffic - in some cases "millions of yearly visitors forever; for nothing more than the price of the renewal fees", there are only 5-10 million good generic domains so they are bound to be scarce. "That shortage of supply and global demand keeps prices high… and will for years to come. In fact if the examples above show anything, it’s that great domain names are “still” cheap."

I believe Frank's prediction, especially as long as he keeps a sizable collection of domains. But I do also recognise that when a guy sitting on a load of domains says they will only get more expensive, it is something he would say, isn't it.

Ultimately I would expect the Coase Theorem to hold in the domain market (Freakonomics explains the details): when transaction costs become sufficiently low each asset will end up with the party that stands to make the most with it - an efficient outcome.

I don't believe this will be the big domain holding guys with Google for Domains, Sedo ads or one of the 'nameless' domain advertising platforms on generic domains. The pages they serve are often of low relevance and poor quality.

For these sites there is often someone who could develop them and make a lot more money. What do you really smart people with eye for persuasion architecture reckon would happen to the clickthrough rates on this guy's website if he actually showed a few photos of glass cabinets (the way these people do)?

The reason he doesn't bother is probably that he registered numbers of sites like this. Many of them could be developed and monetised at multiples of what he makes per site and the day will come when he will simply be better off selling or leasing the site for someone to develop.

It is easy to compare domains to real estate - you have property in a prime location so you're better off building an apartment building than using it as a parking lot. If you have loads of properties in a prime location you will develop them, sell them, or at least rent them for someone to develop. After all a prime location is made prime by the development.

So if you fail to develop, people learn to go elsewhere to shop. Maybe to a market or library? You will be left with the passers by looking for YourGenericProduct.com, sometimes finding rubbish. Meanwhile someone like this who is aparently a domainer (landlord) is not so much different from a normal jeweler (although he doesn't make the jewelry onsite).

But if you develop a prime location you have an advantage over your competitors doing the same (or better) in a less prime neighbourhood. Your generic domain name will give you a search engine placement boost through the keywords it contains. If developed it can help collect natural links, help build customer trust by sounding 'official' and of course make it easy for customers to find their way back later. That is where to me lies the value of a domain.

There will come a time when domains as a piece of real estate (call it a storefront) will be obsolete. I can not tell what the replacement will be and how soon it will come but it needn't be too long. The longer some guys sit on undeveloped domain estate the more risk of a paradigm shift take place and render domains worth less:

search engines taking place of direct navigation
social network sites/communities taking that place
browsers taking place by capturing certain user actions
new internet rules (new top level domains? perhaps a new extra layer? www.greatdomain.com.new?
new technology (thought-navigation? you think of a site and your browser takes you there without any typing)

or something completely different.

But before that happens there may be serious cash to be made for people who but low and sell high.

Predictions of 2008 trends start rushing in

2007-11-29T01:32:00.000+01:00

The 2008 predictions are gathering speed and it's only going to get worse.

My view of the global economy is limited from my ground floor apartment but a private equity insider predicts we have just seen the "lull at the top of asset prices, and stomach lifting hump before the first roller-coaster drop."

Trendwatching landed in my mailbox today with as many as EIGHT cleverly identified consumer trends for 2008. Status spheres will segment the market and Evian is by far not expensive enough for some people (who now apparently buy a $20 version - how cheap of me to have turned down the $3 option yesterday offered to me as the only non-carbonated mineral water at the crappy Notax restaurant).

Meanwhile someone predicts professionally produced content will beat home made videos next year.

I have so far only made a single prediction: Kosice real estate will rise dramatically in 2008 but I hope to make a few more just to see if I get to say I told you so later. Oh yeah, and (via the brilliant Frank Schilling) US real estate prices are going down in 2008:

Shut up when the anthem plays!

2007-11-25T20:05:00.000+01:00

The Slovak Police drew enemy fire from Slovak media after forcibly removing a protester who shouted through a megaphone about undemocratic practices in Kazakhstan within earshot of where the Slovak Presidential Guards saluted Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbajev.

There is a special provision in the Kazakh constitution allowing Nursultan Nazarbajev (him and only him) to stand for reelection an unlimited number of times. Well no surprise he received regal treatment, especially since Kazakhstan has so much oil and is the World's No. 1 exporter of potassium.

Police dragged the Kazakh emigre activist Balli Marzec, a Polish citizen, kicking and screaming and detained her at the police station for 12 hours.

Sadly this was but one in a string of incidents with blatant violations of free speech, freedom of movement and other basic constitutional rights. In some the police were subject of provocation and mistakenly took it as a sign they can suppress human rights.

More often police were the perpetrators of harassment and abuse - beating people up, shutting up demonstrators, harassing the poor and homeless.

This of course permeates the police culture at all levels: corruption is rampant at many levels and certainly the attitude is more often "abuse and exploit" rather than "serve and protect".

Old advice on doing better with charity

2007-11-25T00:59:00.000+01:00

If you've ever given to a poor person unwillingly, you should know there are seven higher degrees of charity Jewish philosopher Maimonides inferred from the Torah.

To do better next time try giving a poor person gladly, with a smile.

Even better, give to those in need when you are asked.

If that doesn't feel charitable enough try giving before you are asked.

Next level up means giving without knowing who receives your help but they will know you were the benefactor. In Maimonides's times the custom was for "greatest sages" to pack coins in a scarf, sling it over their shoulder and let poor people pick out coins not seeing who they were and thus avoiding embarrassing them.

When the roles are reversed you can move up a level: you know who you are helping without them knowing who you are. There were righteous men who would put coins in poor people's doorways secretly.

When neither side knows the other you are almost at the top. A guy or gal recently gave $100 million to a town in Pennsylvania this way.

There is but one level left, the greatest: when you help someone get on their feet so that they no longer need the help of the community. A Silicon Valley geek taught a whole Stanford class how to make Facebook Apps although these are presumably paying students and this would not classify as an act of charity. It may just be good teaching.

Oh and read this article mainly as an effort to connect those two interesting stories into one entry.

Landline over mobile

2007-11-19T16:56:00.000+01:00

Although the number of landlines in Slovak households is declining I still maintain mine. I pay some 400 Slovak crowns per month to Slovak Telecom, mainly for the sake of older members of my family who feel a lot more comfortable calling my landline than calling my mobile.

While there are financial considerations (i.e. calling mobile phone numbers from a land line phone in Slovakia remains pretty expensive) there are also some privacy considerations: calling someone's home telephone and reaching them means you will not be catching them in the supermarket checkout line, at a busy traffic intersection or in a cinema.

For me another advantage is that I know only very few people have my landline number and I can be pretty sure that it is the family calling (and the occasional telemarketer who I simply hang up on).

Many new businesses these days do not bother to install landlines - probably to save the money and hassle they provide a mobile phone number as their primary contact number. I would argue that this may be shortsighted for some, especially those who interact with an older clientele. There are lots of mainly older people who remain distinctly uncomfortable both calling a mobile phone in general (perhaps because they are used to the anonymity of landline calling from the time landlines did not have caller ID) and especially calling a mobile from their land line telephone.

If I were to operate a business that expects customer calls I would probably try to offer at least a mobile and landline contact number and perhaps even consider having a separate mobile contact with the several mobile operators. From a practical perspective having a contract with each operator allows to economise on outgoing calls. But also this maximises the chance that customers wishing to reach you by phone will be comfortable doing so.

What prompted this short writeup was my recent experience trying to make a hairdresser appointment. On the website the only phone number provided was a mobile, I phoned and said I would like to make an appointment. The lady on the other end surprised me a little: "Could you call back in about 10 minutes? I am away from the salon right now." Now that would ever happen with a landline...

2008: Anyone can make predictions!

2007-11-14T22:00:00.000+01:00

I made a prediction earlier, saying that the city of Košice will blossom in 2008. The prediction brought me search engine traffic because people are starting to look for predictions for next year. Even Adwords advertisers have woken up with their predictions for 2008 (led by horoscopes and such).

Google Trends shows that the demand for new-year 2008 predictions online has grown over the last few years. Every year it starts earlier and peaks a little higher. The order of searches by countries is stable over time - Indians search for predictions the most.

A classmate of mine in primary school, Alexander, told me in 1988 that in 1999 we would be able to travel to neighbouring Austria on bicycle. To me that was unimaginable at the time: we were living in the depth of a Soviet-satellite Communist regime. In November 1989 suddenly we were walking across the border. His prediction simply turned out to be correct.

Now I feel like it may be fun to make a few predictions for 2008 - if I make 10 or 20 oredictions on random events there is a good chance a half of them may turn out right and having 5 or 10 correct prediction can be packaged as pretty good predictive success.

Anyway the purpose of this article is to motivate myself to make up a few predictions, write them up and drum them up.

Filling out the facebook profile for a UWC classmate

2007-09-17T20:47:00.000+01:00

I've been adding a lot of my fellow UWCers to my facebook, it's been somewhat of a fad. The circle enlarges and more people who touched my life but fell of my radar screen appear. Today Agnieszka, the first UWCer I met became a Facebook friend.

Facebook offered for me to fill in how I knew Agnieszka and honesty about my AHUWC experience made me check that we:
lived together (we did, in Lanham house),
were in a group together (an outdoor orientation group, I think), took a course together (the IB although that may be a slight stretch as Agnieszka was my second-year), attended a program (numerous, for sure), traveled together (she and Demet from Turkey were the first UWCers I actually met, while changing planes at the Dallas Fort Worth Airport), went to high school with Agnieszka, met randomly (in an airport), are Facebook friends (as of today) and finally, I know Agnieszka through a friend (or several friends).

Neat.

My Prediction: 2008 will be the year of Kosice

2007-09-08T00:28:00.000+01:00

I am extremely bullish on Kosice - have been for years. The Google Trends screenshot shows clearly what's going on - more and more people are looking for info on Kosice on Google.

If I had the cash to spare or goodwill to borrow I would buy a nice place in the centre of Kosice, banking on its finiteness and the Skyeurope flight from London. My guess would be about 50% appreciation over the next two years.

There are real estate investment opportunities galore right now. The market is somewhat illiquid, I believe, but that may open opportunities for a buyer ready to pay in cash.

It wasn't easy to find English-language blogs in Kosice but in the end I came across a fellow internet entrepreneur, a Peter Soltes.

Are you clever enough to pull a 419?

2007-09-03T22:17:00.000+01:00

I don't know if Nigerian scammers read blogs but if they do I have an idea for a scenario for them:
1. send one of the usual spam letters (late widow of Sani Abacha, wife of Rwandan farmer),
2. send another letter signed by a Nigerian official (or even a UN official of another nationality) requesting cooperation with the authorities in uncovering the scammer from no. 1 above, earning a hefty reward in the process,
3. if anyone catches on, make them actually send money to no. 1 while delaying payment from no. 2.

Or maybe I can send the idea to this guy although he obviously does not need it.

My feeling is that if the other things reaching my mailbox work this one would, too.

$10 Threadless sale rocks!

2007-09-03T21:41:00.000+01:00

I love Threadless. Threadless has rocking great t-shirts and they ship to Slovakia.

One of the most frustrating things about many US-based e-commerce websites is that they do not ship to Europe. There is no directory of US internet stores that ship internationally, that I would be aware of. Even at this day and age in a lot of websites you have to dig deep for info whether they will ship to you or not.

I am surprised the math doesn't work out favourably at least for the big stores that do not bother to ship throughout the EU (J. Crew, BlueFly.com to name a few). They must have sufficient ability to learn on the internet that Poland, Slovakia or Estonia let alone Austria or Sweden are not Nigeria (not to mention the fact that there must be lots of nice, regular people in Nigeria who cannot order anything at all from anyone because noone will ship to them).

The flipside is that any parcel worth more than EUR 22 must clear customs and in my case is subject to 19% VAT and 10 or so % customs duty. But that's a whole another story (and a sad one of utter ignorance of essential civic dignity).

Anyway, what spurred this post was the current $10 Threadless sale. Needless to say that because they are among the few who will ship to me (and without extorting me with incredible postage just for not being from the US of A) I am a loyal repeat customer.

Acupressure point for nausea, anyone?

2007-08-24T21:54:00.000+01:00

Not as easy to find as I would have expected. I was confident there was one and I did find a nice diagram in the end on a site on a New Zealand site on nausea during labour. It is a point a bit (2-3 inches) above the wrists, between the two veins on both arms.

You can massage it gently or even apply a wristband with a plastic button available through New Zealand chemists.

Who ranks who with Personalized Pagerank?

2007-08-23T18:17:00.000+01:00

San Jose is pretty far from Bratislava so there is no way for me to make it to search engine strategies this year. Instead, I have been reading the amazingly useful live coverage at the Search Engine Roundtable.

In the coverage of Personalised Search this assertion attributed to Dave Davies of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning genuinely surprised me:

Google will be assigning a value to you as a search user. This value will be used to grade your activities on web sites. This will affect the rankings of sites based on an individuals activities on that site. Users who are trusted by Google will affect the results to a greater degree than those who are not trusted.

I had thought of personal pagerank as individualised pagerank assigned to a website just for you (and people like you). E.g. Google knows I get annoyed with Web 2.0 social sites and love all things Russian. Therefore if I searched for dating sites something like Consumating would have a low personal pagerank for me. RussianBrides.com would on the other hand appear pretty high up.

The Davies interpretation would mean something quite different: his peronalised pagerank would rank my personal worth as a searcher whose search behaviour is, I guess, generic enough to be useful to influence the general pagerank for other. Goofy people, who surf all over the web, would be discounted, while systematic, savvy searchers would carry more influence.

I think if you juxtapose the two ideas, it is clear which one makes more sense: since everyone's results will behighly personalised there is not so much point in finding trusted users to watch their behaviour. Rather, in a fashion similar to how Amazon works in recommending CDs you may like, search engines can group users according to a variety of characteristics: "If you liked Consumating and Digg, you will love Sphinn."

Goofy users won't have low personal pagerank. Rather, if Google knows you are goofy, it will modify your personalised pagerank algorithm to rank highly sites other goofy people like.

Do you pay when Google employees click on ads?

2007-08-17T23:34:00.000+01:00

I am wondering, would it be possible to geotarget an Adwords campaign to Googleplex? The land area is almost 1 sq. km so it should be enough to meet the Adwords minimum area requirements. That way you could see whether and how clicks by Google employees count.

It would be worthwhile to check with Google PR people whether there is a "Google policy on employees clicking Adsense and Adwords ads". Do these clicks get filtered? Google CEO Eric Schmidt let it slip at an August 2006 Search Engine Strategies that he clicks ads 'all the time'. This may seem like a questionable practice, especially if Schmidt's 10,000+ employees follow suit...

Several people replied in Comments that Google supposedly filtered out all clicks from its offices, and from the whole Google network (employees on laptops connecting through VPNs).

It would also be interesting to know whether Google employees are allowed to click ads outside of work. This could be a conflict of interest for some: it may be tempting to do some late night clickin' and boost ad revenues after a quarter when a hiring binge dented profits in Q2 2007.

But seriously. I deal with various Google ads a lot in my day job. Generally, I try to avoid clicking on them both on my own sites and other sites. When I search on Google, in the ads displayed you can select the URL, copy it and visit the site without incurring its owner costs.

With Adsense ads Google places on other people's sites, the standards seem somewhat looser: on many sites if you tried to click to select the URL you actually click the ad. The clickable area is much larger and often invisible when the color matches the surrounding box. It's curious why reduction of the clickable area of ads on Google's search results pages wasn't followed in ads on Adsense and Google's other advertising properties.

But no doubt this will be self-regulating: when advertising on Google becomes crap and advertisers see lower returns other networks will grow. People learn and at the tip of the pyramid stats are being scrutinised closely.

Košice Rejoice - Londoners Are Coming

2007-07-27T23:41:00.000+01:00

Kosice is Slovakia's second city. Located near the country's far east end, over 5 hours by car from the capital of Bratislava, Kosice often got the short schrift over recent years.

I have long believed that what Kosice needed was a direct flight to London and now, SkyEurope is giving it to us later in 2007. Seeing what SkyEurope has done for the development of tourism in Bratislava and for our freedom to travel, I fully expect to see the magic again.

Young people from Kosice are a migratory lot, often bypassing Bratislava for Prague and London. This will make migration easier but also facilitate contact with the home. Hopefully, the positive effects of what Kosice residents bring back (in material terms and know-how) outweigh the greater ease of departure.

Tourists are coming too, no doubt and in great numbers. It will drive development in the hospitality industry - both for lodging and services. The hotel market in Kosice has been stale to say the least and this should shake it up a little. I would not be surprised if English stag parties discover Kosice - the bear is cheaper than in Bratislava and residents will be friendlier before they find out what stag tourism is all about.

Investment both in business ventures and real estate will very likely increase too, with the added ease of flying from London to Kosice direct in a few hours.

Like Putting on a Ski Mask to Rob Google Blind

2007-06-22T00:35:00.001+01:00

I've been eager to see who gets to advertise on my blog. At the moment for obvious reasons I don't get any visitors or anyone clicking my ads, so I guess Google is reaching into the dark corners of its advertisers' database in the rotation.

I have seen and felt Google Adwords guidelines on all sorts of advertising copy - spelling, punctuation, use of superlatives. I have also read extensively about the death of MFA.
Anyway, in true Andy Beal style, WELCOME NEW ADVERTISER, Project Black Mask:
For an incredible RRP of $97, ProjectBlackMask.com promises to reveal Google's Dirty Little Secret to "wealthbuilders".

I did not click (so I do not have to email Google), I typed in the URL directly. And I learned the the Project Black Mask has nothing to do with affiliate marketing but everything to do with

...gaming the search engines for thousands of FREE clicks in a completely automated way. Black Mask is about milking a loophole in the Google algorithm that was open in 2006... is still open in 2007... but it might not be in 2008...

"Like Putting On A
Ski Mask To Rob
Google Blind!"

More Project Black Mask ads (and respectable organic exposure) can be found if you search Google: a Squidoo lense, Digg entry and 11 ads, all pretty targetted:

Black Mask Blindfold
Project Black Mask is outdated
Learn why here
www.bigwiglog.com

Project Black Mask LAUNCH
Massive $50 Discount. Only Here.
_Everything_ will be revealed!
ProjectBlackMaskRevealed.info

In fact, you can see a whole bunch here.

Whatever people say about Google and democracy in China, Google proves its democratic nature here: you can pooh-pooh Google and advertise here no problem! :)

A socialite's priorities unmasked

2007-06-20T16:54:00.000+01:00

Fabiola Beracasa* is a socialite - I would be too if I were the daughter of banking magnate Alfredo Beracasa. She runs a business called Circa, buying jewelery of other socialites in distress - an uberdiscreet business according to a Gotham Magazine article on her busy daily schedule (hattip to Wealth Report).

I found one thing in Fabiola's schedule fascinating:
7:45a.m. Meet my trainer, Reily, and go for a four- to five-mile run outside, followed by a half hour of weight training. (Next entry 9:15 a.m.)
4:30 p.m. Review the donation requests that have been sent to us and decide which events and charities Circa will commit to this year. (Next entry 5:30 p.m.)

This woman actually proudly admits to spending more time on her morning workout than her annual decision on charitable giving? ;)

* photo by Style.com's Sherly Rabbani and Josephine Solimene featuring the fabulous Fabiola with a Carlos Mota at a dance in February 2006

Finally - Witricity puts us on our way to transmit electricity wirelessly...

2007-06-17T21:03:00.000+01:00

I think everyone has some future inventions they are waiting for eagerly - something out of a science fiction but feasible with our current knowledge. Perhaps just a tad to costly to manufacture or simply not a priority.
For me, I've had a few such dreams and am proud to report that another one seems well on its way to fruition.
Specifically, I've often though about wireless transfer of electricity. My limited knowledge of physis did not allow me to gauge whether this is realistic, but apparently it is (via Virginia Postrel): MIT's team led by Professor Marin Soljacic (in an MIT-released photo via AP/Washington Post) transmitted electricity to light up a 60 w light-bulb about 2 m between the two coils, calling the result Witricity.
This is much cooler than the earlier attempts I had read about (pads, where you would place your mobile phone to recharge it).
What is my next goal you ask? The personal jet packs, of course (I imagine they will be attached to a chair to keep your legs from getting burnt by the flames...).

Where the hell is my ATM?

2007-06-15T20:46:00.001+01:00

Me: There used to be an ATM here, now there is just some cable sticking out from a hole in the tiles. So I thought I would let you know. I mean maybe someone stole it or something?

Tatra Banka Dialog Call Center Lady: I don't thinks so [with a 'I am not really hired to deal with silly jokes tone].

Anyway, my Tatra Banka bankomat at the Bratislava Radisson (I don't live AT the Radisson, just near it) has disappeared. No sign, just a hole in the floor tiles with some cable sticking out. The call centre lady had no idea about the ATM, she was simply able to list where ATM's are available at present.

If the bank were to act somewhat sensibly they could:
1. mine the data for customers who were repeat users of that bankomat,
2. notify them of why this one is disappearing, whether and when it will be back and where the nearest one is,
3. put up a little note,
4. inform their call centre.

Now this would be too customer focused even for what in my view is Slovakia's most customer-focused bank.

UPDATE: Having blogged this, I decided to pursue it further, even at the risk of acting slightly ridiculous. I sent off a question through a contact form at Tatra Banka's website and received an automated reply promising that I will be contacted ASAP. As an interesting aside, the www address in the signature of the automated message pointed to an advertising feature of Tatra Banka's Bank+Coffee, rather than the bank's main website.

UPDATE 2: Not too many days later I have heard back from an ATM business specialista:
"With regrets we must inform you that the bankomat has been deinstalled permanently from these premises. At the same time we want to assure you that we plan to replace the deinstalled bankomat, in a nearby object. If we have caused you any problems please accept our apology."

Next time I will translate my response to the ATM business specialista.

Long Time no Blog - and not because I was enjoying Sunset on the Hokianga Harbour

2007-06-15T18:41:00.001+01:00

I have not blogged for over two weeks now, not due to a lack of material but due to its abundance (at least in proportion to discretionary time usable for blogging). ;) I have a few topics to cover:
1. Bank usability
2. DaveN's new car and the mean looking 5.6l 7 seater (EUR 35,000 for export outside the EU only)
3. Optimising for image search (how do you imagine "Sunset on the Hokianga Harbour"?)*
4. Like DaveN I will try to do these posts in seven minutes each, or maybe 14

* No, sorry, This is definitely not a sunset at the Hokianga harbor, it is a sunset at an Irish Harnour from Webmink to investigate a point.

Watching a Ponzi-scheme implode

2007-05-27T18:28:00.000+01:00

Over and over again, people get involved in Ponzi schemes (most likely since before Ponzi's time). The ones who get in early on can profit - sometimes handsomely, if they get their exit timing right.

In Slovakia, we are currently seeing what looks dangerously like a Ponzi scheme unravel and it seems fur is gonna fly...

In November 2006 a company called Duna-Trade, s.r.o. based in Galanta, a small town some 50 km from Bratislava, changed its name to Auto-Reklama, s.r.o (which means "car advertising"). The seat of the firm changed from a run-down Galanta prefab block of flats to an attractive address in the historical centre of Bratislava.

Soon an offer that sounded too good to be true but good enough for those who wanted to fall for it came to light: if you own a car, pay SKK 25,000 (about USD 1,000) upfront, Auto-Reklama will plaster advertising all over your car and pay you SKK 7,000 every month. Or lease a new car through the company and they will pay the same amount towards your leasing. All you have to do is show up once a month so the company can check you are driving the required amount (900 km).

Cars of all makes and ages with aggressive Auto-Reklama stickers proliferated around Bratislava and Slovakia and people started to get paid. More people signed up. The media did a little sniffing - the owner of the company turned out to have debts vis-a-vis the state Social Insurance Agency from other companies. More interestingly, all the ads were always for Auto-Reklama itself. After all, whoever would pay over SKK 100,000 per year (assuming a VAT tax and some minimum fee for the middle-man's transaction costs) to put a sticker on someone's ugly car? Perhaps one of the Miss Auto-Reklama candidates? Or the 82 Bratislava cars featured on the website (notice the licence plates, readable on most cars)?

In May Auto-Reklama missed its monthly payments, the owner disappeared (a spokesman for the company explained only the owner had the right to release payments and the owner was abroad). Auto-Reklama offices in some towns stayed closed, with employees reportedly fearing an angry mob.

Two big questions remain:
1. Where is THE MAN behind all this now (a Mr. Porozsnyák)?
2. Do those butt-ugly stickers come off without trace?

Swimming in the fountain nude

2007-05-27T07:43:00.000+01:00

I saw a stag do yesterday in the centre of Bratislava, right in front of the heavily guarded US Embassy. The guys stripped one of them (presumably the stag). He jumped into the rather shallow fountain, swam a little and then rolled around in the grass by the fountain.

People, mainly Bratislava locals, watched on, many somewhat bemused, but nobody looked too upset by the whole 'nude swimming' antics.

Minutes later the police came - in total there were about six men in two cars. We saw them standing around with the group and eventually the now dressed man was led away to a car.

The British Embassy in Bratislava along with the city authorities have been looking for ways to curb excesses of the hundreds of stag visitors for years now. Several leaflets have been published and the overall atmosphere facing the stag groups has changed. A few years ago they were welcome with open arms by businesses throughout the city centre. A few broken statues and naked parades later they are banned from many major bars and most clubs.

Like in other cities with stag tourism most semi-decent hotels will not accept larger all male groups. Now the question is how long till the Brits (and some Irishmen):
a. learn that they are not as welcome,
b. will have 'been there, done that' and move on eastward.

Like Bratislava a few years ago, there are many cities further east, that would both welcome stag tourism (because they hardly get any tourism) and provide stag parties with a great experience (my birthplace Kosice in Eastern Slovakia comes to mind - I believe that with the first direct flight from London, which cannot be that far away, stag party goers will learn that Kosice is cheaper and friendlier than Bratislava).

Who's gonna cry when the MFA bonanza ends?

2007-05-20T21:42:00.001+01:00

Not so long ago it was common to search Google and find pay-per-click ads in the results pointing to sites with nothing but more ads. You would search for something like 'Ohio insurance' and find a number of results with ads such as

Top sites on Ohio insurance
See top web results
on Ohio insurance!
ohio.thetop4bestsites.info

You would click through to a site filled with little but more Google ads - with numerous Adsense blocks throughout. The sites were usually optimised for maximum click-through on ads.

A case of arbitrage - webmasters tried to find cheap terms to advertise on and then have advertisements, which pay more on their own website. While this worked, and it did for a long time, there were apparently people out there making as much as tens of thousand dollars per month (UPS Club, anyone?).

But like with any untapped opportunity, the news spread and ranks of arbitrage and made-for-adsense (MFA) webmasters swelled. Automated software appeared to simplify the task of finding 'untapped niches'. Webmasters would find various ways to obtain cheap traffic (Adwords, organic, other cpc ad systems) and turn into into more expensive traffic by displaying higher quality ads.

What were the effects?
1. for Google, the additional ad-clicking meant the appearance of extra revenue, but not extra profit, since this was simply a transfer from some its advertisers to some of its publishers. In fact, MFA arbitrageurs were taking away money that could have been Google's profit,
2. for regular advertisers an increase in cost and decrease in effectiveness (conversion rates, ROI) of their ads on Google Adwords, likely pushing a segment of potential advertisers outside of the network completely,
3. for clever MFA webmasters, often huge profits with a small initial time investment,
4. for the searcher a decrease in quality of the search engine results pages (SERPs) - they click on ads, which rather than showing the expected content show more ads.

There were calls from the advertiser and searcher communities for Google to stop this practice. In the long term, by souring the quality of results (especially in the content network - ads published on people's blogs and other sites) the MFS arbitrage was probably hurting Google itself. Many CPC experts recommended that advertisers opt out of the content network (ads displayed on sites of publishers outside of Google itself)

According to Andy Beal at MarketingPilgrim.com, self-admitted MFA webmasters at WebmasterWorld have been discussing notices they received from Google that their Adsense accounts will be suspended as of June 1, 2007. Google apparently deemed their business model unfit (albeit after tolerating it for years).

And for MFA webmasters out there - lucky you, if you have made enough this way to make getting into a new business model easy, start learning about defensible traffic now. Also, there must be a market for your skills in writing those high click-through adwords ads and placing the adsense boxes just right.

In China, all interest rates must be divisible by 9...

2007-05-20T19:21:00.001+01:00

A "divisible-by-nine rule was enshrined in accounting standards issued jointly by the central bank and the Ministry of Finance [of China] in 1993," according to Bloomberg (via Harvard professor Greg Mankiw).

Hence the People's Bank of China's raised its benchmark landing rate by 18 basis points (0.18%) on Friday, May 18, 2007. Central banks in most countries would, of course, deal in quarters or tenths of percents.

Interestingly, on the same day the bank decided that

"Reserve requirements on funds held by banks will be hiked by 50 basis points."

The trading band for the yuan, the Chinese currency, was widened by 50 points on that day as well. Perhaps the rule only applies to the rates for consumers?

The Bloomberg story mentions several motivations for the 'divisible-by-nine rule' (I tried to find nine in the story but only counted six):
- Chinese calendar
- a 360-day financial year
- long considered lucky number
- makes calculation with Abakus counting device easier
- avoid rounding of interest
- nine sounds the same as 'longevity'

Now if so many people believe in this, maybe there is something to it?

May I call you 'Madam', Sir?

2007-05-19T21:00:00.001+01:00

Viet Le, a dear friend from my UWC times whose blog I follow (and borrowed the word 'miscellany' in the name of my blog from) has a great entry about doing a double-take after being "Sir'd" by some congresswoman's press spokesman.

'Apparently, my telephone voice has a feminine lilt so it's always "Miss" or "Mam" or even "Veet",' Viet blogs. Got me started thinking about the whole phone voice thing.

I remember in my early teens the frustration, when I answered the phone and everyone thought I was my mother speaking. I also remember the genuine indignation I felt when correcting people. On the other hand, I could make funny calls to people and pretend I am an adult woman, rather than a child of 12.

I remember a few more men whose high-pitched voices were subject to discussion: my male friend working at a travel agency who is always referred to by callers as a Ms. and sometimes doesn't bother explaining and a former classmate of my mother, who she said everyone though was gay due to his high pitched voice until he got married and fathered two kids.

There is evidence (reference, anyone?) that people with deeper voices appear more trustworthy and I think I came across someone mentioning a study of effects of a deep voice on earnings.

Click here, if this text is blue or purple!

2007-05-19T20:29:00.000+01:00

Usability consultant and cre8pc.com founder Kim Krause Berg points out usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s retraction of an earlier recommendation that for usability purposes hyperlinks should be shown in blue font with an underline for unvisited links and purple for visited.

Kim quotes Nielsen saying in an interview that links can essentially be any colour different from the surrounding text since people have become more experienced in browsing.

Like Kim I've had a personal preference for ignoring this rule with some limited exceptions. I've sometimes viewed the semi-formalised rule as a useful shortcut in arguing for a usable link identification scheme on a site. Also, sites serving markets where users have less experience, older computers or smaller bandwith may sometimes benefit from such a straightforward colour-coding.

The distribution of experience, equipment and bandwith among internet users varies greatly with different internet user demographics. For the sake of maximizing accessibility and improving user experience sometimes sticking to the very standard link identification scheme may be advisable - it may work very well for a site with a less proficient target group.

I showed a website to a friend who is a long-time internet user, a middle-aged proprietor in the hospitality industry. He mainly emails and only browses rarely. He told me the website did not work. When we checked the site together, it turned out he was unable to identify links which used green rather than blue colour.

In most circumstances I feel free to deviate from the now-revoked recommendation, keeping in mind its underlying motivation - that visitors need to be able to see where to click for your site to be a nice place and to accomplish its goals.

As far as other ‘rules’ or 'recommendations' for usability in the area of link identification that I would subscribe to, I would generally argue in favour of 1. consistency (across the site and even related sites), 2. simplicity (avoiding fancy mouseover/javascript weirdness) although I can think of a number of reasonable exceptions.

A proprietary link identification scheme is probably ok for sites working with experienced web users. On sites where you are a return visitor a proprietary link identification scheme may even make your experience more enjoyable, regardless of what colour the links are.

How to perform problem tree analysis

2007-05-17T10:30:00.000+01:00

I worked with students today on creating Problem trees as part of using the Logical Framework (log frame) methodology in my Policy Evaluation class. This was our final class and I was happy to get something quite interactive going for students - they seem to enjoy this and a few even yearn actually doing something.

The technique is a simple one but rewarding (genuine hat-tip to Dagmar of Slovak Evaluation specialist D&D Consulting, who has used it in a training session we did for local policy makers): you use little cards to write down problems you wish to adress with a public policy intervention (this works reasonably well at any level - strategy, policy, programme, project). You tease out additional cards by asking the WHY question - i.e. why does this problem happen.

Now the trick part: on the back of each card you write an objective associated with resolving the problem - often is as simple as turning a "Too little of XY" into "More XY".

You then work hard to arrange problems according to causality - working from an effect at the top through a focal problem somewhere in the middle all the way to problems, which are the underlying causes.

You then simply flip the card over and voila you have a Goals analysis - a hierarchic ordering of goals you can transfer into a logical framework matrix. Neat.

I have (and I imagine my senior colleagues do as well) a few hangups about using interactive methods in teaching. In my Economics MSc. in Scotland we NEVER did anything remotely interactive - no group work, no in-class presentations and believe it or not, not a single essay (other than the dissertation, of course). But then the university gave the world Adam Smith so maybe they knew what they were doing. Our econ programme shared the building (or rather was a guest) of the Edinburgh MBA Programme and the management students were all about interactive methods while seemingly not so much into "substance".

Apparently, despite a lack of organisation to my Policy Evaluation course, the practical bits were very well received by students. Every time I teach or train I relearn the same lesson: students (at least Slovaks) of all ages love interactive teaching. We have been exposed to so little of it in our school system that we are grateful to learn anything practical and get to actually do and say things in class rather than have to listen to lectures and repeat them back in oral exams.

Adwords pet peeves

2007-05-17T10:26:00.000+01:00

Wrote an email to Adwords Support regarding my pet peeve - the fact that it is not easy to find out through AdWords and even Google Analytics what actual phrases the people who clicked your ads searched for. I have doubt there is a reasonably easy way of doing this but Google does not seem to promote thins functionality.

On a related note, Google allows all sorts of keyword match types (i.e. you can say you want your ads displayed on searches for Slovakia SEO exact-matched, broad-matched, phrase-matched, as well as negative). There is even an option for all matches together with the exception of exact match - phrase match for [Slovakia SEO] along with broadmatch but with the exact match as a negative.

With this match type, you would be displayed for "shitty Slovakia SEO", "Slovakia SEO cheaply", "Slovakia search engine optimization" but not for the exact match of "Slovakia SEO". Confusing, huh?

Anyway, to make a long story short, a match type that is NOT on offer is something like [Slovakia] SEO, where the word

Slovakia

would be required, while SEO would be broad-matched. This would allow you to display ads for all searches that contain the word Slovakia and any variation on the words SEO, while not displaying for something unrelated such as Hungary SEO.

Borrowed content

2007-05-17T10:21:00.000+01:00

We found someone seemingly planning to use our copyrighted content - a site planning to offer reservations at Bratislava apartments, currently hosted on its Liptovsky Hradok web design company server has a whole bunch of our content - a painstakingly made list of galleries or info on the Bratislava Opera. They also have stuff from some of our friends and clients.

We have seen our unique Bratislava content borrowed over and over again by ignorant and sometimes unscupulous webmasters. I know that most of the time the energy that goes into trying to notify webmasters of copyright violations is a waste of my time - in the same amount of time we could simply write more new content. But sometimes it feels really painful to see your work displayed on god knows who's pages without any credit.

Pizza enjoys Tropical SEO

2007-05-17T09:52:00.000+01:00

Andy Hagans pledges convincingly to a lazy SEO lifestyle - if not the whole then a few details definitely spoke to me such as having a personal assistant to take care of pesky details, give his phone number only to very close associates. And some parts I arrived at independently, e.g. taking up to a week to answer emails, "especially if the reply requires effort on my part."

I have enjoyed Andy's writing on Tropical and have definitely taken several points he has made to heart. My favourite points/quotes:
1. "...[I]ndustries with poor underlying economics can make even genius managers seem average,", which leads Andy to conclude that "Managing your career is like investing–the degree of difficulty does not count. So you can save yourself money and pain by getting on the right train," in Warren Buffet's Advice to SEOs.
2. Working as a SEO consultant makes for a poor business model, as your time is much better spent on your own projects in high-yielding lead-generating affiliate areas such as real estate, mortgages, insurance.
3. Once you get into the right area, "[i]t takes strategy, tactics, balls, elbow grease, money, and smart planning" but mostly simply working hard everyday, in tips on building a site you can sell for a million dollars

Andy was a professional link-baiter, and as you can see, he got me. I love the blog and the style, as well as the surrounding "blogscape". I've discovered and enjoyed following a little blogring with Andy Hagans at TropicalSEO, Brad Geddes of eWhisper.net, Brian Provost's ScoreboardMediaGroup and several others with a focus on "competitive webmastering".

Slovak real estate sites suck

2007-05-17T09:49:00.001+01:00

Seriously, one day I am gonna get just slightly more angry with Slovak real estate sites and I am going to put in the money and effort into building a usable server. The existing sites suck because they are overrun by repeat advertising. I will put in a sensible descriptive database structure and work hard to build a usable search interface.

Meanwhile, I will look at international examples, and there are definitely interesting examples abound. From C2C portals to social real estate, possibilities are endless and a good concept may even scale.

For all your creature comforts

2007-05-17T09:46:00.000+01:00

On Joost, I came across an amazingly funny video from the Aardman Animations studios. It's called Creature Comforts and features dead serious sounding interviews with animals in different settings. Really sweet and funny (and I Googled a few more from Youtube) not least because it reminded me of a dear friend, Radda from New York, who I haven't been in touch with for a while.

I watched a few clips and found them hilarious. I also found notable that some of them came from the late 80s - I mean we were still living in the Communist regime here in Slovakia, then.

Joost Blogging

2007-05-17T09:43:00.000+01:00

Joost - Dusoft forced-fed me an "invite" to the peer-to-peer internet TV by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (of Skype and Kazaa fame). We watched a few car reviews including some pretty neat shows about almost mass market cars such as the BMW 130i and VW R32. Of course, the Porsche shows were neat too.

After troubleshooting an issue around logging off Dusoft's account and creating mine in the downloaded player we made Joost fullscreen. The broadcast was split in the middle by the frames of my two 19'' screens. Seeing the unused potentially monetisable real estate - the dark sides around the image, made me gulp at the though of the advertising potential.

Of course, the Joosters possibly gulped in a similar fashion some two years ago, began development with 150 programmers (or rather software developers in New York, London, Leiden and Toulouse - no word on Tallinn or Bratislava).

Andrej's Miscellany

What Google Trends terms should you watch to know about panic?

A Liptov Weekend: Hotel-Hopping on a Whim

Great Asian Noodle Bar in Vienna - Sharing Fruits of My Research...

Austrian Tabloid Fined €20k for Lifting Girl's Facebook Photo to Illustrate her Alleged Prostitute Namesake's Murder Story

Blue Bay Hotel in Netanya Blues

Moods Boutique Hotel Prague - a Quick Stay and Review

Can you make money with planned Slovak tax changes?

Wellness Patince: Well Done

Seen this ad format before?

Is to. Simply the Shortest URL Shortener Ever?

PROKOP 2010 - the new Slovak PR Award

People to follow on Twitter in 2010 #follow2010

Don't Waste Your 'Potential', American Express

Professional deformation makes me leave deformed rants on a great website

Ameritania Hotel NYC Paying Indian "SEO's" to Post Comment Spam?

You need cool things to put on Facebook?

Can Apple afford to be this unresponsive?

Is the conference discount on hotel room sometimes a surcharge?

Dell in Bratislava's Largest Illegal Building (Legalised Ex-Post)

How many Twitter followers do you need to qualify?

Warning: ApartmentsNYC911.com may not deliver what they promise

The shortest, 3-letter URL shorteners - The Definitive List

Hotel Therma Dunajska Streda - the Good and the Bad (There is No Ugly)

A few cool things to try with Facebook ads

Five more three-letter URL shorteners

The three shortest URL shorteners in the world

Tatra Banka: Beating a Dead Horse

Things I noticed giving up the Crown for the Euro

Crown to Euro Brings Along Fines for Abusers

Five Bs I loved in Istanbul

Countdown to 2008 Elfyourself

Disqus Now Installed

Renting an apartment from Izumi von Hardenberg, apartmentsnycity.com? Beware.

Google to Slovak Adwords advertisers: cancel your account with us now!

Five things I disliked in New York

Five things I liked in New York and miss in Bratislava

Google Chrome Market Share by Year End?

Wouldn't you be a cheerleader for competition?

Rebiana from Stevia is Coke's New Sweetener

Towel battle looms

Surely they ARE crazy - Slovakia's Price Board before euro adoption

Markets are tough, Slovak bank clients learn

When you get sick in Croatia, do as the Croats do?

Tatra Banka, careful about any single-sided moves!

Welcome to the dot anything world

Veoh's got guts

Competitive Webmastering in the 21st Century - How much is your domain worth?

Up in arms over Vegetka

Must take stance on China

PR agency posting fake comments? Don't get caught!

Don't Elfyourself, buy a stapler instead

Ryanairisation of Skyeurope?

Happy to be an Orange customer today

Get rickrolled while rickrolling is still in!

Real estate lies with short legs - Bratislava apartments for sale

Two ways to date a beauty queen - or three brunettes

Don't believe what you read - this is just the Internet

Slovak Consumer Culture in 2008 - Not Quite There Yet

I love competition - watching Slovak ING and mBank fight it out in savings accounts

What will happen when Yahoo Site Explorer stops to function

More on Card and Reader

Back with more Tatrabanka ranting - the Calculator

Slovakia's Best Barman

Why good domains cost much and for how long?

Predictions of 2008 trends start rushing in

Shut up when the anthem plays!

Old advice on doing better with charity

Landline over mobile

2008: Anyone can make predictions!

Filling out the facebook profile for a UWC classmate

My Prediction: 2008 will be the year of Kosice

Are you clever enough to pull a 419?

$10 Threadless sale rocks!

Acupressure point for nausea, anyone?

Who ranks who with Personalized Pagerank?

Do you pay when Google employees click on ads?

Košice Rejoice - Londoners Are Coming

Like Putting on a Ski Mask to Rob Google Blind

A socialite's priorities unmasked