Can you make money with planned Slovak tax changes?

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

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?

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?

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

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

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

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?