View This Data (Ep. 8)

crisis vs recession on the internet (Romania)
Originally uploaded by brandlyyours

Crisis vs. Recession
in Romania

(1) The search for "crisis" really began in the 39th week of 2008.

(2) There is no conceptual difference [later edit: "in Romanians minds"] between "crisis" and "recession", as search trends are pretty well correlated.

Coffee Will Save the World

The 7.2 million tons of coffee used yearly worldwide could yield around 1.3 billion liters of bio-fuel. This means that a car could drive with this gasoline for about 260 million kilometers, or 338 times the distance to the moon and back.

I always knew coffee can do magic.

via guardian

View This Data (Ep. 7)

Prices For Gas Vs. Prints
Originally uploaded by brandlyyours

Look how marketing, PR and politics manage to obliterate basic economic facts.

Printing ink costs 514 times more than gasoline due to (at least in part) the low transparency of the printer industry.

More info here

Shocked

70 years of profits down the toilet...

NYTimes shows that the economic crisis is really global and deep - reaching: "Toyota Expects Its First Loss in 70 Years". Who could have forecast this 24 months ago? :)

Compare the Crisis

This year, American households will spend on average EUR301 on gifts (down from last year).

In Romania, this Christmas is going to cost local families around EUR585 (all things included).
64 out of 100 salaries in Romania will be spent entirely on presents. This means a total of EUR335 spent on gifts for all these 64 out of 100 employees.



Sources:
For USA
(u1) Conference Board via hbr.edu.
For Romania
(r1) Salaries and gifts - Aviva Romania via Curierul National
(r2) Cost of Christmas - Deloitte via realitatea.net
(r3) Official data regarding average income (net) in Romania

See You in Cluj

For those of you interested in discussing the ten steps needed for a successful start-up, on 12-Nov-08 I'll be in Cluj at ZileleBiz.
Looking forward to seeing you.  

View this Data (ep. 6)

This interactive feature compares previous plans to help ailing economies to the currently debated one.

If you're not an economically inclined person, just think of this feature as a way to browse through history and get a bit of comfort from knowing that we've been in similar situations before. Ok, it might be a bigger issue now (at least money-wise) but we've dealt with stuff like this before.

Let's hope we do the right thing.

"Since Hank Paulson, the Treasury secretary, unveiled his $700bn plan to rescue the American financial system all manner of alternative models have been debated. Here we take you through some examples of past bailout structures, drawing from the US, Sweden and Japan."
(FT.com)

FMCG Spending In Romania

From ACNielsen via adevarul.ro

See this Speech?

What did Mrs. Clinton talk about last night?
Well, let's see: America, Barack, Obama, going, keep, years, care, people and children.


And if you have the time, read it or watch it.

Breaking News: Men Cook!

Emancipation finally shows some true results: men cook!

When there's a new segmentation study identifying some "keen and accomplished male cooks" as gastrosexuals, it's time i also put the info on the table:

Yes, I'm cooking for pleasure, praise and seduction ;)

Move over all you metro - and uebersexuals, gastrosexuals rule the kitchen... ahm... world. We know how to boil an egg and we're not afraid of baking cookies.

However, don't make us wash the dishes or other blue collar stuff - we are true creative people and not washing machines. Hint: Think of Ratatouille.


Gastrosexuals cook for:
(1) pleasure
(2) praise
and
(3) potential seduction

A few words on this study: Commissioned by PurAsia (trademark owned by Mars), the study has been done by Future Foundation and can be requested on their website or at gastrosexual.com

Inspired by Mountains?

Code names at Microsoft

Microsoft seems to be gradually parting from it's usual code names inspired by the same mountain region: Whistler Blackcomb.

Midori, their new code name, raises at least one big question: "Did Microsoft change their travel agent?"

bbc has this story with witty comments

Stress and the Immune-System

Stress& Immune-System
Originally uploaded by brandlyyours

Stay stress-free. It has been scientifically proven that stress generates aging and a shaky immune system

"When the body is under stress, it boosts production of cortisol to support a 'fight or flight' response"

via science daily

View This Data (ep. 3)

Cinemas in Romania
Originally uploaded by brandlyyours

(1) Romanians don't go to the cinema. This is often said and written when talking about spare time activities in Romania.
However,
(2) there are less and less cinemas in Romania.

I can't say for sure which of these two facts is the resultant and which is the cause. Cinemas either went bankrupt because people did not go to the movies or... they became banks, fast-foods and / discos because of their location and dubious privatizations.

I guess reality beats the crap out of movie fiction.

iTunes Store Romania?

iTunes Store Romania?
Originally uploaded by brandlyyours

Is it coming soon?
I managed to complete all registration steps until "payment" when I keep getting an error. The error text reads something like: " Error, please try again later"

Does anyone know more about the iTunes Store coming to Romania?


Update: Legal terms on apple.com are available for Romania. It appears that only AppStore will be available in Romania. Click for legal terms in Romanian

Update2: Apple appears to be operating the iTunes Store Romania through
iTunes s.à.r.l., in Luxembourg - as it does with other EU countries as well.

EU and My Mustard

Could a guy like me just have breakfast without reading labels? :-)

This Vama Veche mustard is Bulgarian.

I now wonder where the accompanying delicious sausage comes from...

EU messed with my food.

View This Data (ep. 2)

For those of you buying a widescreen HDTV, you might be soon looking for a bigger home :)
It appears that you can calculate an optimal couch to TV distance by multiplying the TV's width in inches with 1.8664.
For visually inclined mathematicians, the picture below should help.

Help or Company Needed

After some 100 questions, I now know for sure that I'm a total geek.

Should I seek help or company?

The reference table from innergeek.us

+ Geekish Tendencies................................≥09%

++ Geek.............................................≥15%

+++ Total Geek......................................≥25%

++++ Major Geek.....................................≥35%

+++++ Super Geek....................................≥45%

++++++ Extreme Geek.................................≥55%

+++++++ Geek God....................................≥65%

+++++++! Dysfunctional Geek.........................≥75%

Economic Turn-Offs

People respond to incentives, right?
But what about turn-offs?

An Albanian refinery entered a restructuring program and decided to only keep employed one member of each family. So... a few couples working at this company decided to ... get a divorce in order to keep both jobs.

Via capital.ro, liberation.fr

Thoughts on... Voice Recognition

The Economist wrote in May that French teachers are upset that pupils have less and less spelling skills.

Their scapegoat: "fingers are pointed not only at progressive teaching, the decline of the dictée or the legacy of May 1968. The new culprit is text-messaging." Article is here

My two cents: SMS is doing to spelling what fast food is doing to food. However, imagine what will voice recognition do to spelling... :)

Later edit: How does "br&ly urs" sound? :)

Web-Ads: Enough is enough

I'm from Transylvania, Romania. People from this region of the country are known for being patient and calm. However, enough is enough.

Whenever I open newspaper sites in Romania, my browser freezes for 10 seconds because some advertisers just need to show me some razor-blade, apartment or mobile internet app. (The razor blade even shaves the letters off the screen!)

This morning I installed Adblock on my Firefox browser. Guess what? I am happy again :)

Where's the content?

Apple announced the 3G iPhone for July 2008.
My question now: What will be the source of content loaded on iPhones all over the world?
The iTunes store is currently present in 22 countries but, coming this year, the iPhone will be present in 71.
Hardware is great. But where's the content?


Data sources used: Apple's site and Wikipedia

Later edit: This article from Time, takes a look at Apple's business model for the iPhone 3G: Steve Jobs Bets the Apple Farm

Plants recognize their relatives

Cakile maritima
Originally uploaded by waen ♡

"Some plant species show an ability to recognize (and prefer) their own relatives." Wow. Let me tell you this: Frank Herbert was right. :)
In his Pandora series, Frank Herbert talked about conscious plants and a tangled web of ecology, politics and philosophy. Jesus Incidentis the first book of this SF series. I've read it one or two years ago and am talking to plants ever since :)


NYtimes: Loyal to Its Roots By CAROL KAESUK YOON


Later edit: "No one knows, yet, how significant such effects are. Moreover, we’re
only beginning to make an inventory of who’s down there — the identity
of most intraterrestrials remains mysterious." from NYTimes.

What's next?

Keynote coming soon

Get this widget!

Later edit: widgets and web2.0 seem to cause problems today...

Mephisto luring under the bed

Saturday evening was a dream-come true. After reading the German original for high-school, I finally saw a live adaptation of Goethe's Faust.

My 3 tags are:

• spooky
• a_must_see
• great_director_great_text_great_mephisto_great_set_design.

Foto: Scott Eastman, source:liternet.ro

PS: Should you not find the time to see it in June, the show has already been sold to this year's Goethe festival in Germany (at the beginning of September)

Luke I'm Your Father

I just found out that this page is related to "An Astronomical Alphabet"

Also want to check your web-site-relationships? Type "related:www.mywebsite.com" in google.

Here are my relatives :)

Romania: iPhone is Orange

France Telecom spokesman Bertrand Deronchaine said Orange will be the exclusive iPhone provider in Belgium and Romania, with co-exclusive or non-exclusive deals in other countries. He declined to offer more details about the arrangement

The first good reason for me to switch back to Orange :)

Link to AP News

You Are Not Seeing Double

Please bear with me as I am getting better at working with ScribeFire.

I have recently switched to this Firefox add-in and
since I'm learning-by-clicking :)
I often find myself publishing an update to a blogpost as a new post.

So, you're your eyes are ok, my clicking is double :)

CEC Bank Rebrands

As CEC starts rebranding, today's business press turned greenish.

CEC Bank is 144 years old and still having the guts and strength to start a rebranding process set to last until 2010. (I know that the Romanian state is trying to privatize this bank, so a well-done face lift can only help :) )

Liking or disliking the new logo is a subject for designers and other pundits. What I have noted yesterday, was that the process started in a coherent and well orchestrated way:

• press conference
• new website
• Check out the car design for auto-credit
• I wonder why they did not register cecbank.ro or cec-bank.ro...
  
• new TV ad (expect to see a 20 sec cut very shortly :p )
• CEO's tie was branded

YahooMessenger Penetration in Romania