Veni | Вени

Yesterday, during the 2nd round of elections, Bulgaria elected incumbent President Georgi Parvanov for his second term.

This is the first time in the last 17 years (after the fall of socialism) when the incumbent wins re-election. Mr. Parvanov made that possible with about 76 % of the votes, leaving 24 % for his challenger.

President Parvanov came into office from being leader of the Bulgarian Socialist Party. Today the party leader, Sergey Stanishev, is Prime Minister of the Republic of Bulgaria.

Both are members of the Internet Society of Bulgaria. Earlier this year, they both met with a number of Internet chief executives.

Joi Ito was in Bulgaria in the last few days, and gave a number of speeches – one at the Sofia University, and two with the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham).

On the breakfast with the AmCham Board we had the pleasure of meeting the US Ambassador to Bulgaria, H.E. John Beyrle. At the lunch with broader AmCham member community, we were listening to Joi’s visionary thoughts, which he expressed in a very unique way. His speech was so interesting, and inspiring, that it wen way beyond the time specified. This hardly left any time for him to have his lunch. By chance, the day he had his speech, was also the birthday of H.E. Koichiro Fukui, the Ambassador of Japan to Bulgaria. What better present could AmCham organize for him?!

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Joi Ito forwarded me a note from a visitor of his site.

They point to a study on the impact of the new Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) on the web sites, which were designed for IE6. The results of the study are available at the UK company’s web site. Among sites that are not ready for IE7: BHP Billiton, Lloyds TSB, Unilever, and others.

Worth reading, and if it’s true, hundreds of millions of USD will be spent to fix the web sites. Perhaps it would have been easier to fix IE7?

Today the Bulgarian Foreign Minister, Mr. Ivailo Kalfin, met with ICANN‘s President/CEO Paul Twomey and Joichi Ito.

The big news:

The Bulgarian Foreign Ministry moved all of its content under CreativeCommons License 2.5 attribution.

The Minister started a blog at http://www.kalfin.eu.

More details from the press-release of the Ministry:

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Between Oct. 29, 2006 and November 3, 2006, Athens hosts the first Internet Governance Forum.

The forum is follow-up to the WSIS. More than 1000 people have registered, and perhaps all of them will come in the Greek capital. Since this is the first such event, it will also define what the next forums will look like. It all depends on the participants, which will range from civil society activists to ministers and heads of states.

Here’s what you should be visiting on line for more information:

The official site of the Athens meeting.

The IGF Advisory Group.

The IGF Forum.

There will be official blogging during the meeting.

Read more…

Bulgarian Agency for Information Technologies and Communications has announced a two-week public discussion period for the new Telecommunications Law. Its original name is “Law for electronic services”, and is in accordance with the latest European acquis in the field.

The law is published on the web site of the Agency, and everyone can download it, together with the current law, and suggest changes to Mr. Rangelov and Ms. Pasarelska at the Agency.

Unfortunately the text is only in Bulgarian, and I am trying to find out if we can obtain it in English and put it on the web.

Major issues – Internet addresses are still going to be beyond the control of the National Regulatory Authority, which means Bulgaria continues to be on the cutting edge of modern societies.

P.S. Update from October 16, 2006. Here’s the draft law in English.

The Bulgarian Parliament accepted changes in the Tax Law, which will make the corporate tax rate only 10 % from January 1st, 2007, when Bulgaria joins the European Union.

This makes Bulgaria with Cyprus have the lowest corporate tax rate in the EU.

The finance ministry (headed by anothre friend of mine – Plamen Oresharski, with whom we were candidates for mayors of Sofia in 2003; what a small world!) said that the low rate will make companies come out from the hidden, gray market.

That decision makes the government of socialist leader Sergey Stanishev the most liberal in finances in the last 10 years. More information about it at the International Herald Tribune and The Raw Story.

Eudora users face a great decision by Qualcomm – Eudora goes open source from first half of 2007!

You could read more at the official web site.

Eudora is a great mailer program, and now that it goes open source, it hopefully will add some more details, which were missing – e.g. cyrillic alphabet support. What makes Eudora better than usual mailers (e.g. Outlook Express, or Outlook), is that it allows usage/moving/copy of your mail without problems via different computers. For example, if you get a new PC, you don’t need to worry – you can copy all your mailboxes, filters and configuration files on the new compter, and they will work just fine, without any problems.

My colleague and very good friend Joi Ito is coming to Bulgaria.

He will have a public lecture at the Sofia University on October 25th, at 5:30 p.m., at Auditorium 65.

Here’s what the ICANN web site says about him:

Joi Ito is vice president of international and mobility development for Technorati, which indexes and monitors blogs and the Chairman of Six Apart, the weblog software company. He is on the board of Creative Commons, a non-profit organization which proposes a middle way to rights management, rather than the extremes of the pure public domain or the reservation of all rights.

He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan.

In 1997 Time Magazine ranked him as a member of the CyberElite. In 2000 he was ranked among the “50 Stars of Asia” by Business Week and commended by the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications for supporting the advancement of IT.

In 2001 the World Economic Forum chose him as one of the 100 “Global Leaders of Tomorrow” for 2002.

He has served and continues to serve on numerous Japanese central as well as local government committees and boards, advising the government on IT, privacy and computer security related issues. He is currently researching “The Sharing Economy” as a Doctor of Business Administration candidate at Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, Hitotsubashi University in Japan. He maintains a popular weblog (http://joi.ito.com/) where he regularly shares his thoughts with the online community.

His visit to Bulgaria will include meetings with the Internet and bloggers community, members of the Parliament, ministers, businessmen.
More about Joi and his trip (in Bulgarian) can be found at portal.bg.

I was in Prague Sept. 24-26 for the ICANN Studienkreis conference. While the conference was in the usual great way Wolfgang Kleinwachter is organizing it, the impressions I got from Prague were quite negative.

But let’s first talk about the conference.

That was my second ICANN Studienkreis (first one was in Aarhus in 2004), and it confirmed my feeling that Wolfgang has found a niche for a unique, elite conference on issues related to Internet governance.

Many of the ICANN directors, besides me, have been participants there, and this year there were also a number of well-known people to talk: Markus Eggensperger, Dirk Kirschenowski of .berlin, Marie Zitkova of .aero, David Maher of PIR, Philipp Grabensee of Afilias, Annette Kroeber Riel of VeriSign, Andrew McLaughlin of Google, and many many more…

I liked our topic, “Will Late Starters become Front Runners in new Markets?”, where people from Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia and Moldova discussed what’s the future of the Internet. East Europe has about 250 M people, who are the next wave of Internauts. Many of the ideas being developed today in this part of the world will shape the Internet tomorrow.

You can read more about the conference at its web site (linked above)

For my experince in Prague, see below. Read more…