Veni | Вени

The European investment fund CEE GROWTH LUXEMBOURG SICAR S.C.A has invested a significant amount of money in the Bulgarian Internet Service Provider BOL.BG
The investment shows the enlarging activity of the fund in Central and Eastern Europe. It’s a result of an in-depth analysys of the market, the influence and the possibilities for development of the ISPs in Bulgaria.

The plans of the company include further development of their high speed fiber-optic network, new services as VoIP, IPtv (Internet television), Video On Demand, and others. BOL will be looking for new people, and if you know someone who is interested in working in Bulgaria for a hi-tech company, please, mail Dragomir Tzankov – dragot @ bol.bg .

BOL will be also buying out other ISPs, and will form joint ventures with them. That will give other companies (both smaller and larger) to be part of a winning team.
At the moment, BOL has fiber-optic network, covering larger parts of the capital of Bulgaria, offering Internet access with speeds of up to 1000 Mbps for businesses and citizens. At the end of 2006 bol.bg signed an agreement with Premium Digital for legal distribution of movies over the Internet, using Video on Demand (BoD) technology, thus becoming the first company to provide 4-in-1 services (Internet, phone, digital tv, and VoD).

And why I am writing about it? For two reasons:
first, it’s important for the development of the Internet and the country as a whole, and
two, BOL was founded by me and Dimitar (Mitko) Ganchev in 1993 as CIT Ltd, and in 1997 after changing ownership, the name BOL.bg showed up (registered trade mark of CIT). Today it has more than 50 employees, 12 offices, and is among the leading Internet Service Providers of Bulgaria.

CEE GROWTH LUXEMBOURG SICAR S.C.A. is registered in Luxembourg, has Eur 40 M for investments in the South Eastern Europe. It’s managed by Slovenian managers, with experience in funding hundreds of companies throughout Europe.

The British government’s Educational Communications and Technology Agency – BECTA has issued a serious warning against using Windows Vista in the British schools.

The report is recommended for schools, government and partners, industry and developers. It will be indeed important to see if the Bulgarian government will listen to this report, esp. that some of the biggest proponents of Microsoft in Bulgaria have given the example of the UK as a model for development of e-government.

Here are some of the most remarkable moments in this report (bold text is mine).

The report found that whilst the new features of Vista add value, there are no “must have” features in the product that would justify early deployment in schools and colleges. The technical, financial and organisational challenges associated with early deployment currently make this a high risk strategy. Early deployment is therefore strongly recommended against.

The report recommends that Microsoft should facilitate a small number of pilot activities to clarify what the benefits of deploying Vista in schools and colleges would be and how much deployment would cost. The costs of a widespread deployment of Vista are currently estimated to be around £160 million while the benefits are unclear.

Schools and colleges are strongly advised to consider the findings of Becta’s final report on Vista due by January 2008 before considering any wide-scale deployment.

The review of Office 2007 identified that there were over 170 new features in the product, but considered that many of them were of more use in a business rather than an educational context. A detailed analysis of the new functionality found that none of the new features were a “must have” for schools and colleges.

As the costs of deployment of Office 2007 would be significant, Becta has not identified any convincing justification for the early adoption of Office 2007. Recognising that many schools and colleges already have perfectly adequate office productivity solutions there would need to be a strong case to justify the necessary investment.

The report compared Office 2007 with a range of competitor products and found that many of them delivered about 50% of the Office 2007 functionality, enough it is believed to meet or exceed basic office productivity requirements of many schools.

Becta therefore calls on the ICT industry to ensure that computers for the education marketplace are delivered with a choice of Office productivity suites available, which ideally should include an open-source offering.

The ability for schools to exercise choice is further restricted by interoperability difficulties and Becta is calling on Microsoft to improve its support for the ODF interoperability standard.

You can read the full report at this address (PDF, 332 Kb).

This news in Bulgarian at portal.bg. Тази новина на български език – в portal.bg.

Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the ICT sector the EU – it was published today at the European Commission web site.

You can download and read this quite useful report, 287 pages, prepared by the UNU-Merit in the Netherlands by clicking on this link (PDF file, 1.7Mb). UNU-Merit is part of the United Nations Univeristy, and is the Maastricht Economic and social Research and training centre on Innovation and Technology.

More information about it (in Bulgarian) can be found at portal.bg.

There was an article at BoingBoing.net last year, but I refer to it now, as today Portal.bg has published a Dnevnik daily article (note: in Bulgarian) about the problems Bulgarian face when they try to read/download books online, including books from authors who have died about 70 years ago…

The problem is that some publishing houses have bought the rights from the state or the authors, but some of their books have already been OCR-ed and published online, usually in plain text format.

Michael Dell has said yesterday in Las Vegas that the entire PC industry should adopt free recycling programs for users, as he announced his company will plant a tree for every computer it sells.
Quite a wise move! Congratulations for Dell and his visionary thinking!

I’d use this news to tell my readers about a Bulgarian, who has been doing the same:
Some Bulgarian newspapers reported about a Bulgarian doctor, living today in Australia, who Launched a Walnut Plantation in Bulgaria. Dr. Preslav Trenchev bought 104.8 ha of land in the region of Pernik town at a tender. The land is going to be used for planting trees. This comes on top of the land he already planted in 2006, with trees – mainly walnuts.
So far he has planted about 120,000 decares (12000 ha, 30,000 acres) in about 13 municipalities in Bulgaria. His aim is to have 4,000,000 decares (400,000 ha, appr. 1 million acres) of land with trees!
Dr. Trenchev is not only someone that I happen to know; his life was actually saved by my Grandfather in 1971, when he was to be sent in the Gulag; instead my Granfather helped him to get him out of the country and Dr. Trenchev ended up in England, where he was forced in exile. I will blog more about it soon.

P.S. Disclosure: I have had in my life about 8 personal computers, and have planted 13 trees – so, to say, I have also planted some for my company’s computers.

I was talking today with my colleague and friend Mitko Ganchev, and while discussing the new services Google offers, we reached to the conclusion that in a few years, if nothing major doesn’t stop them, Google will replace everything – starting with Microsoft, and ending with the Gigabytes of RAM, hundreds of Gb of HDD, new processors, etc., etc.

What people will need for their daily work, would be just a keyboard and a monitor, plus Internet connection.

Indeed, today’s users have at Google almost everything they need – their domain name can be hosted there, they can get their e-mail (spam-filtered), they can write documents and spreadsheets (and share them with others), they have their calendar. They can publish their pictures (and edit them quite successfully), or blogs. Oh, they can also see themselves, or at least their houses at the Google Maps. Or share information on what they read via the Reader.

People can make money from Google, check how their web sites are doing, and talk between each other. Actually, you can see on your own what else is there.

What Google lacks today, I am sure will be fixed tomorrow: SIP-phone, putting together all different IM (instant messaging systems like ICQ, Yahoo messanger, AOL, etc.), some music player, which should be able to play songs that people could upload, or just put the urls, so that they can be played for them.

Or may be they already have all that, but I didn’t have the time to find out about it… :-)

A friend of mine from Holland has sent me the url to a wonderful small clip of what has happened on the Internet since the beginning, and what’s still to come.
It’s a flash movie, made by Robin Sloan for the Museum of Media History. It’s released under CC license, so anyone can use it.
It talks about the world in 2015, when Google has aquired Amazon, to form Googlezon, and when news has started to be delivered locally to every reader – as they want it.

It’s more than worth seeing it!

Here are the links: EPIC 2015 The Movie (and the same one, Full Screen Version)

This time it’s the price Bulgarians pay for services and products from the European Union.

A Bulgarian reader of the IT-news portal Portal.bg has published this information

- Transaction date: 01-01-2007 11:30
- Product name: Skype Credit balance of EUR 25.00
- Total amount: EUR 28.75

In other words – he was a Skype customer (Skype is based in Luxembourg), and when he updated his account on January 1st, he had to pay the 15 % VAT.

That is still 5 % less than what he had to pay in Bulgaria for the same service, but also until January 1st, there was no such tax for Bulgarians, as we were not members of the EU.

This gives me the lead to write that there will be more things to follow:

Bulgarian companies that sell products, which are more expensive than in EU (for example Greece or Romania) will have to lower their prices, or go bankrupt. Thessaloniki is quite close to Sofia (200 km), and with all the big malls and shops there (let’s mention IKEA for furniture), the Bulgarian companies are now facing a real competition. Now is the time to see who will remain on the market, and who will disappear.

Old companies, being run by representatives of the analog generation, for sure will say “bye-bye” to the easy profits, often supported by their friends in the government. New companies, created and managed by young professional Bulgarians and foreigners, will profit and will make a good foundation for expanding their businesses to Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Turkey (at least).

Yes, it’s interesting time to live and do business today in Bulgaria!

As of now, as of this second, Bulgaria is a member of the European Union!

Congratulations to all of the Bulgarians, who contributed to this historical fact! Congratulations to all my friends and colleagues, who made this possible:
- Ivan Kostov, former prime-minister (1997-2001);
- President Peter Stoyanov (1997-2002);
- President Georgi Parvanov (2002-current);
- PM Simeon Sax-Coburg Gotha (former PM, 2001-2005):
- PM Sergey Stanishev (PM, 2005-current);
all foreign ministers
- Nadezhda Mihaylova, Solomon Passy, Ivailo Kalfin, and all their deputies, among them Petko Draganov, Nikolai Milkov, Lyubomir Kyuchukov, Gergana Grancharova, Todor Churov, Evgenia Koldanova, Feim Chaushev, to name a few;
- Meglena Kuneva – our Minister for the European Integration, and first Bulgarian EU Commissioner;
- the cheif-negotiators for the EU Membership – Alexander Bozhkov, Vladimir Kissiov;
- Bulgarian ambassadors to the EU-member countries, to the USA, and to the UN: Amb. Elena Poptdorova, Stefan Tafrov (who was in Paris, London, Rome and in New York as Permanent Representative of Bulgaria to the UN), Dimitar Tsanchev;
- members of the Parliament;
- hundreds of employees at the Foreign Ministry, Parliament, Council of Ministers, other Ministries;
- and last, but certainly not least – to all Bulgarian people. Each of them… each of us who has done a little, had actually done a lot. Because when we put together all the little pieces, they formed together our European membership.

Bulgaria is back to its origins, to its family. Finally.

Congratulations, and good luck!

____
P.S. from 00:30. Just finished watching on the Internet, live, the official program on the Bulgaran National TV, from Alexander Batenberg square in Sofia. Wonderful show – and with participants from all over Bulgaria. Thank you all, who made this show and the Internet broadcasting possible! Special thanks go to Mitko!