First snow in Bucharest. Lovely day to go out in the traffic. Everyone does so

So I did too, but I had to take my dads car and try my luck in the jammed city. I have a small company that started in 2003 and because it had no activity in the last period I decided to uproot it as I pay taxes and fill forms for nothing. So that was the old’s car purpose, to get to the city hall where , the one of the two places where my company is listed

In Romania you can’t do this things online, nobody knows what you really have to do to uproot a one employee company. So I go there thinking it’s not gonna be easy, and ask at information desk what should I do. A hand sticks out, gives me a form and says: fill this, go to room 229 and that’s it. Cool! Only one form here and I’m done. I go to 229, after having to climb some long stairs only to see that that’s the only office in the building with a huge line of people. All looking mad

I decide not to stay in the line, I pretend I work here, I pass everyone with a determined look and go inside. Small office, dark, full of smoke.Four desks and in the middle a set up kitchen with bread, salt and salami. Four people. All smoking and drinking coffee chatting. My entrance stopped the chattering, and they were obviously bothered by me disturbing them. I showed one of the woman there the form I filled and I asked if that’s it. She looked at me head to toes, gave me a suspicious look and asked me if I paid the listing for 2005. “Listing for 2005? But I came and you said there’s no such thing as the law changed” “No my darling, the law changed again you have to pay for 2005″ “Sounds strange. Why not on 2006 and 2007 too?” “You ask too many questions. Just go and pay” . I took the receipt she gave me and I asked where do I pay. “I don’t know”.”What do you mean you don’t know? Can’t I pay here?” “Listen darling, I don’t have time to waste with you, you go pay near the red building” “Red building. Yes. Everyone knows. Now go out. We have important things to do”

I go outside, the doors car is open. I look around, inside, nothing missing. Maybe the wind opened it. I go inside but the drivers door doesn’t close. Not lock, but doesn’t even stay closed. There’s nothing I can do, I can’t leave the car here, so I have to drive with one hand while with the other I’m holding the door

Off I go to the red building to pay. I ask around. It seems the “red building” was known and was just 15 minutes car drive away. I give the woman at the cash register the receipt, she gives a funny look and she says “What’s this?” “I don’t know, I just came here to pay. It seems I can not pay at the city hall and I have to pay this amount to close my company” “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you are talking about, never heard of it. Go to desk number 3″ huge line here too

I stay and wait and finally my turn comes. I tell a 50 year old thick glasses woman my story, she nods with a sigh and she tells me that the city hall sends them the 2005 payments because they don’t know how to use the payment software they have. They only use it for recent payments as they don’t have to calculate the surcharge. “Why don’t you report them?” “You have a very keen sense of humor my love” and she starts typing something on her computer with only two fingers very slowly. After 20 minutes she tells me that her computer doesn’t work anymore, the system crashed and I should go outside and wait

Finally after I wait 10 minutes outside she says, “go to the cash register, now you can pay”. I go back , tell the cashier that the desk 3 woman told me that now I can pay. “Pay what?” , “the 2005 listing, here’s the receipt” “but what’s this? I have never heard of such thing, this stupid people. let me go check” The woman , must have been in her late 50, goes down her chair, steps out the office and disappears for 10 minutes. Finally she comes back, I pay and with a triumph on my face I go back to the city hall

Again a long line, I do the same scenario. I take a determined look and walk and I pass everyone and enter. This time with the four people inside there was another woman “Aha. Well we can only do you the deal if you prove me you really know Ioana so that we don’t get screwed” they said to her. The woman, looking pretty strange,with a lot of skirts on her said “Let my mother die, I know Ioana since I was born. I’ll tell you her cell number”. They check Ioana number, it seems to coincide and they sign a paper and give it to her. The woman leaves happily while me I have 8 eyes starring at me. “I paid the listing” “Good” one woman says while she writes with a pen on a paper “paid”. “With this paper you go down and take another paper”. If I only knew that all I had to do is write paid on a piece of paper I would have saved 2 hours of my life! I go down, I sit in a big line, I give one woman the paper with the “paid’ stamp on it, she gives me another paper in return that only says a number and I go back to 229

Same desk, more smoke. “Here’s the other paper. Is it done now?” “Ah, no. I sign this one and you go to the Financial Administration with it”. “To do what?” “I don’t know. You’ll see there”

I go back to the car, door not closing but the car was still there. This time engine not starting. When it’s too cold outside , sometimes it’s refusing to do so. I try and try, finally I make it work but this time every time I brake, the engine dies. So I go suicidal , without breaking, holding the door tight to see what’s the other place all about.

I park the car, unscrew the screw (that’s the security system my father came up with - a huge screw that you take with you and prevents your car to be stolen as the whole process make the engine not start) -wondering who is gonna steal this piece of metal - and go to a building that seems deserted. No movement around. I go near and on the schedule I see:

13:00-15:00 Break; 15:00-16:30 Open

I think it was just Bucharest playing a prank on me, so I went home and let you know what happens if you decide you want to close your company in Romania. Who knows, it might be useful to someone

Note to myself: my dads car with the huge screw is mandatory, otherwise the whole procedure is not at all complete

For everything good in life you thank your God, for every good page rank you thank Google

Thank you Google for this good PR you gave us

Thank you Webmaster tools for pointing the bad URLs

Thank you Analytics for showing us usability

Thank you Google Reader for keeping me posted

It’s been more that two weeks since Google changed the Page Rank for ITerating.com but I’ve waited patiently to see if it’s just an illusion. Two weeks later , it’s still there, all green and shiny:

It’s not bad at all I might say since the mother of all wikis, Wikipedia has a page rank of 8 and no other wiki has more than a eight

A lot of websites noticed a drop in rank in the middle of Oct due to Google changes and just a few experienced a gain. Another website on the lucky list is this blog of mine. Even though I don’t blog too often I’ve been taken under the protective wing of the High Page Rank of ITerating and I got a six. But guess what? We can do better

Today the AjaxWorld Conference & Expo ended in Santa Clara so we took our toys and left. Our toys there were wikis and strikis and mashups , our favorites of course. Here are some pictures from Nicolas session “Enterprise Mashups Meet Wikis: Using AJAX to Build Strikis”

Nicolas explains how Ajax can be used together with semantic tools to build a striki (it’s just a nickname we give to our structured wiki) like ITerating

and how to mix user-generated content with strategic information housed in database systems and text-based repositories allowing them to co-exist

And of course: the conclusion LONG VIVE ITerating and VIVE LES STRIKIS with it and our favorite quote from the press “We are the jewel before Spanish eyes”

Note: If you want to complain about the quality of my pics, please do so to Steve Jobs

The market is getting crowded. Once you build an empire, the next obvious thing is compare yourself with the other giants and make it better. Us, the consumers (no no, I’m not gonna be stuck as a consumer, I’ll have my own empire one day : ) ), we have only benefits out of it

It started in ‘89 on a Mac. That’s when Microsoft Office first saw the light on a computer monitor. One year later, it saw the pixels on a PC computer. In 1994 StarOffice’s development started and has been bought in 99 by Sun. In 2000, the free clone of StarOffice was made available as OpenOffice. Linux users from everywhere made this suite very popular and widely spread but never as popular as Microsoft version

Yesterday Google launched its own presentation product online completing the trio on Google Docs. Writely and Spreadsheets united a year ago under this name and now Presently is going on the road with them. I tried it today and I’m gonna write my impressions on the Presently’s reviews page. The presentation features integration started a couple of months ago on Gmail with “view as slideshow” button near any presentation attachment. The viewer was great and I was happy to have it there but the whole version of the presentation tool on Google Docs makes it more exciting as I’ve been a user of this collaborative suite since the beginning. I like it cause it’s simple, Google takes care of all my files and I can easily share them with everyone on the team. Here’s a how Presently looks like:

As all the main news channels today announced the launching of IBM Lotus Symphony office suite their server is crowded, crowded, crowded. I’m trying for 3 hours now to get their presentation tool . Lotus Symphony is a trio as we’d expect: for spreadsheets and all that Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets, Lotus Symphony Documents for creating or editing any kind of word processing documents and of course Lotus Symphony Presentations the rival of PowerPoint

After Firefox freezing a couple of times trying to download IBM’s new free suite, I finally managed to sign up for an account (yes, you have to create one to download Symphony) with all the details, It’s annoying cause they even ask for your telephone number and every company detail they can get. The installation took a while two, not to mention the download process.

The Symphony Suite looks very simple at a first sight and the presentation-creating tool looks a little bit weird if you got used to Impress or PowerPoint as the other pages of the presentation are visible when you are editing the current one

I’ll write my first impressions of the whole thing on ITerating after publishing this post so see you there!

Meanwhile tell me if you know anything about Yahoo’s plan in that direction. If they don’t have any, then they should

Today, on Digg home page was pushed a very useful article with top ten free software products nobody heard of. It was useful as I, while I’m writing I’m using one of them. In a random order here are the tools:

1. AutoHotKey It makes our life easier as it’s an utility that writes scripts for automating keystrokes or mouse clicks. What does mean? When all you have to do to finish something is copy paste some data from one place to another you customize one script to do it for you. You can also remap keys and buttons on your keyboard, or expand abbreviations while you type them.

2.ImgBurn If you already use Nero then you’ll find this tool much simpler and you can save some money cause ImgBurn. It writes what ever you have to write, even HD DVD and Blu-ray and . It’s a very flexible app and it supports almost all image file formats. It’s meant to be used on Windows but it also works on Linux systems. To make a copy of a DVD all you have to do is put the DVD in the drive, press Read and the disk is copied into an .ISO image

3.MusikCube Helps you just listen to what you want to hear, while offering innovative features not seen elsewhere, It’s very clean with a lot of plugins that you can install like importing ratings from iTunes, or emulate the Winamp look. The feature I like the most is the Dinamic Playlists that get smarter while you listen to more music. It learns your habits and then plays only the songs you like

4.Blender Do it like Pixar but do it for free!

5.MWSnap Inspired from the Snipping Tool that comes installed with Vista is a small lightweight tool that takes screenshots or just snaps parts that you desire from your screen

6.FoxitReader. Who doesn’t hate Adobe Acrobat Reader? It takes so much until you install it and then it freezes everything even though you have a speedy cumputer. FoxitReader is the free version of it and it’s super small. Just how we like it to be

7.Windows Live Writter Using it while we speak (write/read ). It’s a very comfortable tool for bloggers It makes it easy to publish your content and it supports a lot of popular weblog services. As you can see, Wordpress too. I’ll write a review on it on its review page on ITerating after I finish this post and let you know if I liked it or not

8.IrfanView Very simple and very fast it’s super practical for all image type files.It’s small but it’s smart and it can be used by anyone. You can edit, view, optimize images with a compact tool that does it all very well

9. ConTEXT Notepad Replacement for Developers

0.SharePod

It’s the last but not the least as it’s for all of us, iPod users out there that want more flexibility when it comes to data transfers.On Live Slick there’s a good article on how to handle the whole process. The application is great and it works smoothly.Congrats Jeff on the digg article!

As I finish this article I’m gonna review some of the applications. You can do so too on every product page under reviews so tell us if you like them or not!

No no, it’s not another post about Facebook’s early application HOT or NOT. It’s about what’s hot and what’s not today. So let’s see:

HOT: Italians know better

As the summer days are already drifting away in Rome this is a moment of joy and that’s why they come with a white night (Notte Bianca) when everybody stays awake to celebrate it. This year, the night was 8th of September and besides concerts, art representation and general jubilant mood, artist Giancarlo Neri set up a installation of thousands of color changing light globes. If you’ve been there and you’ve missed it you can still run and catch it as it’s still there tonight but if you are 4298 miles further as I am, click the foto and slide…

NOT :I’m not a model!

I’m not a model so I can never be part of this one year old hot social network called ModelsHotel. A lot of people tried to get in (especially male cause the stake inside is so big) but they were not accepted. Why? Because it’s whether they invite you personally whether someone inside does. I don’t have any model friends (poor me!) so if anyone has one to spare please contact me! I suffer from not being inside

Since Facebook has goodies on its website I see Facebook on my monitor, in my newspapers, on my phone, in my closet in my dreams and well everywhere I go

It became the coolest social network and everyone is following it like a big internet cult. No sleep, no talk, no work. Just Facebook all day. It’s even scarier as I know that my profile is as public can be (see video below) and yet I go on poking, playing poker, giving gifts, following friends and sending messages.

A list with most popular Facebook apps can be seen here and it can be any time improved by anyone with new applications, reviews or hot info

Me I admit I’m so far fan of two applications: Traveler IQ Challenge (it continues making more and more people aware of the planet they are living in) and Wikimono such a clean and nice wiki (wiki fans forever!)

Related stories and videos:

- What happens in the Facebook stays in the Facebook ? questions raised about users privacy and how this information is used by marketers and government officials

-Public Search Listings on Facebook how your profile can be seen by search engines if you let them

-Wikimono Home Page -more features to come; soon the public wiki pages created on Facebook will be available here

A lot of buzz lately (especially on Techcrunch) on Seedcamp initiative. Seedcamp is a great event that was held in London for week and this was its first year. It’s for young entrepreneurs that need founding for their early stage strategies and online company or product concept. Anyone from Europe could participate at the event and in the London final 20 finalists were chosen. From this 20 finalist, 5 were supposed to be the lucky winners to get 50k for 10% of their company. Not a big amount but the event it’s such an incubator for them as the jury and the mentors there were composed from top VC firms and large companies representative (Skype, ebay, Google, Yahoo were not missing from Seedcamp). The whole Seedcamp reward is not only about the money and the chance to prove you can in front of internet giants but also three months of training from top designers, lawyers, corporates to help the young companies to grow

The good news was that not 5 , but SIX winners were announced yesterday.

Personally I like Zemanta best as it’s supposed to save me and other publishers from a lot of work. It enchants text after you write it with links, photos and related content. It’s such a great tool but right now you can only see a part of its development on their site. It’s a sample of Slovenian text that’s transformed into web ready content. This tool already exists in some forms fore enterprise management but so far a similar tool for bloggers has not been yet on the web.

The other winners are :

Project Playfair -it’s about turning number into hypernumbers, that is making numbers cells comunicate

Kublax -same thing as Mint (new VC founded financing US application) but not locally targeted.what it does is sync with all your bank accounts, utilities, even loyalty schemes and presents all the information in a user friendly format so that you know how much you’re spending, on what and how quickly you’re running out of them : ). It’s also a good tool to see which are the credit cards are more efficient for you and which one you want to get rid off. Can’t wait to see this one in place!

Tablefinder- Wants to be the agregrator of all online bookable restaurants

Buildersite- Web market place for construction services and homeowners

Rentmineonline - The ebay of renting

Good luck guys and hope to hear from you soon!

PRODUCT INFORMATION ABOUT COMMERCIAL, OPEN SOURCE AND

HOSTED SOFTWARE NOW AVAILABLE AS A SEMANTIC WEB SERVICE

ITerating Collaborates with Semantic Web Community to Create Framework for

Exchange of Software Product Information

NEW YORK – August 27, 2007 – ITerating, provider of the first free Wiki-based software guide for open source, commercial and hosted software, today announced the immediate availability of a free Semantic Web service providing up-to-date information about more than 17,000 software products at www.iterating.com. Other repositories of product information can now automatically synchronize their data with this ITerating web service. IT professionals and other consumers of software can use the service to keep up-to-date on information about new products, new versions and patch distributions for commercial, open source and hosted software.

It has become a daunting task for IT professionals and consumers of software information to keep up-to-date due to the vast number of new versions, drivers and patches that are now available, and the condensed timeframe in which all are developed. Now users can subscribe to specific products or product categories on ITerating.com and easily create an automated information feed. The ITerating web service can now be synchronized with many repositories of software product information such as Linux distribution archives and online guides.

ITerating worked with Tim Berners-Lee and others in the Semantic Web community to develop this unique web service. The service is built upon a Semantic ontology framework which consists of four ontologies, including DOAP (Description Of A Project), FOAF (Friend Of A Friend), Open BRR (Business Readiness Rating™) and Review. ITerating created a Semantic ontology for Open BRR, which is a standard model for rating open source software. In addition, ITerating worked with the creators of DOAP and Review to extend their existing ontologies. Finally, these three ontologies were combined with the FOAF ontology – resulting in a comprehensive vocabulary structure for discovering, sharing and comparing up-to-date information about open source, commercial and hosted software products.

“We applaud ITerating for the work they’ve done to extend the DOAP ontology,” said Edd Dumbill, creator of DOAP. “We view this vocabulary as an important addition to our overall objective of standardizing the description of software projects and resources.”

“The ability to exchange software product information in a free, standard format is a tremendously valuable asset for the software community,” said Larry Augustin, venture investor, open source evangelist and founder of sourceforge.net. “We look forward to seeing more companies endorse it.”

“Our goal is to offer the world’s first comprehensive software guide that is always up-to-date,” said Nicolas Vandenberghe, CEO of ITerating. “By combining a Wiki format with Semantic Web services, we are able to ensure that the information on the ITerating site is both comprehensive and up-to-date. Now everyone has the opportunity to use this powerful but simple tool to organize, share and combine information about software on the web.”

About ITerating

ITerating provides the first Wiki-based software guide for open source, commercial and hosted software. The site is a comprehensive and up-to-date resource for the IT industry. It is the only software site to offer product directories, descriptions, reviews, ratings, articles, and detailed product feature comparisons. All content on ITerating is covered by the Creative Commons and contributions (rating, reviews, text) remain the property of their creators. Founded in October 2005, ITerating is headquartered in New York. For more information, visit www.ITerating.com.

Articles:

• Dr Dobb’s Journal

• SOA World Magazine

• Tectonic

• IT Manager’s Journal

• SD Times

• OpenTechPress (Japan)

• JavaMagazin (Germany)

As I’m a Research Analyst at ITerating, my duty is to analyze almost everything: new currents in open source, traffic, SEO , new cool tools, competitors, linux distributions and tons of other stuff. My job became gradually part of my life and now I’m used to analyzing everything around me: people I meet, places I see, events I attend and things I come in contact with.

Today I learn that a new launched website finally lets me analyze myself from a objective point of view. It’s called MyProgress and it’s supposed to measure my personal evolution towards a perfect human being.

It measures how healthy I am, my personal skills, wealth and personal finance. It takes into consideration how much time I play tennis, how much money I spend (that’s a mine field : ) ), if I drive a car often, how many pets I have, how much jewelry I own. At the end, I can read my life through a RSS feed and compare myself with users my age, my occupation and my location.

The health field has not been yet developed, it doesn’t contain my local currency in the list (RON that is) but the website works super smooth and it’s very intuitive. After I played with it a little it told me that with my current evolution on spending I have no chance to ever being wealthy : ) :

“The largest wealth within the scope of MyProgress.com is 475 298,43 €. You will never gain today’s top with your current wealth growth rate. “