I do think that the more you travel the hardest it gets, I missed my flight to Prishtina, Kosovo today operated by British Airways. The reason was my fault, i did not make it in time, and I was 30 minutes late.

British Airways kindly offers flight deals but when you are in need they are well known to analyze the importance of your travel, so they start to increase fines and provide expensive solutions. That is how I got rewarded today. My travel agent managed to re-book me for 12 January, the only possible date to go back, it was fully booked. People are traveling but there are only 3-4 flights a week.

Update: I need to come up with something to solve this 3-4 flights a week problem. I have in mind something.

1. Write a new business plan idea each quarter
2. Wake up one hour earlier and go to sleep a hour earlier than in 2007
3. Subscribe to The Economist, Time Magazine, Wired this year.
4. Read books about Airlines Industry
5. Use often my new Sony DSCT70B Digital Camera and buy a Flickr Pro account
6. Spend less time typing in Instant Messaging applications, using Twitter as alternative channel
7. Use Skype for booking conference calls
8. Fly only with Miles and More partners in order to use Fly Award points to flights.
9. Not trying to beat my air-travel stats from 2007 (16 Take-Offs)
10. Learn cooking and finally get a driving license this year.

I went through Rrethi.com tonight which is a service that allows you to locate places, businesses and events in Prishtina, the capital of Kosovo. It uses Google Maps API and has quite clear imagery of Prishtina. This meshup website will introduce local thinkers to bring the power of web interactivity in Kosovo. Very good initiative.

Web.Start is the first conference in Southeastern Europe focused exclusively on Web applications and Web startups. The conference takes place on May 17-18th, 2007, in Zagreb, Croatia. The conference is being organized by the Croatian Association of software and online entrepreneurs Initium.

This is the event I would like to attend, but I’m already booked to be in Vienna, Austria as a ICT Jury Member for Balkan Case Challenge Competition. Now that information is doubling every 2nd day, the events seems to be going that way too. I like the initiative of Web Conference in South East Europe. If its going to continue I can easily say: See you next year.

Therefore, I would like to give some small recommendations to the organizers:
1) Start spreading the words in Blogosphere at least 6 months before the event.

2) Blog more about the event, i like the Joel Spolsky video, but your blog has to be much richer. Its nothing shame if you also invite Jason Calacanis and if he cant make it to update in blog that he is not coming, at least we know u gave a try.

3) Participants can also contribute writing in their blogs, so participants link is much more what is web about than trying to stay corporate business conference style. In some events I go after I see that my acquaintances are attending too.

4) Do a live coverage as it happens, by using life stream services and web services such as Flickr, Youtube and Wiki’s.

See you next year.

IDI (Information Development Initiative) in cooperation with the company Inter-Service is sponsoring scholarships for the CISCO NETWORKING ACADEMY in Kosovo. Scholarships are distributed into three categories: Category A scholarship covers 100% of the costs (10 scholarships), Category B scholarship covers 50% of the costs (30 scholarships), Category C scholarship covers 30% of the costs (50 scholarships).

You can apply online by going at IDI website

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment. Wikipedia.org

Florence Devouard the chairwoman of Wikimedia, the foundation behind Wikipedia spoke about “Wikipedia: a social innovation ?” at LIFT07 on February 8, 2007 she covered the basic facts of wikipedia worldwide and the comparisons between the other encyclopedia and wikipedia model, she also mentions wikipedia upcoming solutions such as delivery wikipedia entries in other formats for the countries not having access online such as freely licensed text-books that will make another revolution education in future.

Wikipedia.org invites everyone to take a part online and create articles they opened the gate for online citizens, to contribute on the website of entire humanity, letting people to create articles and make them responsible for the content they create.

But what remains the biggest challenge for Wikipedia is the Neutral Point of View (NPOV) since many users today are using the biased sources from text-books who are also biased on their way as a reference to create articles. This brings controversy among many online activists who try to create articles based on facts as a primary source.

An example can be Kosovo article in Wikipedia which is still stub and closed for editing cause of vandalism by contributors, if you monitor this page u can see the history of editing is much frequented and never the truth appears on the Kosovo article. So there is a lot to do in NPOV

Apart from the Florence discussion, there was a simple mistaken discussion about that Wikipedia has money for another three months which got exploded in Blogosphere the next day after her speech and this is what makes blogging attractive. The video explains it all on what Florence Devouard and Laurent Haug really discussed.

Language is major issue on wikipedia which seems to be very English-centered way of creating articles. On wikipedia stats regarding the languages I took these facts about wikipedia articless in languages around in balkans, where Romanian language leads in there.

Romanian: 58 496 articles
Slovenian: 45 900 articles
Serbian: 43 824 articles
Bulgarian: 37 533 articles
Croatian: 29 414 articles
Bosnian: 17 259 articles
Albanian: 14 279 articles
Macedonian: 9 348 articles

Enjoy the Wikipedia story on LIFT07

I’m republishing LIFT07 Conference videos every weekend with notes I took on each presentations I attended to let my readers enjoy these fabulous videos offered by LIFT07 organizers.
LIFT is a conference about the challenges and opportunities of technology in our society hold on 7-8-9 February 2007 Geneva, Switzerland

Mike Arrington called me two days ago on my private cell phone in relation to my previous post regarding the Technology Usage in SEE. Following our phone conversation he invited to give me a free ticket for Web 2.0, I checked the dates and on that time I will be out of country going to a private vacation, so i rejected the offer. Mike also asked me if i have any idea about what he should do with this ticket and I recommended him to let people write about the negative side of TechCrunch.com

Now the post came up and I got angry because Mike Arrington again stole MY IDEA as he stole many ideas from other people around the blogosphere. TechCrunch is about gossips and attacks and Michael Arrington stealing ideas, TechCrunch is about Web 2.0 and Michael Arrington stealing ideas, TechCrunch is about Innovation and again Mike Arrington stealing ideas. TechCrunch is about entrepreneurship and Mike Arrington stealing ideas.

So what is TechCrunch about?

This is what just everyone would like to have in their houses.

I did a small research on the The Networked Readiness Index Rankings to see where does south east European countries are indexed on using technology. The report was delivered lately by World Economic Forum judging countries who integrated technology into business and helped developed an infrastructure on their countries, usage of technology in innovation, culture and leadership.

The Networked Readiness Index 2006–2007 rankings
Here is the 2006-2007 top-10 technology countries: (2005 ranking)
1: Denmark (3)
2: Sweden (8)
3: Singapore (2)
4: Finland (5)
5: Switzerland (9)
6: Netherlands (12)
7: US (1)
8: Iceland (4)
9: UK (10)
10: Norway (13)

——-
South East European Countries:
30. Slovenia (35)
46. Croatia (57)
55. Romania (58)
72. Bulgaria (64)
74. Serbia and Montenegro (80)
81. Macedonia (81)
89. Bosnia and Herzegovina (97)
92. Moldova (94)
107. Albania (106)
*Kosovo is not included separately in the statistics