CianBlog

A few months ago, I was happy to blog about Ben Nolan, one of my former colleagues at Sxip. From his projects one of the most interesting was ZoomIn. On that time, I was asking myself if nobody is going to try something similar in Romania, a country with 22 millions of inhabitants. Now, Alex Brie, one of the ROSI group members, bright guy and young entrepreneur :) is trying something for Romania too. The name of the project is GeoKeo, it has a blog and can be tested at http://geokeo.com. GeoKeo is in alpha state now, but you can try it and have an idea about what is going to be. So, what is GeoKeo? ” Short answer: GeoKeo is an incubating search engine, the first online geo-local search with the most accurate digital map for Bucharest, Romania and soon the rest of the country. Longer answer: a startup developing the local search engine of choice for the 5 millions Romanian Internet users, displaying addresses and useful objectives in Romania and providing geolocalized targeted information or marketing services. ” Probably would be interesting to hear form you what kind of technology you are using for this project and some of your future plans. Good luck!

I wrote a post a few weeks ago about an interesting initiative that Carmen Holotescu from eLearningBlog and Cristian Manafu had; to take the Romanian blogosphere pulse by a survey named “RoBloggers”. Now they posted the results and are quite interesting to take a look there; it seems that the Romanian blogosphere is growing and became mature. ———- My personal note ———-

I had the first contact with Carmen a few years ago when I took one of her online project management classes. I realized then that she is a nice person, bright, friendly and committed. And more than that, she really try to do something for the Romanian IT community. Her example of responsibility and involvement provided me the strength to go further with eLiberatica and ROSI.

One thing that strikes me since I came in Canada three years ago is the openness, sympathy, respect and tolerance of the people to other cultures. Most of Canadians are applying the phrase “live and let live”. More than that, they will listen to you and even try to help you when you are in a need. Last Saturday I found the same attitude. This is another thing that make me feel proud about my second home, Canada. I met Bruce Byfield at Barcamp Vancouver; it was a pleasure. Bruce is a journalist and editor for the Open Source Technology Group, best-known for Slashdot and SourceForge websites. He, together with Kate Milberry paid a high interest about my presentation. More than that, Bruce mentioned yesterday in his NewsForge article about our initiative. Thank you Bruce! Kate Milberry also had a very interesting talk about tech activism and Free Software named ” Geeks and Global Justice“. Kate is a social justice activist and doctoral student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. About her work you can find more on her blog. Other images from Barcamp (there are links beside the sprayed words): Hmmmm, I have no idea why the image map is not working…. here are the links Darren Barefoot presenting Barcamp sessions eLiberatica at BarCamp Me Kate Milberry presenting Geeks and Global Justice Zak, my mentor Roland Tanglao from Bryght Sarah Pullman presenting an interesting yoga session for geeks Bruce Byfield from NewsForge Boris Mann from Bryght Lori Pike, my former manager at Sxip