“How to Web” is a new conference taking place in Bucharest sometime soon. Looking at the team in charge of the event, i couldn’t help notice some of the little lies.
For example, Raluca Georgescu created “Raluk.ro, one of the most important local entertainment websites”. I never heard of it until yesterday, and i spend a lot of hours online. Why lie? People already know you as a former office manager, lying only attracts attention to you and articles like this one are born.
So, yea, can’t wait!
You think this year will be good, and you sell your car to buy more wii? Is anyone buying that? I’m not a games, but i think a Wii does not cost 5.000€.
My guess is that he is running out of money. And that is because of his shady practices and bad tactics, the same tactics that got him and his crew fired from Intact group.
Bogdan Gavrila, well known stain on Romanian internet, had a problem a few months ago. While he was the dark force behind the World Blogging Forum, none of the respected bloggers from his native country gave him and WBF any love. Some of them questioned the line up, which was inexistent at the time of the announcement, other asked why the Liberal Party gave the money and to whom, others alerted the authorities for misuse of the official Communication Ministry logo on the site, as such permission was not given (he promptly remove the logo and now denies ever using it).
All water under the bridge. After the WBF ended, Bogdan Gavrila went on the attack. On everyone. As a part of his attack was the assumption that the bloggers that were present (from Romania, as observers, as Romania did not have a representative at WBF, because, again, every respected one refused to participate) were young lions, already hitting hard the old and established bloggers (the ones that turned him down), who were just about to go down.
I had a tear in my eye. Honest. A few days later after his high hopes declaration of war, one of the young bloggers was caught posting on his blog translated news from American sites.
The whole story is here, in Romanian.
Failed again, Mr. Gavrila. I know this will not slow you down, because a person who already lost everything (money, reputation, business, friends and credibility) has no choice but to fight his dirty fight, along his ashamed crew.
In Romania, we are used to people shouting as hard as they can about their success. They do this, they do that, they just opened a new interactive agency, they’ve just rolled a new amazing campaign…
Most of it is PR bullshit.
And the people who do stuff do not brag about it too much. Just a few lines in a blog post. Or a short minute at a beer. I don’t like to step into the light and talk too much about how i did this and that. I like to do. Those who want to know, they know. Those who care about the Romanian blogosphere know who i am and what i (can) do. The rest are just bystanders.
When you disrupt dishonest businesses, you expect to read a lot of dirt about yourself. That includes that your traffic is not what you say it is, that you blackmail people, that you lie for a living. I am used to this, because i hear it every day, from different people.
Bogdan Gavrila is such a person. His dishonest business got disrupted. He got angry. He got fired. Now he tries to get a new business started. He isn’t doing so good. Who’s to blame? ME! So he wrote a long post saying that I lie, cheat and blackmail people. Proof? Oh, no. Repeating the words “liar” and “blackmailer” is enough for him.
I am glad somehow. Being able to provoke such powerful reaction means i hurt him and his shady business (did a mention that, as head of Intact Interactive, a local interactive agency, he paid one of his personal sites 35.000€ out of a 100.000€ guaranteed contract, even if he sold only 5.000€ worth of advertising on it?).
I am not the truth holder. I am just a blogger. If you want to invest in Romanian internet or just want to know what’s going on, i recommend asking Vivi (Octavian Costache, works at Google), Dragoş Novac (has it’s own company and people outside Romania have heard of him and his partner, Alexandre Almajeanu), Alex Visa (used to work for Traceics Canada), Lucian Despoiu ( owns a Digital Agency), Alex Brie (webdeveloper, works for a French company), Dan Berte ( free spirit and idea man), Marius Pahomi (works for a MediaEdge:CIA), Vlad Stan (angel investor in several projects), Antonio Eram (has a micropayment service), Sergiu Biris (owns the local YouTube, with Alexis Bonte), Cristian Manafu (event organizer) and Bobby Voicu (blogger, used to work for Yahoo, now has his own startup). I don’t agree with some of them, but they have a good reputation, as opposite to people like Claudiu Gamulescu (well-known spammer, has speaking gigs in East-European conferences) Bogdan Gavrila, Magda Zander, Cristi Petriceanu (believe it or not, this guy head IAB Romania, and we headed a ad-selling company that has a 2-million euro debt to publishers) and people like them. They will give you a fair view of what is going on in this little corner of the web.
I know, I should write more often in english about what’s going on in .ro