Internetics – the oldest Romanian web festival

Written on 30th October 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr

Continuing the series of articles about European Web 2.0 events I will stop again to Romania to present the oldest web festival there: Internetics.
(maybe I should stop using the word “Web 2.0″ once it’s declared dead now)

Internetics web festival  was started 8 years ago and it’s held annually (this is the 8th edition). For this year, the festival started on 29 of October and it will end today, 30 of October. The registration of the web projects ended on 14 of September.

Internetics is structured as a competition between the best romanian websites in three main categories: Publishing, Services and Advertising & Communication.
Each of these categories have sections (examples: Publishing has Business, Sport, Lifestyle, News and others… Services has E-commerce, Financial and others… Advertising & Communication has the most sections like Corporate Promotion websites, Viral Promotion, Innovative Projects, Politics, Advergames, Banner Campaigns, Email Campaigns, Interactive Campaigns and others).

The winner of each of these sections will get a prize named “Internetics Icon”. They have two special more prizes for Publishing category (Publisher of the Year) and Advertising & Communication (Agency of the Year).

Another special prize is given to the Webvertiser of the Year and recognize the innovation and visionarism of the clients regarding the Internet as a communication medium. This last prize is given in cooperation with IAB Association from Romania (a subsidiary of IAB – Interactive Advertising Bureau).

The jury is formed by over 40 professionals from various industries which have ties with the Internet (GECAD Software, Rompetrol, Adobe Romania, Kanal D, Clickio, Grapefruit, Yahoo Romania, Totalsoft, ARBOinteractive, PCfun & FIT Distribution, Orange, Neogen, Trilulilu, Publimedia and others including independent professionals).

The festival has some powerful partners like Hostway, Microsoft, Cosmote, IAB Romania, iNES Group, Realitatea, Guerilla Radio, The Marketer, Business Standard and others.

Unfortunately, the website doesn’t have an English section. I know it’s a local event but still, I don’t think letting non-Romanian speakers know about this event would hurt.

In the next two months two more conferences will take place: RoNewMedia (web design) and NetCamp (web entrepreneurship).

Eastern Europe, internetics, Romania, web 2.0, web festival

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European Web 2.0 Events: Webstock in Romania

Written on 1st October 2008                                                                                                              10 COMMENTS
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web

Written by Mircea Goia

Although the World Wide Web was invented in Europe (Tim Berners-Lee – CERN), the Internet was growing faster on the other side of the ocean (ARPAnet – USA). The innovation in our industry still comes mainly from the US, but Europe is catching up.

Web 2.0 events throughout Europe

Web 2.0 represents the new wave of Internet companies and technologies born after the dotcom bubble which crippled the Internet around year 2000. It’s origins are found in the USA, but is has been spreading around the world (hopefully, the recent financial crisis won’t affect it too much). Social networking, AJAX, sharing, user-generated, community, video, collaboration, folksonomies, Internet as a platform…all these terms are the mantra of the new Web 2.0 companies.

In the upcoming series of Web 2.0 articles, I want to explore the Web 2.0 events throughout Europe. It will be like an inventory of Web 2.0 festivals, conferences, un-conferences, and awards. I encourage people from different countries to write about their events here as well.

Let’s start with Romania

I’m starting with Romania (since I am Romanian), a country of 21 million inhabitants and an important market in Eastern Europe. Since my last article on ReadWriteWeb about Web 2.0 startups, things have been changing in Romania.

Now, a year or so later, I can see a jump in Web 2.0 applications and ideas originating in Romania – culminating in one startup becoming a finalist of Seedcamp: uberVU. Seedcamp is Europe’s hottest startup conference, held in London every year, and can be seen as the European equivalent of Techcrunch 50 or DEMO.

Webstock

Following the model of Seedcamp and Techcrunch 50, a new non-traditional conference took shape: Webstock (paraphrasing ‘69 Woodstock music festival).

In some ways, Webstock is more like a Web 2.0 festival than a startup conference. They call it an “unconference” because it’s not like a traditional conference where only certain people are allowed to speak). A real startup conference is Netcamp, which I will cover in another article.

Webstock started earlier this year with the selection of Web 2.0 projects (already launched, betas, private betas – all at least one month old) which will be presented in the final gala. The project needs to have at least one Web 2.0 component (they used the Wikipedia definition) and it needs to be created by Romanian companies or Romanian citizens (Romanian-foreign partnerships are accepted too). (more…)

Eastern Europe, Romania, Tim Berners-Lee, Vodafone Romania, web 2.0

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