I am happy to be the first who announces launch of Czech start-up Adsmazon.com. “Advertising self-service shop”, as says tagline of this project, is aimed on connecting small to medium sized publishers with advertisers on direct market.
People behind this project - Alexis Manach and Jakub Havrlant - have already developed another startup recently, “For Sale By Owner” real estate marketplace Bezrealitky.cz.
Adsmazon will connect advertisers and allow them to select directly a medium of their choice for selling display advertising (several types of banners available so far). Sales will be based on CPM model with fixed prices for 1000 impressions. Advertiser will pay amounts based on real impressions after the campaign ends, publisher will recieve 75% of the price, which makes Adsmazon commission at 25%. Large media agencies usually have 30-35% commission, so Adsmazon will leave more to publisher.
Frankly, this is the model I have been looking for since we started eSports.cz. We have many websites with 10 - 50 thousands unique visitors per month, which could be attractive for some kind of advertisers (local ads, subject specific, target group specific), but are too small for media agencies. On the other hand, individual sales of this kind of advertising with small volumes on each advertiser is difficult to handle and have relative high transaction costs One convenient marketplace could help us to sell advertising more effectively and use the potential of our sites better.
Key fact for success of Adsmazon is how will attract advertisers and prove them, that advertising at this kind of websites could be useful for them. Adsmazon now offers 20 categories to sort publishers websites into, maybe also regional targeting would help in these kind of advertising.
Publishers could use media management system based on OpenX Adserver also for managing their own display advertising and self promo campaigns.
Adsmazon will launch on March, you can get 5% discount for both advertisers or publishers accounts if you register now.
Published at February 13th, 2009 under
dot CZ
One of the leading Czech online retailers Mall.cz launched dynamic product search engine to their stores. AnswerOil product finder, developed by PrismaStar.com (read an interview with their CEO Josuha Tabin in my older post) extends fulltext and parametric search on Mall.cz product pages.
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On January 5th, 5 Czech betting companies obtained an official licence to provide online betting services in the Czech Republic. They now are allowed to compete with other bookies like bwin or Expekt, who operates on European market upon licences based in other countries (Great Britain, Gibraltar, Slovakia, Malta). It is a huge impulse for Czech online advertising market, as betting companies are ready to invest millions of crowns in their marketing activities. Those, who make their living in online advertising, should praise Czech Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek for this huge gift. He even approved online betting despite his mother Christian-democratic party refused this as a devilish:) Or should it be read as an unexpected activity to overcome current crisis? 
Despite all 5 major Czech betting companies (Sazka, Tipsport, Fortuna, Chance and Synot Tip) stated they were prepared for the launch of the legal internet betting in the country, reality seems different. Czech law, upon which this licences were issued, demands to identify a registered user by his ID with his presence at any of the betting office. At the Sazka, they seemed to think about “usability” of the process: you just need to fill out your registration form online, print out your registration number or even just a barcode and have it approved at any of the 6500 terminals of Sazka. On the other hand, Synot Tip requires your to fill out the registration form, than you need to wait until you receive some kind of betting card via post in about a week and then finally you’ll have it approved at their branch and receive username and password.
Affiliate system for third-party revenue driven advertising offers only Sazka, which seem really odd as this is common at almost every online betting bookmakers. Sazka offers 25% revenue of the net profit of user recruited by your site. Synot Tip claimed that they are working on it, but they should work on their product at first by my opinion.
And what about advertising? This is a huge boost for Czech online market. Current “old” online bookmakers had to increase their activity as well and as a result you could have seen up to 6 different online betting ads at sport.idnes.cz, sport section of major online portal iDnes.cz, in recent days.
New players on this market are ready to invest a really huge sums of money. Even homepage of Seznam.cz, the page which gets the most pageviews among all Czech sites and which has been ad-free for several years, is now again available for small banner (418×120 px) for 800 000 CZK per week (32 000 euro). And this banner has been bought by Sazka, they also have a bunch of banners on iDnes.cz. Synot Tip had an interstitials around the sport websites, Fortuna flooded iHned.cz with their banners, Tipsport joined bwin as a main partner of Sport.cz and Chance has their banners at Nova Sport. This means really millions of crowns in online advertising, which hasn’t been present before.
Bad for Sazka, that according to their spokesman Zdenek Zikmund they are not planning to run their popular numeric games like Sportka online. That would be a huge money making machine by my opinion - now you have to visit Sazka terminal every week (or at least every month, if you pre-pay some rounds) to place a bet for their jackpots. Online app would make it as easy as possible - login, select random numbers for each round, set this for next 6 months, in case of any profit forward those money on my bank account. And please, inform me via SMS or email every week - Sazka now just made 800 CZK, which is a minimal bet for this amount of rounds.
Czech bookmakers and officials always stated that foreign companies who operates on Czech market (illegally by their opinions) does not pay taxes or any fees in the Czech Republic and thus all their profits goes abroad. Apart from fact, that this occurs every time any foreign company offers their services without having any legal activities on the country and European union allows this, foreign betting companies runs their marketing activities here and this brings a lot of money, especially into Czech sport. Sponsorships contracts, both online and offline, could be valued as more than 400 millions CZK per year (my own estimate), not including affiliate profits. And this brings sponsorships money not only into football and ice hockey as two most popular sport in the nation, but also to minor activities. For example, bwin supports sledge hockey and one of the main sponsors of upcoming Nordic Ski World Championships in Liberec is Bet-at-home.com.
Despite crisis, several upcoming months seems to be secured in our business. Once again, thank you Mr.Kalousek
Published at January 14th, 2009 under
dot CZ
Paul Graham, head of the venture project YCombinator, published a list of 30 startup ideas which he (and YCombinator) would like to fund. Check the list and explanations at http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html and don’t miss all the user comments as well. Graham made one of the most inspiring startup articles in recent months.
Published at July 22nd, 2008 under
dot COM
Busy week started for me on last Monday, getting up at 4 AM and catching train to Prague for Adobe onAir Europe Tour event. And it was definitely worth to get up so early - it was one of the best tech events in the Czech Republic I had a chance to attend.
Great venue (Staropramen brewery and Potrefena Husa restaurant) along with professional and tasty catering, working wifi, friendly staff and great speeches made this event really special. This kind of events could easily turn to boring product pitches without any additional value, but this group of Flex and AIR developers was able to present and share their knowledge in very relaxed way. The most of the information presented was understandable even for non-developers like me and I got a chance to spot some inspiring trends in the whole Flex/Flash/AIR area, which seems to me more promising than MS Silverlight technology.
To point out one special presentation, I was really impressed by the capabilities of BlazeDS server technology, which allow to push data from server to Flex clients (in AIR applications or on the web) more than 10 times faster that what regular HTTP requests with XML files is able to serve. For applications where almost real-time data delivery to clients is crucial, this could be a killer technology. Yes, the smarter of you already know, that our project Onlajny.cz, which deliver live sports results, is an ideal candidate for such a technology.
So, I was impressed by the event itself, but Adobe decided to make me even more happy and so I was one of the lucky ones, who were pleased with the giveaways, which people from Adobe made after every session. I had to leave before last one, so I passed my ticket to Tonda Hildebrand (thank you once again), just in case. And later in the night I got a message, that I won the Adobe CS3 master collection And because it is the Macintosh edition, I started to think about the complete switch to Apple. I need a new laptop anyway, so… Would you recommend me to do it?
Published at June 17th, 2008 under
dot CZ
First ever BarCamp in the area of former Czechoslovakia will take place on Saturday July the 14th in Bratislava. Although there has been some attempts to make an un-conference style events in the Czech Republic, or even a BarCamp itself, our fellow bros in Slovakia hit the nail sooner and this make the Czech Republic the very last country in the area without a BarCamp-like event. (In Poland, they had 10 BarCamps just in Poznan so far).
I believe Czech tech community will get a grip and until fall we will invite BarCamp in Prague as well - keep you eyes on barcampprague.com or Pavel Neumann’s special twitter feed.
I definitely think it is going to be a terrific day in Bratislava and with all the beautiful local chicks and bars in Bratislava… It seems to me like really worth to travel
Recently announced transaction which sold search engine technology Jyxo and the largest czech blogging platform blog.cz to CME, an owner of the most popular Czech TV channel Nova, has been a huge success to former owner and founder of Jyxo, Michal Illich. He will earn approximately 8 - 10 mil USD when the process of sale will be done in two years. But he is not the only winner of this deal.
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Published at May 29th, 2008 under
dot CZ
I am currently at the IIHF ice hockey world championships in Quebec and there couldn’t be better gift for me as a journalist which anyone could give me than today’s release of Czech version of Google Translator. Google now allows me (and anyone else too;) to have text or webpage translated from 22 languages to Czech. Which is by my opinion the greatest achievment of Czech Google team this year so far.
Now I can read ice hockey news even in such a obscure languages as Finnish, Swedish and Italian (apart from Arabic or Hindu, which I could rarely use in writing about ice hockey:).
I have already used it for brief translation from Swedish and Russian - despite is could seem that Russian version as a Slavic language should make better resluts than Swedish, after consultation with native Swedish speaker the Swedish version gets better translation so far.
BTW, if you are interested about my stay in Quebec, you can check some pictures I have at Flickr or, if interested in Czech hockey talks, see our hockey blog at blog.onlajny.cz
Published at May 9th, 2008 under
dot CZ
As various Czech and Polish sources reports, polish venture fund MCI investment, who already possesses several shares among Czech companies (read more in this older spot), bought 50,11% shares of Invia.cz, largest Czech online travel retailer. Invia sold travel services for over than 50 mil. euro in 2007 with profit of 400 000 euro, which gives them largest market share in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Invia is active also in Hungary and Romania.
MCI owns similar market leader in Poland at the moment, Travelplanet.pl. As press release announces, they haven’t plans to join their activities in the near future, but with two market leaders on board there is a clear aim to build the strongest online travel retailer in the region with expected sales of 250 mil. euro a year.
Travelplanet.pl is already listed on Warsaw stock exchange (WGP) and MCI plans to make an IPO of Invia.cz over there in 2009. At this moment, next to MCI former three founders of Invia and Swiss VC fund Centralway possesses the rest of the shares.
Price for the majority hasn’t been disclosed, but it was confirmed that is above 2,9 mil. euro, according to Ondrej Bartos, Czech investment director of MCI. One of the Invia founders Radek Stavinoha told Lupa.cz in the interview last June that owners ask about 8 mil. euro for the whole company. This sets the price somewhere between 3 and 8 mil. euro, which is quite a large range, but most probably they got no more than 4 mil. euro.
Published at April 24th, 2008 under
dot CZ
Czech ecommerce has been limited with lack of any useful and widespread micropayment system so far. There were some attempts before, but since 2002 any micropayment system had to obtain a bank licence from Czech national bank and it was too difficult for all providers. Only Monetka.cz managed to get some kind of exception, but never succeeded as a popular payment method.
Other alternatives: PR SMS are limited by high commissions (more than 50% of price) from mobile carriers, Paypal is English-only (although you can use it in the Czech Repubic and in Czech crowns) and credit cards aren’t popular from both sides (smaller merchants can’t afford 3% commissions of every payment along with monthly bank fees for using cards acceptance system and on the other hand Czech customers don’t tend to use cards on the internet).
PaySec
But now it seems things are moving in the area of micropayments. CSOB, second largest bank in the country, announced a beta testing of their system PaySec, which will allow general use of micropayments with moderate conditions (1 CZK as a price of payment from customer side). However, conditions for merchants weren’t disclosed yet and only a limited number of them use PaySec in testing environment. It is thought that merchants will negotiate conditions individually according to their turnovers. (Source)
PaySec is in closed beta right now, but already several major ecommerce sites are announced to accept it - including Kosmas.cz (books), Aukro.cz (auctions), i-legalne.cz (online music) or Student Agency (travel agency, air tickets).
Sazka
But PaySec is not the only micropayment attempt on the market. The largest betting agency Sazka announced few weeks ago that they are working on kind of hybrid payment system, which will combine internet transactions with their large network of terminals (more than 7000). Sazka already allows people not only to place bets via terminals, but also charge their prepaid mobile cards, pay insurance bills or buy tickets. No details are known yet, but it is expected that during the internet transaction an unique number (or barcode for print) will be displayed to customer and he will pay with cash on Sazka terminal, referencing the number. It will be probably part of the already existing xPay.cz gateway, which offers several payment methods for merchants (see source code of www.xpay.cz website, in keywords section there is Sazka mentioned, although there is no word about Sazka on the site).
mPlatby
mBank is getting more and more popular in the Czech Republic, they already have more than 100 000 accounts opened. Nice, but what does it have in common with micropayments? Adam Zbiejczuk, mBank blogger and “mBank evangelist” had a speech on OpenMeeting in January and I noticed a small glimpse about mBank and micropayments during this year. mBank has still a lot to work on (their accounts offers really basic services, but are free), nevertheless this was interesting.
In Poland, mBank offers mTRANSFER, what is the closest thing to micropayments, but generally it is just a gateway for online payments between mBank accounts, similar what Czech eBanka or Slovak Tatrabanka already offers. These systems cannot be called micropayments, as they are available only to customers with accounts in mentioned banks and are charged as standard wire bank transfers.
But with mBank, as you have your account for free, it could serve as a micropayment-like solution, because there are no costs of maintaining your account. No one would open expensive eBanka account only to have it for online payments, but I can imagine people would do that with mBank account.
We will see, how this will develop - the biggest obstacle I see for mBank is a lack of business accounts. Companies can not open mBank account yet and thus mTRANSFER does not have any sense yet.
All three systems are generally positive thing, even the uncommon Sazka online/offline solution, which could bring ecommerce transactions closer to those, who are away of them yet. Czechs use cash-on-delivery as a primary payment method, which is limiting for some kind of goods and services. New payment methods could ignite new activities in ecommerce and web services and allow new projects to be created.
Published at April 4th, 2008 under
dot CZ