After some days of “testing”, I’ve added a new great feed to my blogroll, the one of Dragos Novac, a Romanian entrepreneur. He is the CEO and co-founder of Krogos Software – a software development and offshoring services company located in Bucharest, Romania – and the blogger of @rgumente.

About While presently there are several Romanian internet discussion groups about themes comprehending business issues under diverse forms, @rgumente is the first blog from Romania about business and strategy. It is yet another voice in the space about what is happening in Romania, the way I see it.

Why business and strategy? Because every day I am observing or being involved in the business world both from Romania and from outside and I tend to have a strong opinion about what is going on. People I usually hang out with don’t really discuss about this stuff so here I am with @rgumente.

Why Romania? Because this is the place where I was born, where I always came back from my life journeys and where I am presently trying to make a living. Finally, because the business environment from this corner of the world presents several different perspectives quite interesting or scary, depending on the mood of the observer.

Dragos’ blog was just reviewed in the weekly Power Blog reviews from Small Business Trends. Great work and definitely another perspective!

We had a strategy session with some of my colleagues in an quite uncommon restaurant near Zürich – the Seerose restaurant. Uncommon because you can have a aperitif on a lake-pontoon (definitely too cold today…) and you are really eating “on the lake”, with a marvelous view. We saw the first snow on the Swiss alps.

I found some figures about the last Montreux Jazz Festival – quite impressive:

Some months ago, I had a very interesting discussion with two American friends, both moderated, one Republican and one Democrat, who both know very well a big part of the World, including some Arabian countries and Europe. Both very well educated (Harvard), and both speaking perfectly four languages. So, not really some “average” guys ;-) We discussed the link between the religion and the State in America during quite a long time . Both agreed that G. Bush is making a religion war against the Muslims in Irak and Pakistan, and that the other “normal well-known” arguments which are always mentionned (petrol, geopolitics) exist but aren’t so relevant. That was completely new for myself, I was a bit sceptic, as a *lot* of European friends I met the last time.

This was for me a kind of new light concerning the war in Irak.

With some distance, I must say their analysis is definitely interesting. In this field, I read a post of Pierre Carion about the pledge of Allegiance. If I understand well, this is a school flag-raising ceremony which takes place each week. Foxnews published an history of the Pledge of Allegiance and its different versions. The Pledge currently reads:

I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I find this idea of Pledge, as an integration “instrument”, ok. On the other side, as a French guy, I am surprised that the Pledge is containing such an explicit mention of *God*. What happens to all the Americans who are atheistic or who don’t care about religion? I have thought that, as in France, there is strong and clear separation between religion and the State. Questionable, no?

Pierre quoted also an extract from an interview between Robert Sherman, a reporter, and George Bush (the father ;-) in 1987:

RS: “What will you do to win the votes of Americans who are atheists?”

GB: “I guess I’m pretty weak in the atheist community. Faith in God is important to me.”

RS: “Surely you recognize the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists?”

GB: “No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.”

RS: “Do you support as a sound constitutional principle the separation of state and church?”

GB: “Yes, I support the separation of church and state. I’m just not very high on atheists.”

I found this input interesting with the light of my two American friends…

About one month after the version 1.7 of Sauce Reader, Synop launched an updated version of its great feed reader (first review, second one), which is available for free download (for personal use).

What’s new?

Along with many bug fixes, this release has one major new feature:

URL Feed support to monitor and store changes to any web page.

Using this feature, you can now monitor updates to any web page using Sauce Reader. Monitoring a URL for any changes, Sauce Reader will download a complete copy of the page for offline browsing (MHTML file). Use this feature to:

Keep a complete record of all versions of a web page over time.

Monitor infrequently changed pages that do not publish a feed.

Wow, it sounds interesting :-)

Another interesting article of the Knowledge@Wharton about the role of corporation in our society. The article is based on some inputs from a documentary film called The Corporation and the corresponding book – The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.

Both are an attempt to create a new definition of goals and responsibilities for the business world consistent with the realities of the 21st century. The key to this reappraisal is the concept of a "sustainable economy.

I don’t know the book and the movie, I found interesting that the authors point out that:

Acting to make Interface an entirely self-sustaining and ecologically responsible firm by 2020, [its founder and Chairman, Ray Anderson,] has guided his company to a record of remarkable achievement. In the July 19, 2004, issue of BusinessWeek, data supplied by Interface show that waste produced by the company has been reduced by 80%, water intake is down by 78%, emissions of greenhouse gases down by 46%, energy consumption cut by 31% and use of petroleum-based materials by 28%. The final figure is in some ways the most persuasive, detailing a total savings of $231 million. Ethics and profits are indeed compatible.

Great concrete example!

Source: A Critical Look at the Corporation’s Dominant Role in Society

Google’s Tribute to Ray Charles today. Ray was born on September 23 1930.

September 23, autumn is already here….

One way to “fight” against the autumn’s spirit, a good chimney fire! The first one since last winter.

I visited one of the datacenter of Triaton in Frankfurt (Germany) yesterday. Quite impressive! We had a chance to have a look at the second mainframe which was installed in Europe! This installation happened in 1957-58 by the Hoechst chemical company. It was a 701 model. The goal was to organize better the payroll system. Already a Business Process Re-engineering project ;-) I was surprised that IBM already had more than 80’000 employees in 1957…

I couldn’t take some pictures but I found some funny and interesting pictures and information on the IBM’s website. Have a look at these pictures and the incredible power of this machine!

Overview of the mainframe (the one we saw was bigger)

The incredible control panel

The magnetic core storage unit

The vacuum tubes

System performance

Source: IBM model 701 exhibits

I passed the “200 posts” milestone on last Friday :-)

Thanx all for taking some time here!

Image source: Wikipedia