Nevena Ristic is a  teenager from Kragujevac, Serbia. In fact, today is her birthday. Nevena celebrated her 15th birthday today at San Matteo Hospital in Pavia, Italy. Nevena has leukemia type AML M4. She first spent a year in Belgrade’s University Childrens’ Hospital and the leukemia went into remissiion after a long set of chemotherapy. The leukemia is back. No suitable donors were found in Serbia, so Nevena was recently transfered to Pavia where they have just found a suitable bone marrow donor from Chicago, U.S.A. and she is now awaiting the transplant.

Nevena and her family are fighting the long fight with this disease that takes it’s toll on so many adults and children each year. This battle of awesome proportions to regain her health, something that should be the God given right of every child, has caused quite a financial strain on her family’s finances. They have sent out an appeal for donations on a Facebook fanpage made for Nevena and Serbia Today joins them in that appeal now.

Nevena’s father, Miodrag Ristic, has opened a bank account for the purpose of donations with Banca Intesa in Serbia. We have contacted Nevena and her family for more information on payments from other countries and are awaiting their response. In the meantime, please do what you can to contact your bank, other payment or Banca Intesa directly to see how you can make a donation to the existing account from your location.

Help Nevena fight the good fight. Our thoughts and prayers are with her.

Banca Intesa in Serbia
908-16001-87

account number: 53-102-0002587/0

account owner: Miodrag Ristic

About the author:

Milos Petrovic is a respected Serbian blogger with an Engeneering Degree in Organizational Science. He is founder of the webportal of the city of Bor, has participated as a teaching aide at the School of Organizational Science of the University of Belgrade, and worked for Trident Media Group and Tritech, among other endeavours.

Disclaimer: The following is a summarized and translated version of Mr. Petrovic’s original post on MilosBlog.com and does not necessarilly reflect the views and opinions of Serbia Today or its partners.

The begining of the year has definitely been reserved for the review of Internet advertising in Serbia. According to all announcements, the presentation structure and “sold out tickets”, the event was a promising one and, finally, did meet expectations. The current state of matters was well demonstarted and some interesting pointers were given as to the further development of on-line advertising. Our last impression was that we all believe in a better today and that the cult of “B92-Blic” advertising should be broken.

On January 2010, at Hotel Zira in Belgrade, a one-day seminar was held, titled “Advertising on the Interent” and organized by ABC Serbia. An excellent space, very high quality audience, plenty of familliar faces from the profession, good food and beverage, excellent socializing.

Courtesy of: milosblog.com

Nebojsa Radovic, a.k.a. Eniac - Presented types of on-line advertising, paying close attention to niche specific sites and reminding that the “large” sites aren’t the only available advertising space.

Jovan Protic, Director of Ringier online and publisher of “24 hours” - Presented statistics and analysis of the on-line audience in Serbia. Mr. Protic emphasized the readiness of audiences to accept advertisements located on mainstream media websites, which seemed like an undermining of websites that don’t fall within the mainstream media créme. He also noted that every advertising campaign should be tried and evaluated after 7 days, to monitor its effect and be able to react to that appropriately. Wise, I’d say.

Rade Trickovic, a well known figure from HTTPoll - Spoke of advertising through content brokers and other agents. Mr. Trickovic listed many advantages to using professional agecies who deal in Internet advertising. Is Internet advertising in a state of crisis in Serbia? The fact that only some 3% of the cake goes to on-line advertising speaks volumes to that effect, but the amount of clients HTTPoll has had in the past year, numbering over 400, claims to the contrary. I prefer to let others analyse whether HTTPoll is taking a big bite out of the Internet advertising cake.

Dejan Bizinger, Business Development Manager - Mr. Bizinger first reacted from the audience to Mr. Trickovic’s presentation, bringing to attention the well known fact that the majority of funds for on-line advertising in Serbia are directed to B92 and Blic. I got the impression that this didn’t agree with many in the audience, and with good reason. There certainly is a  “B92-Blic” cult in Internet advertising and that isn’t at all good for our Internet scene. Somehow, i believe that cult will come to an end.

Bizinger later took to the stage and presented on the subject of advertising on social media, presenting this most interesting form of on-line advertising. New concepts like Check-in and Groupon systems are entirely innovative for our region, but their implementation should be expected. During his presentation, Dejan mentioned people who handle social media accounts for corporate purposes and called them Social Media Officers, which probably makes more sense than the usual Social Media Expert title that has been getting negative attention on local blogs recently.

Mladen Malik, Owner and CEO of eZadar.hr - Mladen, who is entirely transparent by character and one to speak his mind, spoke of eZadar.hr’s success. He had plenty to boast of. The numbers were what was most interesting as eZadar.hr rolled in an impressive revenue of €150,000 in 2009! Annual contracts with companies and entrepreneurs from Zadar, affilliate agencies, and other forms of advertisement, gave eZadar a near 300% rise in profit in comparisson to 2008. Aside from busting the myth of 2009 having been a year of crisis, Mladen also demonstrated that Croatia is a step ahead of Serbia in Internet advertising. A great promotional example for the city of Zadar! I was left under the impression that Mladen had a highly successful strategy as to on-line advertising. Regular rounds of local businesses, ads on different portions of the site, sponsored polls, curreny exchange lists… all advertising tools were employed for the monetization of eZadar.hr. Food for thought.

Finally, my complaint that advertising through articles wasn’t a subject. Blogs, PR texts, product analyses, tests, reviews, etc, can represent a powerful weapon in on-line advertising. A text with well done SEO can be worth more than a banner campaign. Such campaigns may not have a bombastic effect short-term, but can mean quite a lot long-term.

In conclusion, notes from the seminar:

-TV audiences are migrating to the Internet
- On-line advertising – “try being smart”
- Pay per view, click, action
- Socio-demographic research is desirable
- Banners – creativity is key to success
- Flash Banners – more creative. More work for flash programmers
- E-commerce and affiliate platforms – the outstretched arm of Internet advertising
- Campaigns – plan, implementation, testing, adaptation, monitoring, evaluation.
- Combinations are key – print or TV plus Internet advertising
- Targetting – every niche deserves attention
- Breaking of the “B92-Blic” cult of Internet advertising
- Social networks are the pillars of innovative advertising
- With a good strategy even local sites can turn a profit

We are finally able to bring you some real news. As of yesterday afternoon we have a venue and a few more partners for the event that is set to be held in Belgrade from June 4th to June 6th of this year – the SEEWeb Conference 2010 for web entrepreneurs from Southeastern Europe. We’re supposing many of you already have suspicions as to the subject and purpose of the SEEWeb Conference and, unfortunately, we can’t confirm or deny those suspicions just yet.

However, we will be organizing this event in a transparent and yet unseen manner – transparently and in real time. We would like to get as many of you on board in this and other Serbia Today / Advanced Serbia projects and hear your ideas. This is why we will keep our doors open, so to speak, and keep you aprised of the developments and progress of our plans.

Here’s what we are able to tell you at this point:

1. The SEEWeb Conference 2010 will be held at EUROCentar in downtown Belgrade. The management of this primarily business edifice has been extremely cooperative and understanding of our efforts. They are loving the ideas we’ve been coming up with and have offered us use of the center’s gallery and other areas at an unbelievably low price and highly flexible terms. We are now proud to call them our partners in this effort.
2. For the duration of the SEEWeb Conference we will also be partering with MUSE Premium. We will not only be using their catering services, but also their two locations (one located within EUROCentar) for promotional purposes and the conference itself.
3. We are currently working out the very last details as to our budget for the SEEWeb Conference and we already have several major sponsors lined up and waiting. We would like to take this opportunity to thank them for their patience as we work things out and the faith they seem to have placed in our team and ideas. We can’t wait to finally be able to announce your sponsorship over the next several days!

Thus far, we have team members and partners in Serbia and Croatia, as well as potential partners in Greece, Hungary and Slovenia. We hope to involve as many coutries from Southeastern Europe in the SEEWeb Conference and other projects and will send out an open invite for partners in other coutries with more information as soon as we are able to.

Thank you all for your attention and many thanks to all those supporting our efforts!

We are happy to announce that the Serbia Today project has just recieved the full patronage of Napredna Srbija (Advanced Serbia), a NGO from Serbia. With their support and guidance, we will be organizing the first of many major events to come. The event has been dubbed SEEWeb 2010 and is planned for the first week of June 2010. More information will be released within the coming days and weeks as to the exact nature and purpose of the SEEweb event.

Beside Napredna Srbija as patrons, the founding collaborators on Serbia Today and  SEEWeb are Sasa Jovanovic and Aleksandar Jovanovic, better known as Hermes Creative, Tomislav Car and his Web poduzetnik, Ivan Dimitrijevic, a.k.a. Fotomanijak, and Sergei Oudman and Danica Radisic from H2O Solutions as the initiators of Serbia Today.

Our goal is to create a strong and efficient community for web entrepreneurs and online marketers in Southeastern Europe, a place where we can collaborate, learn from each other and use our common knowledge to influence and assist web entrepreneurs and further development of the Web in the region.

Drago nam je da možemo da objavimo da je Serbia Today projekat upravo dobio pokroviteljstvo Udruženja građana (NVO) Napredna Srbija. Sa njihovom podrškom i savetima, pripremamo se za prvi od mnogobrojnih događaja koje planiramo. Ovaj prvi događaj smo nazvali SEEWeb 2010 i planira se za prvu sedmicu juna meseca ove godine. Objavićemo više informacija u toku narednih dana i sedmica, vezano za tačnu prirodu i svrhu SEEWeb događaja.

Pored Napredne Srbije kao pokrovitelja, glavni saradnici na Serbia Today i  SEEWeb-u su Saša Jovanović i Aleksandar Jovanović, poznatiji kao Hermes Creative, Tomislav Car i njegov Web poduzetnik, Ivan Dimitrijević, poznatiji kao Fotomanijak, i Sergei Oudman i Danica Radišić iz H2O Solutions kao začetnici Serbia Today-a.

Naš cilj je da stvorimo jaku i efikasnu zajednicu web preduzetnika i onih koji se bave online marketingom u jugoistočnoj Evropi, mesto gde ćemo moći da sarađujemo, učimo jedni od drugih i koristimo naše zajedničko znanje i resurse da utičemo i pomognemo web preduzetnicima i daljem razvoju Web-a u regionu.

If you’re a web entrepreneur or online marketer then you most likely have a personal of company blog. What you see on the right sidebar ofall the pages on Serbia-Today.com is the Twitter Hashtag Widget for WordPress, a handy little tool that we are going to use to get to know the SEE web a little better.

We’ll be using this widget to follow all tweets containing the #SEEweb hashtag. If your blog has anything to do with Southeastern Europe, we ask you to join us by including this particular hashtag whenever you tweet a post or news on your blog or website. Feel free to use the hashtag in any tweets that have anything to do with the region or to promote your blog if you’re from the region, on any subject and in any language. And don’t forget to check back here regularly to see what’s new on the Twitter #SEEweb scene!

Razlog zašto je Serbia-Today.com pokrenut u ovoj ranoj fazi našeg projekta jeste taj da smo želeli da podelimo ovaj proces sa svima vama. Proces dovođenja web preduzetnika i onih koji se bave on-line marketingom u jednu zajednicu u real time-u i sa konkretnim rezultatima. Sve to znači da ćemo moći da vam otkrivamo ovaj projekat sloj po sloj.

U ovom trenutku možemo da vas obavestimo da privodimo kraju preliminarnu fazu nečega što bi moglo da se ispostavi kao jedan od ozbiljnijih poduhvata koji bi pozitivno doprineo web preduzetnicima širom jugoistočne Evrope.

Naš osnivački tim se sastoji od sedam članova, svi web preduzetnici i profesionalci iz oblasti marketinga iz Srbije i Hrvatske, i u roku od naredne dve nedelje moćićemo da najavimo više o našim planovima i događajima koje planiramo za tekuću godinu. U međuvremenu, puštaćemo u pogon određene aktivnosti vezane za te planove, i to već u toku današnjeg dana. Svi ovi poduhvati će imati jedan zajednički cilj – da se poveđu web preduzetnici iz regiona jugoistočne Evrope i da se podstaknu saradnja i nove ideje. Nadamo se da ćete nam se pridružiti u ovim poduhvatima dok mi nastavimo da vas obaveštavamo o napretku budućih planova.

The reason Serbia-Today.com is running at this early phase of our project is because we wanted to share this process with all of you. The process of bringing an entire region of web entrepreneurs and online marketers together in real time and with concrete results. This means that we will only be able to unveil this project one layer at a time.

At this point we are ready to announce that we are completing the preliminary phase of what might turn out to be one of the more serious undertakings that will benefit web entrepreneurs throughout the Southeast European region.

Our founding team is comprised of seven members, all web entrepreneurs and professional marketers from Serbia and Croatia, and we will be able to announce more about our plans and events for the current year within the next two weeks. In the meantime, we will be unfolding some activities related to those plans as soon as later today. All these efforts will still have one common goal – to connect web entrepreneurs in the SEE region and encourage cooperation and new ideas. We hope you will join us in these efforts as we continue to reveal more.

Serbia Today je rezultat udruženog truda grupe web preduzetnika iz Balkanskog regiona. Naša namera je da sakupimo sve regionalne web preduzetnike na jednom mestu, sa ciljem da promovišemo saradnju, edukujemo one koji imaju bilo kakve ambicije da se pridruže svetu online poslovanja, i izrodi nove ideje i poduhvate na regionalnom web-u.

Balkanski region je uvek bio region sa mnoštvom resursa ali, kao i većina istočno evropskih zemalja, je često kaskao u vidu tehničkih mogućnosti u poređenju sa zapadnim zemljama. Dok se nova era odvijala na Web-u nama pred očima i tehničke mogućnosti vezane za Internet se relativno izjednačile sa onima u zapadnoj hemisferi, neki su shvatili da je sada vreme da se ide napred. Sada imamo priliku da doskočimo i da pokažemo čega su sve sposobni web preduzetnici ovog, ponekad fascinantnog, podneblja.

Ekipa Serbia Today-a vas moli da budete strpljivi dok počnemo da otkrivamo detalje vezane za regionalni projekat koji planiramo za maj ili jun ove godine. Prve detaljne vesti biće objavljene sredinom februara. Do tada, naša ekipa bi da vas podseti da je on-line saradnja ključ za uspeh u 21. veku.

Serbia Today is a joint effort on the part of several web entrepreneurs from the Balkan region. Our intention is to bring together all entrepreneurs from the region in an attempt to promote collaboration, educate those with any ambition to join the world of online business, and bring to life new ideas and projects on the regional web.

The Balkan region has always been one of great resources yet, like most of Eastern Europe, has often been left behind in terms of technical possibilities in comparisson to most Western countries. As a new era unravelled on the Web before our eyes and technical conditions related to the Internet began realtively equivalent to those in the Western hemisphere, some have realized that this is the time to advance. Now is our chance to catch up and demonstrate what the web entrepreneurs of this sometimes fascinating region are capable of.

The team of Serbia Today asks you to be patient as we begin to expose the details of the regional project we are working on for May or June of this year. The first detailed news will be announced in mid February. Until then, our team would like to remind you that on-line collaboration is the key to success in the 21st century.