It is with great disappointment that we announce the cancellation of SEEWeb Conference 2010.

Due to lack of early interest, which caused some sponsors lose interest and led to irreparable complications in the financing and logictics of what was to be a rather large event of this type, we have found it best to cancel the event altogether instead of providing our guests and visitors with anything less than a superb professional and social experience.

We remind you that our initial intention was to create a community of professionals and experts in all matters related to doing business on the Web in SEE. This continues to be our intention and we will proceed with creating a much needed community of such experts in the near future.

We owe a debt of gratitude to all those who joined us in our efforts, including the speakers scheduled for SEEWeb Conference and all who participated in the organization of the event. We hope to see you all in the near future, to exchange ideas and experiences for the benefit of better business in SEE. We thank you for your time and willingness to participate in the community.

SEEWeb Team

The SEEWeb Conference 2010 will be the first of many SEEWeb events to come. The SEEWeb Conference aims not only to bring together all those businesses and entrepreneurs in Southeastern Europe who will benefit greatly from the Internet, but also to create a network of web professionals in the Balkans with the goal of contributing to the progress of web business and use of the Internet in the region.

Over a period of three days, from June 4-6, the SEEWeb Conference 2010 will bring together some 20 speakers from Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Slovenia, and a special guest from the U.S., all of whom will offer hands-on, clear advice on doing business on the Web and the impact the Internet has on our businesses, culture and daily lives, based on extensive professional experience.

Unfortunately, we also have to announce that we were not able to establish an official relationship with Napredna Srbija, the NGO that offered to be the patron of this conference, due to technical and beaurocratical issues. Both the representatives of Napredna Srbija and the SEEWeb team hope that there will be an opportunity for us to collaborate in the future as we have common goals that we would all like to see realized. The SEEWeb team thanks Napredna Srbija for their good will to support the SEEWeb Conference 2010 and we wish them the best of luck.

The SEEWeb team, however, has not allowed this minor glitch to derail us from our purpose. As of next week we will be working under our own patronage and with our own resources. We have regrouped and are finalizing the preparation of an interesting and innovative program for the Conference that the region and those attending can benefit from remarkably.

We will soon be announcing the participants and full 3-day schedule of the SEEWeb Conference 2010.

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

IT Showoff is a free technology conference on the subject of software development that will be held at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Technology of the University of Zagreb in Zagreb, Croatia on February 12th, 2010.

List of participating speakers:

Tomica Radosevic, co-owner and CEO of Trillenium, will be speaking about their on-line 3D shopping centre, a project by Hrvoje Papic in which over one million euros was invested.

Representatives of Croteam from Zagreb will be presenting their development of Croatia’s most popular game, Serious Sam.

Tadej Gregoric, a guest from Slovenia and representative of Motiviti will present on the subject of casual games for Nintendo Wii, iPhone and other platforms.

Tomislav Car from Infinium will be speaking about his experiences in developing mobile games for advertising purposes.

Kresimir Prcela from Pet minuta (Five Minutes), the company that developed the successful microblogging network Shoutem, will be speaking about implementing augmented reality technology in iPhone applications.

Prof. Zvonimir Vanjak, ScD, from Telegra, will be presenting, based on his ten year long experience in the academic community, a critical view of the Bolognia process, as well as IT education in Croatia in general.

Other subjects include the Microsoft Cloud Azure Cloud Computing platform, the implementation of Open Source sollutions to a large business environment, and the RazborIT system for managing projects financed by EU funds. Visitors will also have an opportunity to hear more about application development for the omnipresent and popular Facebook.

A total of 20 highly qualified presenters, a top discussion panel related to the development of web applications, good fun and socializing are what all guests of IT Showoff can expect. The full schedule can be viewed on the webpages for the conference.

For all further press inquiries, please contact Mr. Nikola Kapraljevic via the conference’s official webiste at www.ITshowoff.com.

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 all well aware that e-business, e-commerce, social media marketing and web entrepreneurship in Southeastern Europe are somewhat behind on those in other regions where the Web is more developed and its use more common. With new technological developments in the region, now is the opportunity to catch up with those regions. As most uses of the Web are still in development worldwide, many of us are in some way professionally invoved on the Web tend to follow those developments on internationally recognized websites, blogs, seminars and conferences. These are great sources of information and opportunities to learn about our specific niches and the Web in general. They do not, however, provide insight into the Southeastern European markets and the implementation of these new practices and ideas to our respective and joined markets.

We intend to make Serbia Today a place where web entrepreneurs from Southeastern Europe will gather to share their experiences and learn from each other. Of course, plans are well under way for the SEEWeb Conference 2010 where we expect to do just that live and with local and international speakers, but the Serbia Today team would like to get started on creating a community before then. As in – right now. From now on this site is reserved for news about past and upcoming relevant conferences in the region and translation of local blogs into the English language, so we can all reach a wider audience and break down the slight but significant language barriers between SouthEatstern European countries.

Our team speaks English, Spanish, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Greek, Dutch, German, Italian and French and we will be translating from all those languages. We once again ask you to join us in these efforts by either using the #SEEWeb hashtag when posting articles having to do with relevant Southeastern European subjects on Twitter, sending us links to such articles either through any of our contact channels, or by e-mailing summarized translations of articles from your native language to English with a link to the source article (you will be given credit for the contribution). Let’s all get to work and contribute to getting to know the SEEWeb region better!

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!