Last post at Blogger.com, feel free to join me at my new blog Odiseev.com

The king is dead, long live the king!

Long story short, I am meeting too many interesting people and experience too many new things not to blog about it. So I am starting my own blog site. I will be happy if you keep following me at odiseev.com.

See you (hopefully) soon!!!

Google Adsense = Disastrous customer support = Robotic. Nonsense. Catch 22

Isn't it ironic? In the next few paragraphs I will lay out my horrible experience with Google Adsense on another of their web properties - their own blog site. But let's not waste time, what is this all about?

Being a long-standing technologist, mentor and evangelist of several rising stars in the internet and mobile tech space, I still have the time for some of my own projects. One of the them is arguably the biggest ex-pat Bulgarian community in Europe. It has persevered for 10 years now and sometimes even to my surprise (considering my time constraints) bolsters a growing userbase and plenty of up-to-date relevant information. The site offers latest news, growing knowledge base, blogs and huge forums.

In few words, it is a helpful site valued by its community.

One beautiful day (2 weeks ago) I received a notification from Google Adsense that my site has violated their Terms and Conditions and that I have 3 days to resolve the issue. The organised person I am, later that very same day, I looked in greater detail at google's request. Google was pointing at a link on my site where one of the users has posted a lady in lingerie. That being said we do not encourage such content so it was immediately removed. The site discusses employment, family, commute etc. but yes users do sometimes exchange about daily life and become playful.

In the mean time a second request for removal arrived which superseded the previous one. Again links related to the post with such content. Cleaned the pics, left the content which was mostly links.

Submitted an appeal and the pain began. When you send an appeal to the "policy specialists" you do not get a copy of your polite message but a standard email:

Hello,

Thanks for contacting Google AdSense. This an automated reply to let you know that we've received your appeal request.

It looks like you'd like to appeal the disabling of *********. While we're unable to respond personally to this particular message, please rest assured that your request has been submitted for appeal and one of our policy specialists will be reviewing it soon.

Please note that while we will take your comments into consideration when evaluating your website, there is no guarantee that ad serving will be re-enabled.

We appreciate your patience and understanding.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

About 2 days later I received a rejection of my appeal. With a standard email.

Hello,

Thank you for providing us with additional information about your site. However, after thoroughly reviewing ******** and taking your feedback into consideration, we're unable to re-enable ad serving to your site at this time, as your site appears to still be in violation. 

When making changes, please note that the URL mentioned in your policy notification may be just one example and that the same violations may exist on other pages of your website. Appropriate changes must be made across your entire website before ad serving can be enabled on your site again. 

If you'd like to have your site reconsidered for participation in the AdSense program, please review our program policies and make any necessary changes to your webpages. 

Once you've fully resolved any issues with your site, please review this Help Center article to learn more about how to create a successful appeal.

We appreciate your cooperation. 

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Went back to that particular forum and took another cleanup, removed whole topics that could be considered by some as adult material and submitted another appeal.

A day later - rejection. Same email.

Went again removed a whole subforum that was touching on issues of our users sexual life and had links to legitimate sources with articles on the topic. Submitted an appeal.

A day later - rejection. Same email.

Removed the whole forum, put it in a hidden folder so that i have references and people's content protected just in case someone needs that information. Submitted an appeal.

A day later - rejection. Same email.

This time I was really clueless. I checked again and could not find anything wrong. Without indication of which links violate the Terms and Conditions of Google Adsense and with a content repository of 150 000 posts I cannot really do a lot even if I want to. I wrote this:

Google team, we have removed not only this link but also many other pages where we suspect there may be a violation. We need your assistance should you find more content that does not comply with your terms and conditions.  

Please PROVIDE US with a LIST, our latest appeal was rejected with a general automated message. We are your trusted customer for 5 YEARS, we deserve at least some BASIC support from a human being. 

Thank you! 

A day later - rejection. Same email.

I am now really clueless and it is a bit sad that a company that I know closely would give me this experience. My web property has real impact on people's life and some income from ads is always welcome to cover the bills.

But rest assured even without the revenues from Google we will persevere as we did for 10 years already.

Google you can do better than this!

UPDATE: I have resubmitted again.

A day later - rejection. Same email.

I have now moved all my properties to Yahoo Bing network.

A quick glimpse at BIN@Porto 2012

Those of you following technology and business events in Europe have probably heard of the 3 day event BIN@PORTO. BIN stands for Business & Innovation Network and this year hosted a bunch of very interesting presentations with key people from Portuguese but also global economy. I was lucky to be invited to participate in one the panels organized by PORTIC - Think Tank for Portuguese Internationalization - organized by our kind and engaging host Pedro Castro Henriques.

The topic of our talk was "Innovation in software products & services" and focus was on software innovation, scalability, quality and mass selling over web & mobile. Before I get carried away with some insights from the events I want to thank Filipa Caldeira from Fullsix, Jose Fonseca from BLIP, Luis Monçao from ROFF, Hugo Magalhaes from EuroCloud - it was great hearing your experience and views!



As I am working for a truly global company it was not difficult to pinpoint 3 key issues to talk about:

• Think agile, Live agile and Develop agile
• Build local awareness
• Establish and enforce quality standards

Not so sure if you, my readers, are really aware of what agile stands for but I would describe it with one word: "change". Be ready to adapt to business needs and get used to constantly changing requirements for your product. Be ready to have your client around you and showing him/her your progress and getting feedback. Because the world has changed in the way we do things, software development has become so fast that you just cannot afford to take 6 months, build a product and then pull the blanket at a gala dinner and show your work to the clients. Unless you want to face their utter disappointment and anger of not delivering what they had in mind.   

My second point was about building global products by understanding the local markets. I am not aware of any complex system (be it ecommerce or something else) being unpacked and launched without any customization. Efforts should be focused on delivering a robust foundation which you can extend and match to local demand. AFAIK developing a monstrous system in the first place to address all possible needs has never achieved its ultimate goal.

And last but not least important going into a new market is sometimes challenging because you have to set the standards and then repeatedly check that people adhere to them. This is to the contrary of established markets where the client is the one complaining about "something not working".

What do you think isn't the last point a bit surprising and Ironic?

Thanks for your time!

One fairer view on Rocket Internet and its founders

My three readers in total have surely noticed that I do reflect on startups, tech behemoths and sometimes on copycats. I do this when I have time and this is one of these moments. But Richard Oakley just stole me this pleasure with his unbiased and in-depth view represented in an article talking about execution, scale and success. No I am not talking about Berkshire Hathaway or Google, I mean Rocket Internet. And the article is "A growing respect for the Samwer brothers".

Few points here:

• I love the fact that the article is based on facts and author's reflections thus leaving the emotional factor out of it. Because TechCrunch (sorry I do really read and like your articles) just cannot get rid of the feeling that you hate these guys in the guts, for the reader's sake let us look at your last 3 publications as of writing this post:
• Rocket Internet: Is There A Method To Its Madness Or Is It Just Bad For Innovation
• the re-iterration of the Bltzkrieg email In confidential email Samwer describes online furniture strategy as a 'Blitzkrieg' in every possible following article about RI including the last one Rocket Internet’s ‘Blitzkrieg’: JP Morgan Invests In Russian Fashion Site Lamoda; $40-80M Reported 
• I also appreciate the mentioning of the fact that businesses that are so easily cloned and surpassed in weeks can actually learn from RI and have lost focus.
• And last but not least important actually adding yet another player is beneficial for the consumer. And a business that does not have its customers in the middle does not seem sustainable in mid or any longer term.

I would love if someone agrees or disagrees with my view and hopefully not Richard's because he won't be available for comment.

Humble me appeared on Portuguese national TV

Good that our great performance in the last months was appreciated by that many people. The rumour spread around and we had a visit from RPT to check our emerging office. I think they were surprized by the size of the venture and amazing working atmosphere.

If you want to enjoy my few seconds of glory take a look at RPT's recording.

Where to meet new people AKA exercise some Social Skydiving?

After a long pause, I feel like I should drop a few lines. My current hobby is meeting new people and exploring Berlin as I was more weekends out of the city than I spent in it. So lets start with what I explored this weekend:

- Went to Bode museum at the one end of the Museum island. There was an exhibition of Byzantine art and Orthodox Christian relics as well as many Italian, French, German and Spanish pictures and sculptures. It was really gooood. But I was mostly impressed by the gorgeous building which takes your breath away from both the inside and outside. If it was not so big, I could imagine living in it. :) The purposedly built exhibition building connects the floors through an amazing staircase and possess a huge amount of spacious and diverse halls.

- Took out some new colleagues for a drink - 3 cocktails each kept me sleeping till late on the next day and that is the reason for this post as I am still in bed. This was also the reason for my research on the meetup options, so please read my last point below.

- Looking for places I must visit and people I want to meet - this included also finding ways how to make some new acquaintances in a city where I have fairly few friends. So using the "Let me Google that for you" approach resulted in finding this article. The main idea is that you should check out the people and events at sites such as http://www.couchsurfing.org, http://www.toytowngermany.com and http://www.meetup.com.

So hopefully I will meet you at one of these :)

Don't wear shorts at interviews - Part II

As I posted just a few days ago, my appearance in shorts has strongly contrasted with my classmates. Now I face even more popularity by becoming the face (just for a short time) of Cambridge Conversations run by Cambridge Judge Business School. For the sake of not losing these precious moments of myself getting exposure in the press (God knows when this will happen again, and surely won't be soon), I have attached them in this blog. As I assume this blog is mostly read by my classmates from Judge, I guess I will experience some funny remarks.