Image via WikipediaOn friday we had a pleasure to present Zemanta at Web.start conference in Zagreb.

What surprised me was the number of participants. There were 250 people there. Eventually I got the feeling that more Slovenian web companies were there than they are at Slovenian conferences.

The moto of the conference was venture capital in Southeastern Europe. Nothing new was said except for the honest truth that regional VCs like copycats. Copycats are a safe bet and easy to understand.

Zemanta on the other hand tries to do something really innovative. Something that hasn’t really been tried before. Our presentation was the last one, but I still managed to get people excited. Let’s see how many of them start to use Zemanta while blogging. How many times do you have to hear how good Zemanta is before you start using it?

Source: WikipediaYesterday we had a splendid launch party at Zemanta HQ (with salsa dancing), now we awake into a new morning where we are excitingly waiting for reviews from around the blogosphere.

Yeah, we got it to TechCrunch!
But others are also important from Marko Mrdjenovič, Had (in Slovenian), and some more and more.

Well dear reader, where’s your review?

Oh, among other news, tomorrow (friday the 28th), we will also be present on Minibar in London, talk to us! Oh, and we would not mind people digging us up.

I hate cables. Power cables, data cables, hubs, splitters, connectors, I hate them. I feel like a monkey everytime I have to plug my nifty ultra portable laptop to 5-7 cables in order to start working normally. After that it looks like an octopus.
Today we had another intersting problem with cables - we had to buy some ups power cables for the new servers. Since we have offices next door to Ljubljana’s largest shopping mall we went for a walk to the first shop, but turned out they don’t have them. Nor the next one, or the third and fourth. Didn’t matter if it was computers shop, electronics shop or home store.
It took us an hour and a half to buy those three ’standard’ power cables. The only cables that are more or less trully standardized in the World (as long as you don’t use Lenovo lapotops). Now I will fear the day, when I will have to go buy another ’standard mini usb’ cable. *sigh*

Related articles by Zemanta:

• F.C.C. Planning Rules to Open Cable Market [0.nytimes.com]
• Photos: Server room cabling overhaul [news.com]
• All Giz Wants: One Plug For Everything [All Giz Wants: One Plug Fits All] [gizmodo.com]

The last time I was explaining to a girl friend about the crazy working hours in a startup, occasional adrenalin rushes, beating the competition, irregular sleep and regular food, important life lessons learned and lack of women in the process, she replied simply: “Well, guys used to go to the army, now you go to a startup.”

Related articles by Zemanta:

• Sleepwalking: a nation in meltdown [telegraph.co.uk]
• Hiring is Obsolete [paulgraham.com]
• Frequent Dream - To Sleep on Flights [0.nytimes.com]

After exactly two months on the Continents (old and new one) we’ve visited midlands of London again. I was surprised that walking around town felt less annoying than I remembered.
We were there for a great party, organized by our lawyers under the roof of The Gherkin Building. Since we were in town, the weather was great, and the view was absolutely fantastic!!! It was like a scene from Bladerunner or any other decent SF movie - a metropolis reaching from one horizont to the other, third and fourth. And you could hardly notice when the city lights changed to stars and Thames transformed to Milky Way. It almost felt like the centre of the Universe. Or the insides of a hollow planet with holes in the ground.

Related articles by Zemanta:

• A journey through the London night [telegraph.co.uk]
• Bono’s U2 tower to be tallest in Ireland [telegraph.co.uk]

• spending lot’s of time with ultra-bright people in a place stuffed with cables
• sorting out beurocracy stuff in the middle of the night, because that’s when the brain can take a rest
• having an office in the tango dance hall
• staying in the office for two work-days in one day, because of a crazy self-imposed deadline, at least two times a week
• receiving a call in the middle of the night, from a guy who is completely thrilled about a possibility to work along

… just for a taste of a regular ‘finally going home to hack some more in peace’ attitude at Zemanta…

Related articles by Zemanta:

• Sleep A Speedy Time For Memory Making [cbsnews.com]
• Strictly tango for the dance tourists [observer.guardian.co.uk]