AllThingsD » Czech Republic

"Brusli?" No. Chuck Norris

Gordon Fairclough and Leos Rousek — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 20:57:54 +0000

Action-movie hero Chuck Norris has a holiday hit on his hands–in the Czech Republic.

The 70-year-old martial artist-made famous by tough-guy roles in 1980s films such as “Forced Vengeance” and “Missing in Action”–is starring in a series of TV commercials here for T-Mobile and its satellite-TV service.

The ads, featuring Mr. Norris in humorous encounters with Czech Christmas customs, have turned into a pop-culture phenomenon, which is starting to spread outside of the Czech Republic into Central Europe.

One of the spots–all produced by the Prague office of Saatchi & Saatchi–shows Mr. Norris in the kitchen of a Czech family preparing a traditional Christmas Eve dinner of fresh carp. His hostess asks Mr. Norris to kill the still flapping fish with a wooden mallet. “You’re the master,” she says.

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IPad Debuts in 11 More Countries

John Paczkowski — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 15:56:04 +0000

This week is a big one for international iPad launches. By its end, the device will have debuted in 11 new countries: Poland, Taiwan, Denmark, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Norway, Hungary, Malaysia, Finland and South Korea, which expects “magical and revolutionary” things from Apple’s tablet. “The media device iPad will bring revolutionary change to our digital lifestyle triggering mass consumption of contents,” Pyo Hyun-myung, president of the mobile business group at KT, Apple’s carrier partner in the country, told The Korea Herald. “The iPad, along with Apple’s iPhone, is expected to offer a new and favorable experience for people with the combination of our network and the variety of contents shown in the applications.”

Czech Republic Rejects Google Street View Over Privacy Concerns

Beth Callaghan — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 19:40:28 +0000

Igor Nemec, head of the Czech Office for Personal Data Protection said Wednesday that Google won’t be allowed to expand Street View in the country because the technology “disproportionately invades citizens’ privacy.” One of the principal complaints is that Google’s cameras, which are placed nine feet high, can see into people’s homes. Google won’t collect any new data in the Czech Republic until an agreement can be reached.

The Bids Are In for AOL's Sale of ICQ–It's Down to a "U.N." of Four Buyers

Kara Swisher — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:02:26 +0000

AOL has taken another step closer to selling off its ICQ instant messaging service, culling seven bids to four “serious” ones, said sources close to the situation.

The price for the service is hovering just under $200 million, several sources said, with one bid higher.

An AOL spokeswoman declined to comment.

BoomTown reported news of the sale of ICQ by AOL (AOL) in November, part of a deleveraging of units from the newly independent Internet company as it focuses more on its content and advertising business.

While other reports a month later said the sale was closer to completion than it actually was, the process is proceeding in a more traditional manner, with bidders making proposals to AOL’s investment bankers, Allen & Co. and Morgan Stanley (MS).

Sources said that the solicitation of bids is now over and that there are four “serious” ones, which one person close to the situation described as a “U.N. of buyers.”

Translation: The bidders are likelier to be international Internet companies rather than from the U.S.

That’s because ICQ–which has 40 to 50 million active users across the globe–has a stronger overseas business, especially in Germany, Russia, Eastern Europe and Israel.

While I could not get the exact names of those left in the running, the most obvious possibilities include:

Russian investment group Digital Sky Technologies, which has invested in both Facebook and social gaming site Zynga; China’s huge Tencent-owned QQ instant messaging and gaming service; Naspers, a multimedia giant known as the MIH Group and based in South Africa; Seznam, the largest Web portal in the Czech Republic; and, perhaps, Yandex, Russia’s leading search engine.

In the U.S., some felt Google (GOOG) would be a bidder for ICQ, though it was Yahoo (YHOO) that apparently made a much lower offer, which took it out of the running.

In any case, the price will likely be much lower than what AOL paid in 1998.

The then-powerful AOL acquired ICQ, which was one of the most explosive online communications tools, for $287 million, with another $120 million in earnouts for the team. It was part of a Tel Aviv, Israel, start-up called Mirabilis.

But ICQ’s popularity in the U.S. lagged compared with rival services from Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo and Google. In addition, Facebook and Twitter have become major players in the status-update space.

AOL’s AIM service, in contrast, is quite strong, typically clocking in as one of the top instant messaging properties.

ICQ is still based in Israel with about 100 employees and is moderately profitable. Bidders, sources said, are now talking with the ICQ team as part of the process.

Creating 'Moments' of Your Life

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:30:02 +0000

It’s hard to maintain a monogamous relationship with one photo-sharing Web site. You will sign up with a service and use it as your primary online repository for a while. You may even familiarize friends and family with that service so they expect to see your name associated with it in emails. But before long, other sites with flashier features will entice you to start spending time with them while you continue to maintain your accounts on the old site so you don’t lose your digital memories. Can’t they all just get along in one place?

This week, I tested thisMoment.com—a content-sharing Web site that doesn’t mind if you use multiple sharing sites. It acknowledges your accounts on other sites and the fact that you have probably loaded a bunch of photos or videos onto those sites. It even recognizes that you likely still want to remain connected to those services. In fact, thisMoment is made better by your relationships with these other sites. And the service also makes it easy to incorporate into your account material created by others—even strangers.

[ See post to watch video ]

Anyone can use thisMoment.com the old-fashioned way, by uploading personal content and building “moments” (collections of related content) to share with friends. But thanks to thisMoment’s ties to other sharing sites, users may opt to add others’ publicly shared materials like videos, photos and articles to a moment, making it richer and more interesting. This content can come from sources like Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Facebook—even Life Magazine photos and MTV videos can be interspersed throughout a moment. The Moment Maker tool quickly scans sites for relevant content to add to the moment.

This week, the service introduced an iPhone app for making moments on the go and a Facebook app for creating moments within Facebook. I tried both, in addition to using the thisMoment.com site, and found that resulting moments looked like they took a lot more time and effort to make than they actually did.

ThisMoment’s secret sauce is in its elegant displays. It takes all sorts of content—text, photos, videos—from various sources and meshes it into a handsome slideshow that flows from one visual to the next. Black backgrounds dramatically frame photos and videos, and captions stand out in brightly colored text. Maps from Google (GOOG) pinpoint exactly where the moment took place and a list names other people who were in the moment.

And when you’re all done creating your moment, thisMoment doesn’t mind sharing your final project with others using still more social-networking tools like Twitter, Facebook and some 45 Web publishing sites—if your privacy settings are set for sharing.

For some people, the idea of integrating other online content into their personal moments could be a turn-off. I wasn’t initially sure I would want someone else’s content mixed in with photos and videos I took, or vice versa. And I still wish thisMoment provided a clearer way of differentiating between someone’s personal content and that which was pulled from the Web. (Currently, small print below each item tells where it came from.)

But there’s so much content online that it makes sense to tap these resources. And users can opt to make moments without external content.

ThisMoment artistically assembles digital moments using content from the Web or personal photos and videos.

Rather than just slapping photos on to a Web site where people can see them, thisMoment asks its users to check off descriptive words—or enter their own—to explain how the moment made them feel. Though I originally scoffed at these add-your-own emotions, I later grew to like them when I looked back at my moments and those created by other people. They give these online creations a personal touch that isn’t conveyed in other photo-sharing software programs or Web sites.

Another thisMoment differentiator is its sense of time. You can create moments for things that happen in the past, present or future, like an upcoming wedding or birth, and a timeline at the top of the Web site shows where these moments fit in, according to their dates. If you share a moment with someone who is labeled as being in that moment, she can “seize” the moment, adding it to her own timeline. ThisMoment also encourages you to rate your moments on a scale of small to big according to how much they matter to you, though I often forgot to do this, and to label your moments so they can be organized into different categories.

I soon got the hang of how to use thisMoment to supplement my moments when I didn’t have enough content to create something worth sharing. When I attended a folk rock concert at the Embassy of the Czech Republic here in Washington, D.C., I only captured a few so-so photographs and wouldn’t have otherwise shared any visual memories from the evening with friends. But I used the Moment Maker to troll the Web for content related to Czechomor, the band I saw, and found live concert videos, as well as professional photographs, an online biography of the band and a link to where the group’s album was sold on Amazon.com (AMZN). I used this content and one of my own photos, and made a simple moment in a few minutes. (Check out my moment.)

Likewise, friends of mine recently hosted a murder-mystery dinner, but we were so busy staying in character that we took only one photo of the entire evening. I used that photo of me and my costumed friends as the inspiration for creating a moment filled with photos and videos of murder-mystery dinners from all over. This content came from sites like Photobucket, Picasa, Flickr and YouTube, and I laughed at the number of people who wore stick-on moustaches in these photos.

ThisMoment allows anyone with whom you share a moment to see that moment without signing up for the service. If that person is included in the moment, meaning the creator labeled him or her as a person who participated in the moment, then that person can add his or her own content to the moment—as long as that person signs up as a member of the site.

A variety of privacy options let you restrict who can see your moments—just you, friends, family, people in the moment or everyone. If a moment is set so everyone can see it, they can also use your content in their moments.

You may not always want to use thisMoment to incorporate content from other services and Web sites. But even without outside influences, this service’s stunning visual displays will give your moments a polished look that makes you proud to share.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com