According to recent report by Ukrainian Security Service (see article in Russian):
- Somebody sent assaulting and threatening e-mails to the President of Ukraine;
- Ukrainian Security Service cooperating with FBI defined his personality and whereabouts: this was Ukrainian national staying in Miami;
- They are now working to extradite him to Ukraine;
- Ukrainian Security Service refuses to give further comments.
I don’t think that emailing something like “I will kill you” is prosecutable under Ukrainian law, but anyway this story sounds ridiculous.
Brains to Ventures have recently brought to Ukraine and Russia a bunch of investors from Germany, Switzerland and Austria looking for connections with Eastern European IT business. PrivateDC business tour included visiting St. Petersburg, Moscow and Kyiv.
I attended dinner on Thursday and deal pitches on Friday in Kyiv. Keynote speaker for the dinner was Leslie Hawrylyshyn of Euroventures Ukraine who focused on the opportunities of Ukrainian markets, claiming Ukraine to be next natural expansion for Western European businesses. Andriy Kolodyuk of AVentures spoke a bit particularly on IT opportunities.
Seedcamp blog: Seedcamp Kiev - long awaited
My comment: As far as I understand local partners prefer naming this event Seedcamp Eastern Europe, not Seedcamp Ukraine neither Seedcamp Kyiv :)
Robert Amsterdam and Democracy Arsenal are also bringing me to ABC and NY Times news on connections of McCain’s campaign manager with Ukraine’s ex prime minister Viktor Yanukovich.
My comment: “Davis Manafort & Freeman, Inc.” work for party of Yanukovich and Akhmetov (yes, this richest guy) was a subject of attention of Ukrainian media a year ago. Paul Manafort, Philipp Griffin, Richard H. Davis and Rick Ahearn were mentioned consulting Yanukovich.
PS You may mail me interesting pieces on Eastern Europe on mail@demchenko.info to be published in my blog.
On this photo: Ukrainian and Latvian Barcamp participants painting word BARCAMP with their mobile devices. Photo by Kyrylo Kalugin.
Hey, I’m now in Tbilisi. I spent two recent days on Barcamp Caucasus. Caucasian barcamp seemed a little bit artificial with no local Georgian community behind it, but anyway was an inspiring event. It was held in National open-air ethnographic museum of Georgia which provided the venue free of charge.
I presented on barcamp movement in Eastern Europe and Central Asia giving an overview of all past and planned barcamps then highlighting regional features and trends in EE/CA barcamping. I have problems uploading it to slideshare, so I’m going to add my presentation to this post later.
This afternoon I’m giving my part of TOLnew media training. I will post 2 presentations prepared for the training tomorrow: “New Media for NGOs and Activism: Best Ukrainian cases” and “Ukrainian internet market and new media overview”.
Internet marketing in Ukraine on May 21-22
Seedcamp Eastern Europe on May 21-22 Seedforum Kyiv on May 22
All in Kyiv, all in different locations. I visited Internet marketing in Ukraine on Wednesday, Seedcamp on Thursday but haven’t managed to attend Seedforum.
Seedcamp was brought to Kyiv by IDE Gruop, UK-based company founded by Ukrainians.
20 Ukrainian, Russian and Armenian teams presented their projects to Seedcamp experts.
Two winners invited to participate in Seedcamp in London are Deepmemo social quotation service and Football Dream online game.
There’s also third project - semantic web service for knowledge engineering of PlesoNet - with “doors opened” if they improve during this summer.
Here’s brief video interview I made with Seedcamp CEO Reshma Sohoni. That’s where I get headline of this post from :)
Two projects proposed by Eastern Europeans became winners of Knight News Challenge 2008 supporting innovative initiatives in social media.
Project receiving $600,000 award presented as…
The people of Sochi, the Russian resort city hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics, will be able to use the latest online tools to both discuss and influence the impact of the games. A web site and database will allow the community to track and debate how the plans are changing life there over a five-year period. The idea is to help residents better prepare for the Olympics, to inform the media about the city’s issues and to use discussions about the games as a way to improve life in Sochi.
Alexander Zolotarev is a Fulbright Scholar at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, where he conducts research for his Ph.D. in citizen journalism and online communities. He will soon defend his dissertation at the Moscow State University Faculty of Journalism. After writing a Russian travel guide to Norway at 21, Zolotarev worked as an editor at several magazines, including Harvard Business Review and National Geographic Traveler. He has consistently been involved in projects on pop culture and entertainment, including the launch of the IMAX Theatre in Moscow.
Another CEE project to receive $15,000 grant was proposed by Andrius Kulikauskas whom I met on Barcamp Baltics 2008. Here’s description:
Andrius Kulikauskas will blog about different methods of getting digital information to rural areas that don’t have Internet access. He will discuss using a “reader,” or a device for writing and reviewing text files stored on any USB flash drive. The device is meant for people in rural areas with marginal online access so that messages can be physically transported to and from places connected to the Internet. In this system, an individual would load a USB drive at an Internet café, then travel to a village where the information could be read with another device. This method will be discussed in contrast to the pros and cons of using the $100 wireless laptop.
Andrius Kulikauskas is a dual citizen of Lithuania and the United States. In 1998, he founded Minciu Sodas, an online laboratory for serving independent thinkers around the world. He wants to organize 100,000 of them, enough for a vibrant culture. He organizes them by asking: What is your deepest value in life? What is a question that you don’t know the answer to, but wish to answer? What would you like to achieve? His own deepest value is “living by truth.”
Brenda, my congratulations to Freedom Phone / Dial-up Radio project of Zimbabwe!
Great Britons was a program of BBC in 2002 featuring public voting to determine who is considered to be the greatest persons of UK’s history. Seems it was so far ago, so that Great Britons page on BBC site is missing now. Anyway you can enjoy press release and Wikipedia article . This format was later used in a dozen of countries. For example this show was called The Greatest American in the US and conducted by the Discovery Channel.
The final show of Ukrainian version of Great Britons staged by Inter TV channel was broadcasted several days ago.
“UK has chosen Princes Diana “, “The US has chosen Elvis” - ads of Great Ukrainians claimed, nonetheless the winners were Churchill and Reagan respectively. But this wasn’t the greatest fault of the project.
Editor-in-Chief of Great Ukrainians project and one of most respected Ukrainian journalists Vakhtang Kipiani posted in his blog just before the final show (all links in Ukrainian):
“I don’t know who’s on the first place now. This information isn’t given to me starting from Tuesday”
Telekrytyka, leading media magazine, published a leak that Prince of medieval Kyivan Rus Yaroslav the Wise is put on the first place with 500 000 text messages sent by 80 mobile subscribers. At the same time Ukrainian bloggers were reporting that they can’t vote for Stepan Bandera, Ukrainian nationalist leader, who was leading according to recent public results.
So in the final show of Great Ukrainians broadcasted this weekend voting results were presented as:
1. Yaroslav the Wise - 648443 votes
2. Mykola Amosov (famous doctor and academic) - 322321 votes
3. Stepan Bandera - 261247 votes
“60 thousand votes for Yaroslav the Wise during one month and some 550 thousand in just one day - is that possible? The letter” of the project was not violated, but “the spirit” was”.
So why somebody needed to falsify voting results of a TV show? And why TV channel hasn’t discarded this messages? Here’s the answer. Consolidated voting of Ukrainian nationalist and Western Ukraine put leader of Ukrainian mid-20th century independence movement on the first place.
But this result was unacceptable for Inter TV channel’s owners, with their strong ties with Party of Regions and Russia, considering Bandera’s movement to be Nazist (despite the fact that Stepan Bandera spent WW2 imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps).
So, what will be format owner’s move? Will BBC react?
Associated Press on the festival I curated:
During the past two years, Belarusian expatriates have held an annual “Belarusian Spring” festival, featuring fare banned back home — movies, poetry readings, underground rock bands.
This year’s festival kicked off with a dozen activists racing down Kiev’s main avenue on cross-country skis when snow was nowhere to be seen. It was a poke at Lukashenko, a winter-sports fan who every year makes government officials and professional athletes compete with him in a ski competition which he always wins.
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