Portal hopes to cash in on Poland name, but pines for Polska
Another new internet portal project has been announced: Vogel Publishing and MCI Management have set up a new company called Poland.com, and they say it will become a "hub" of the Polish internet. The site is planned to be up and running by June 2000.The URL (www.poland.com) is certainly top notch, but wouldn't Polish surfers be more likely to find it if it was called www.polska.com?
"We couldn't get that URL, someone else has it already," said Tomasz Szladowski, an internet strategist at Vogel in Wroclaw. Vogel bought the poland.com address "a few years ago from an American-Canadian company," Szladowski said. And they haven't done anything with it yet? "At first we didn't know what to do with it," Szladowski said.
The original plan called for the site to be aimed at English-speaking foreign investors, as a so-called "vertical portal" all about Poland. But they scrapped that idea and now it will be a Polish-only site aimed at the domestic audience. English and German versions may appear "in one or two years," Szladowski said. Vogel and MCI said they would eventually invest about zl. 20 million-zl. 25 million ($4.76 million-$5.95 million) in the site, and plan to take it public in 2001, Szladowski said.
Auction on
Just in time for Christmas, a new, improved web auction site launched last week. Last minute shoppers can bid on more than 3,000 possible gift items, including everything from paintings and sculptures from renowned Polish artists to books, CDs and jewelry.
The site, called Platforma, (www.aukcje-platforma.pl) is run by real world auctioneer Agra-Art. Its foray into the virtual auction world was "inspired by Amazon.com and eBay," said Piotr Jaworski, one of the Agra-Art. staff who is responsible for the site.
He hopes that Agra-Art.'s 10 years of experience in the business will give it a leg up on johnny-come-lately internet pure plays like Who Bids More? (http://www.ktodawiecej.com). While that might set a precedent in the internet world, where normally it's upstart virtual companies that eat the established players' lunch, in Platforma's case it just may work.
That's because it started operations with its auction block already stocked with more than 3,000 items from its own catalog, while Who Bids More, which launched with almost nothing, two months later still has almost nothing for sale eight items at last check. Another advantage for the new site is that it will feature a rating system for sellers, similar to eBay's, so that skeptical buyers can quickly gauge a seller's reputation before handing over their credit card number, Jaworski said. Who Bids More still has no such rating mechanism.
The idea of every Tomek, Dick and Harry auctioning off their attic clutter right next to Agra-Art.'s collection of fine paintings and sculptures does not cause Jaworski to worry about his company's brand. "That's why the site is called Platforma, not Agra-Art.," he said, "We hope people won't strictly associate one with the other."
Platforma, which went on line Dec. 16, expects to have some growing pains at first, but its owners are taking a "suck it and see" approach. "If you don't start, you won't know what's wrong," Jaworski said, explaining that any glitches that appear once the site is up and running would be dealt with on the fly.
As a precaution though, they won't start advertising the site until after the holidays, giving them the web version of a restaurant's "soft opening" in which to work the bugs out.
Santa talk
On another holiday note, this week kids in Warsaw will have the chance to "virtually interact" with Santa Claus. Gandolf Polska and EyeNetwork, two video-conferencing companies, have set up a three-ISDN-line link between their office and "a secret Lapland location," to give the invited kids a "near television-quality" connection to the frosty fat man from the North Pole. The kids, mostly guests of sponsor the British-Polish Chamber of Commerce, will be able to see and hear Santa Claus and tell him about all the presents on their wish lists. Santa can see and hear them as well.
