Top Web Apps in Romania

Written by Mircea Goia / June 12, 2007 / comments

Romania flag Romania is a 21 million inhabitants latin country and is the biggest from Balkans (Eastern Europe).
The total Internet penetration rate is about 23% (5 million) and it's the lowest in European Union. However the growth rate is one of the biggest (517% comparing with 2000). Out of the 3.5 million Internet end-user connections more than a half are broadband (cable or DSL - 8.2%, the same as Greece). The broadband and DSL connectivity is localized to cities while in smaller towns and villages dial-up is many times the only option.

Major mobile phones operators (Vodafone, Orange and Zapp) have an important role in the ISP market.
In their shadow, an interesting phenomenon developed in Romania: the unofficial Internet distribution, offered by so-called "neighborhood ISPs" that share the bandwidth of a high-speed connection to neighboring families and friends (thus cutting the cost of the participants). The TV cable companies like RCS&RDS, UPC, Astral offers broadband connection also and they have the largest chunk of the market.
Among the future tehnologies which are now in the experimentation phase (in a small town) are the internet connection using the power lines.

Romania is quite open to new technologies and it prepares many students in information technology. One of the biggest transactions in this field was when Gecad SRL (a local company) sold its antivirus software RAV to Microsoft in 2003 ($10 million).
Online advertising spending are doubling year after year (it will be about $8 million in 2007) and half of the surfers perceive online ads as a good thing (there are two big advertising agencies in the country - Boom and Arbomedia - which share the market along with other small players. Now Google Adsense and AdWords are available in Romanian too so the competition is heating up.). The growth rate of online advertising in Romania is the largest in Europe.

There is also a Webby Awards-like festival called Interneticsthat rewards, yearly, the best sites in different categories. Microsoft has a customer support center in Romania and also many Romanian programmers are working at its general headquarter in Redmond. eBay opened an office there but so far they are just observing the market. Google also had recruited some programmers and started making available Adsense and Adwords in Romanian. Paypal just started offering their services to Romanian markets too, however the offer is not yet complete.

Overview of Web 2.0 in Romania

Romania is trying to catch up with the Web 2.0 movement but most of the sites/applications are localized versions of international sites/applications. The investments usually come from the private sector. The government is investing mainly in the educational system (buying computers for schools and colleges, setting up the infrastructure).

A big investment came from European Union (cooperation between EU and the Ministry of Education): the network called ROEdunet (Romanian NREN - National Research and Education Network). It's a network which connects schools, colleges and universities around Romania.

Most of the web applications are built using open-source software (mainly LAMP) because of the costs. Romania has a good pipe of programmers used to using these tools and many of them are working for foreign companies (outsourcing). Many investors see Romania as the "the India of Eastern Europe" in software programming. English is a language many young people are starting to learn since kindergarten.

Romania Startups

Romania Web 2.0 startups

Neogen is one of the biggest players on Romanian web (and the biggest on Web 2.0 especially). The company is an integration of:
- personalized startpage (Neogen homepage - Netvibes or Pageflakes like)
- search engine (the homepage also - Google like)
- dating (Noi2)
- social networking (Club Neogen - Myspace like)
- social networking for primary school,high school and college students (Colegi - Facebook like)
- jobsite (BestJobs)
- photo sharing (Foto - Flickr like)
- video sharing (Video - Youtube like)
- online games (Doizece)
- classifieds (anunturi.neogen.ro - Google Base like)
- Business directory (Catalog)
- web statistics (Monitor)
- news (Stiri - Google News like)
- newsletters for their services
- personal websites (Site - Yahoo Geocities like)
- online advertising (Asociati and Publicitate - afilliate programs and Google Adsense like)
- web hosting (Hosting)
- automotive (Auto)
- real estate (Imobiliare)
- internal messaging system for all of the above

All these web properties have 1.8 millions registered users in Romania (besides 550,000 in Bulgaria and Serbia) and 3.5 millions visitors monthly (according to Trafic.ro, which is the most utilized web stats tracking software from Romania).
Neogen's acquisition spree brought new web properties to the company in Romania (colegi.ro, doizece.ro, resurseumane.ro, Prohost (hosting), Archiweb (stats), Relatii (dating) but also in the countries around Romania (Bulgaria - love.bg, Serbia - Poljubac.com and Moldavia - faces.md).
Recently, Neogen received a capital infusion from Tiger Global Investment USA (which is also investing in Yandex.ru, Baidu.com, Mynet.com, Google.com) and Wouwer Holland - They will now expand more of their services. The same funds made a large investment into eJobs (the biggest recruiting site from Romania).

Weblog: a hosted blogging solution (although many romanian bloggers have their own solution like Wordpress or are using well-known hosted blogging solutions like Blogger.com, Blogspot.com or Typepad.com)

Their parent company is Netbridge.ro which is one of the biggest investors in the Romanian internet.
Among the Netbridge portfolio are the following:
- boom.ro (online advertising)
- trafic.ro (free online stats)
- t3.ro (advanced online stats)
- okazii.ro (auctions - eBay like)
- myjob.ro (jobsite)
- kestionare.ro (professional online polls)
- curs-valutar.ro (financial informations)
- sfatulmedicului.ro (online medical advices)
- sentimente.ro (dating)

Trilulilu.ro: was the first to enter the video sharing market. But now it faces a strong competition from Neogen
Clipshare: a romanian software solution for video sharing used by many websites around the world
myfeedz : RSS aggregator just released by InterAKT (the well-known Romanian company which built Dreamweaver extensions and was recently bought by Adobe Systems).
MYsport.ro: there are several big sports sites (gsp.ro, prosport.ro, sport.ro, onlinesport.ro, netsport.ro) but what MYsport.ro tries to do is to empower the users to create and publish the content. It seems to be gaining traction.
ZuluWriter.com: a online word processor and document manager (it is in the development stages for now). It's a project of Soft32.com (a very popular software download site).
Bluo CMS : content management system which was mentioned at SeoMoz Web 2.0 awards in Web Development and Design section along celebrities like Ruby on Rails, CakePHP, Prototype and Yahoo UI library

Other web apps

From the general portals perspective there are several local big portals like:
- neogen.ro (1st place according to Trafic.ro)
- Kappa.ro, Acasa.ro and Rol.ro are sharing the 2nd, 3rd and 4th place (according to the same Trafic.ro)

Other general portals includes Roportal.ro, Itbox.ro, Home.ro.
But it seems Google.ro/com is the most used search engine according to Trafic.ro.

Media is well represented (every major offline newspaper and TV channel has an online presence).
- Evz.ro (offline newspaper with online presence)
- Romanialibera.ro (the same as above)
- Libertatea.ro (the same as above)
- Jurnalul.ro (the same as above)
- Cotidianul.ro (the same as above)
- Hotnews.ro (online newspaper without offline presence)
- 9am.ro (the same as above)
- Protv.ro (TV channel)
- Realitatea.net (the same as above)
- Antena1.ro (the same as above)
- TVR.ro (national TV channel)
Hotnews - the bigeest online only newspaper from Romania

The internet e-commerce is booming now especially after introduction of two local credit/debit card processors (besides Romcard.ro which was an early and unique player so far):
- Epayment.ro (introduced by Gecad SRL, the company which sold RAV antivirus to Microsoft - it has 80% of the market)
- Dotcommerce.ro (a branch of Dotcommerce.com)

There are about 1.500 online stores at this time and about 800 of them accepts card payment. In 2007 the e-commerce transaction will be in an estimate of 30 millions dollars (in 2006 it was 10 millions).

Some online stores have millions of dollars in sales. Some examples are:
- Emag.ro (the leader)
- Emania.ro
- Flamingo.ro
- Teora.ro
- Okazii.ro
- Domo.ro
- Dc-shop.ro
Emag - the leader in e-commerce from Romania

There are two software download sites (Download.com like) which are among the biggest from this part of the world (that is because maybe they are in english):
- Softpedia.com
- Soft32.com
Softpedia - the biggest download site from Romania

E-government is starting slowly to get out from beta testing and for some cities is already operational.
Some of the successes are:
- E-licitatie.ro (public procurement - very appreciated in many countries from Europe)
- Autorizatiiauto.ro (assigning international road transportation authorization)
- E-guvernare.ro (Romanian e-goverment portal)
- e-tax system (each local public administration authorities has to implement this - some cities have already implement it)

Conclusion

The web in Romania is gaining traction at a fast pace, almost doubling year after year. We expect to see more Web2.0 applications being built and more users being attracted to use them.

This post is part of Read/WriteWeb's continuing coverage of international Web markets. Other countries profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy, Brazil, France, Japan, India, Austria, Sweden, Australia, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Latvia, Hong Kong and Ireland.