Cisco distributes its product info via Open ICEcat

Cisco just joined Open ICEcat to distribute its multilingual product information to its online channel partners. For the Dutch market, Dutch translations are added if absent in Cisco's marketing materials. This is often the case with technological brands: product information is only available in English and max one or two other languages, but not in the local languages of the user. Intel is also a good example of that.

Cisco is the internet hardware brand, and it is a kind of "internet blessing" that Cisco has decided to join as well.

How committed is Georgia to free zones?

Yesterday, I contacted members of the Georgian government, among others Vakhtang Lejava -First Deputy Minister, Ministry of Economic Development- and Goga Melikidze -advisor of the prime minister- to inform them about the status of our Tbilisi iCity (Free Industrial Zone - FIZ) project.

We identified one break point: the existing legislation is purely designed for Physical Goods FIZs. Actually, for Poti FIZ and the ideas of the Rakeen Group that bought the harbour of Poti. We advised to look closely at the ecommerce and services legislation in Dubai, as we need a services FIZ Law or amendment, to protect the interestes of future investors.

Further, we see four more contingencies:
1. the corporate income tax (profit tax) may stepwise come down to 0% (it is already quite low with 15%), following the Estonian example
2. War with Russia, although the likeliness has sharply decreased with Obama in office in the White House
3. pressure from the West not to create FIZs at the threshold of Europe in exchange for aid
4. governmental instability, as we see now the third Prime Minister in just 6 months. And continuously government officials are kicked out: "Kakha Bendukidze will be leaving his position of Chief of Government Chancellery on Monday", Giorgi Dartsimelia reported today.

The Rakeen Group, also still does not have a FIZ license for Poti. And it seems unlikely that they will get it soon, somehow, as they constantly say to expect the license "within weeks".

First Batavi.org projects live! But download version not yet available

The first Batavi.org projects - an open source trade-oriented webshop - are live. One of the first Batavi projects is Paper Palace - a trader in paper-based office supplies. In computer hardware trade, the first Batavi shops are Network Hardware Trading and Tridis. Batavi is Latin for Bataves, the mythical people that lived in Roman times in Germany and The Netherlands, helped to protect the Northern Borders of the Roman Empire, and were inspirational for the the Dutch Republic in the 16th and 17th Century, the Golden Age of The Netherlands.

Batavi is developed by Dutch-based ICEshop.biz, which has 10 years experience in developing webshops for traders, including XML-EDI connectivity towards their suppliers like Ingram Micro and Tech Data. The Batavi project used the unfinished object oriented code of osCommerce 3.0 as a starting point. But, brought the platform to a complete new level by
- adding supply chain management functionalities
- developing a very flexible object-oriented design shell
- ICEcat integration
- finalizing the many unfinished ideas (osCommerce 3.0 is just developed by one man. ICEshop hired 10s of developers to finalize the shop code).

Although the first projects are live, Bert van Gerwen, director of ICEshop, says that it will take up to 6 weeks before a complete and stable download version of Batavi will be available on Batavi.org. I am very impatient to see this open source project going live, also because of the seamless ICEcat integration, but I appreciate the architectural perfectionism leading to the decision to await the first complete version which includes the object-oriented design shell ("white label version").