Competitive local programmers are mainly recruited from among college undergraduates, Mark Pascarella, chief executive of UberVu, an online company with offices in London, Bucharest and Boston, told ZF within the How to Web event held in Bucharest. The company’s team largely consists of Romanians.
UberVu is a Romanian startup which has developed internationally. Its main activity is to monitor information about corporate clients that appears on various social networks. UberVu’s 300 clients include the World Bank, US giant Microsoft and IT security firm BitDefender.
UberVu, which has so far received overall financing of EUR450,000 through the Seedcamp program and from UK investment fund Eden Ventures, was founded in 2009 by three Romanians–Dan Ciotu, Vladimir Oane and Bogdan Stanculescu, all of whom are graduates of the Polytechnics University.
The company continues its expansion and plans to do more hiring in Romania, says Pascarella, who did not wish to provide details on revenues or the number of employees.
“We continue, at a very aggressive pace, to add good developers, programmers, here in Bucharest. For the most part we are hiring Romanians here in Bucharest and have found that the talent level is as good or better than what we could get in Boston, New York or Silicon Valley.”
Currently IT colleges churn out 6-7,000 graduates per year, but it is not enough to meet market demand. Companies tend to attract college undergraduates through partnerships and internships, but the best university students tend to go abroad.
Asked what singles Romanians out and what pushes them to think in a certain way, Pascarella says it mainly has to do with “raw intellectual capacity, good smart people. So raw intellectual horsepower is a good starting point. Pair that with a good work ethic and a real desire to build cool, interesting things and work on big, complex, interesting problems.”
UberVu provides services as part of packages, with prices starting from $500 per month. For instance if a company wants to know how many times it is mentioned in the social networks and by whom, it can get the $500 package and will receive reports with up to 10,000 mentions per day. Mentions can be a key word, the company’s name, a competitor’s name or another element defined by the client. Each of these elements is a stream. The $500 subscription allows one user to monitor five streams, for instance the company’s name, the name of three competitors and a Facebook page, up to 10,000 mentions per day. Anything above 10,000 doesn’t go into the report.
(English version by Daniela Stoican)