About George Petre
I am George Petre, a product manager who spent the last 7 years working in software innovation.
I have a solid background in social media, online technologies, cloud computing, product development and management, user experience design and online marketing.
I'm proud that one of my products have enjoyed considerable media coverage from sites like TechCrunch, BCC, WSJ, Lifehacker, CNET, PCMag US, About.com .
I am a graduate of Mathematics and Computer Science University of Bucharest and I hold a master degree in Psychology applied in National Security. I am passionate about European cultures and I enjoy travelling all around Europe whenever possible.
Want to know more about me? Visit the Research section, or see my LinkedIn Profile
If you want to contact me, drop me an e-mail at george@isbubble.com
I like to meet and to talk with exiting people. This is why I consider conferences, barcamps and events one of the most important ways to develop my skills.
Even if I don’t like the rain, there are certain type of clouds that I like: some of them are the Cloud Computing Technologies, the other ones are the Tag Clouds. This is my knowledge tag cloud, permanently updated.
Me presenting at MIT Spam Conference 2010 the paper “Facebook - Another Breach in the wall”
One of my products, Bitdefender Safego, an innovative social media security solution for Facebook and Twitter, was covered constantly by most of the important tech sites.
Me presenting “Social Threats : how fragile we are” at Virus Bulletin Conference 2011, the most important security conference in the world.
SMS on Samsung Nexus S in Vodafone
Seems like Samsung Nexus S is not getting automatically the SMSC(sms message center or gateway).
After searching for a while for the solution in forums where many people have the same (unsolved) problem I’ve found the problem: The message center must be introduced in PDU Format.
PDU is one of the protocols used for sending sms. For conveting a number to PDU format you need to enter some prefixes and make some inversion. A full tutorial about this can be found at http://www.dreamfabric.com/sms/
Here is a quick example for my number. My SMS center number is +40722006000.
1.First i will add the prefix 0791(7 octets length and international format).
2.After that I will invert 2 by 2 the digits and I will add an f at the end because my number is odd 04 27 02 60 00 f0
3. The final result is 07910427026000f0
4. Now I will access the setting by dialing ##INFO##, enter in Phone information at SMSC your converted number with the algorithm above.
5.Click update, restart the phone and test. It should work.
Enjoy the SMS service. As you can see, setting your SMS centrr is very “user friendly”.
From Wordpress to Tumblr
Last week I moved my blog from Wordpress to tumblr. I like a lot wordpress, because it has a high level of customization, but I also like tumblr because it’s rendering very well on mobile.
The big problem that I had was with porting old blogpost to the new platform. First, because tumblr doesn’t have an import tool, and second because in the text entries you cannot insert photos hosted on tumblr.
But, I’ve found 2 workarounds that were very intersting:
1. Using the tumblrzie plugin for wordpress helped me to port my old blogs here. Unfortunately, it doesn’t remove the wordpress [“caption”] tags and other things like that, and it keeps the photo with the old path.
2. I’ve found an interesting idea of hosting the images on Dropbox public folder. It’s a little bit uncomfortable, but it’s working and they are loading very fast.
I still have problems with customizing theme. Also, tumblr seems to be very spammed, but I’m working in the security industry, so I don’t see anything wrong in that… for me :)
But definitely tumblr deserve a try.
Google+ invitations and spam
Since Google is teasing again a new exiting product, Google +, I have start looking for Google + invitations online. I didn’t found one, but I have found a lot of people sharing their e-mail, hoping to get an invite.
Here is just an example:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110628225313AAr7jrv
More interesting is that there are even communities for that:
www.plusinvite.com
www.plusinvitation.com
googleplusinvitation.com
I don’t know the intentions of this small communities owners, but if I would be a spammer or a phisher, I wouldn’t miss this opportunity. And I’m shore that there are some that won’t.
Google Plus on Android outside US
I really don’t like when big companies are launching limited trials for US only. I understand the commercial aspect of this, but since a trial is for tech geeks usually, it may also be a bad strategy.
This is a little tutorial about how to make Google+ and possible other us restricted application running on Android Market to run on your Android Phone.
The methods and procedures discussed here are considered risky and you should not attempt if you don’t know completely what it is. Damage may occur, and you are the only responsible person for it.
If you have a Google Pure phone(Nexus or Nexus S), you can jump directly to step nr. 4.
1. You need to identify your firmware. To do that, you go to settings - > About phone and look at the last part of Build Number (in my case, for Galaxy S, is GINGERBREAD.XXJVK)
2. Google for a root for this firmware (in this example I will google for “root XXJVK”).
3. Here are the steps of how to root Galaxy S for XXJVK : http://www.theandroidsoul.com/rooting-xxjvk-android-2-3-3-rom-for-galaxy-s/ . You should look for a similar tutorial for your Phone & Firmware.
4. Once routed, you should install from Android Market the “MarketEnabler” application:
https://market.android.com/details?id=ch.racic.android.marketenabler&feature=search_result
5. Enter in this app, change your provider to T-mobile US, and now you will find Google+ in Android Market.
Enjoy:)
Gmail not recognize the word “Facebook”
Since Google vs. Facebook is a popular thread, I discovered something funny using the spell checker from Gmail for a text. You can see the results in the image bellow:
