Silicon Valley-based Ziare.com and RomaniaUSA.com to merge

Ziare.com and RomaniaUSA.com, two Romanian dotcoms based in Silicon Valley, yesterday announced their plans for a merger in order to broaden their service offer for visitors worldwide. The new company will retain the Ziare.com name and will be based in the famous valley.

Ziare.com is a news and media portal, ranking second in the national top for this category, according to Trafic.ro. Over the past seven days, Ziare.com has had 47,293 unique visitors to have accessed nearly 200,000 pages.

It provides links to about every publication, radio and TV station in Romania and also has an embryo of e-commerce by its offer of online dictionaries at this moment of merger.

Ziare.com was established seven years ago, as part of an Internet project within the American university system. It was one of the first webpages in Romanian at the time

RomaniaUSA.com in its turn set sail in the virtual space in June last year. It is headquartered in Santa Clara, California and has two offices in Romania.

RomaniaUSA.com has a completely out of the ordinary Internet service, sprung from the low penetration of the electronic services in Romania. It is about Scrisori.com destined to transatlantic mail, but also operates for the relations with other countries.

This is the first web service that allows sending or receiving snail mail to and from the USA (and not only). The system works by subscription in a hybrid manner, combining the electronic support with the paper one: the letter and the recipient’s data are sent by e-mail to the company’s office in Ploiesti where they are printed and mailed by the Romanian Postal Service to the recipient.

If the letter is sent from Romania to the US, the sender sends it to the office in Ploiesti, which scans it and forwards it by e-mail to the US user’s account. A six-month subscription to this service costs less than $9 and allows sending an unlimited number of letters.

Another service operated by RomaniaUSA.com is the Teora.ro virtual bookstore, an e-commerce site opened in 1998, as the first Romanian bookstore project.

Cosmin Dumitrescu, RomaniaUSA.com chairman, says the merger decision was also prompted by the “impeccable reputation” Ziare.com has in the Romanian cyberspace. The new company will also provide the Alo, Romania? telephone service and the Linkuri.com search engine.