"I don't understand business plans, marketing or anything that would help me convince an investor," admits Ferenc Fekete, the creator and developer of Dolgomvan.hu (I'm  busy.hu). He is just one of the many young people who are working on Web 2.0-style applications.

Menedzselt információk

Dolgomvan.hu is a free personal information management service that provides help to people while they are working. It was developed over a weekend last autumn and tested in a closed environment, with extra functions being added once a fortnight. It launched to the public this year. Users can list their tasks for the day on their own page, tracking how their work is coming on. The community aspect comes from the way users can share their pages with each other. "Bosses can see how far their employees have come with their work," Fekete suggests, adding that the system can track the amount of time spent on a job, making it simple to work out the returns on a project and carry out cost-benefit analyses. It' s easy to work out how much time people have spent on a given project.

Similar applications have existed in English for some time, including Backpackit, which has several hundred thousand users, but even in its paid-for version it doesn't have the working time tracking abilities of   Dolgomvan.hu. The Hungarian site is more than a hobby, but it isn't generating any income, and its founder has not yet set up a company. It has a few hundred registered users, and operating the site costs little. Fekete's employer, a web design company, provided the server for free, and his colleagues designed the website. But how does he plan to earn money from it? "I can imagine setting up a more sophisticated premium version, but we could also develop specialised versions that we could then sell," Fekete suggests.

The developers of Poll-R, which offers online voting, are much more cautious. They set up a company right at the beginning, clarifying exactly who owned what. The voting site was Marton Ronyai's idea. "I wanted to do something new. I realised how flawed most online votes were. I wanted to set up a portal that would allow you to export votes to other sites while making sure everything could be seen in one place," he explains. "Poll-R is Web   2.0 because it is content-led: anybody can set up a vote, and get as many responses as he wants. If he doesn't have anywhere to host his poll, then he can set up his own page where others can leave comments. If he has his own page, then he can export the poll to it as a flash application, and he can specify the poll's size and colours."

The owners have already worked out what they will earn their money from. "We will establish contact with blogs and professional content providers. That will give us a database of people we can export our polls to and how much they will pay."

Not everybody has been as lucky with servers as Poll-R or Dolgomvan.hu. Jo-hely! (Good place!), a project that one a prize from Budapest's Technical University earlier this year, places heavy demands on servers, according to its developers. The site uses Google Maps to map out bars and clubs. It also emphasises the community aspect: users can highlight places they like and comment on other people's recommendations.

"We used university servers at the beginning, and you could only get involved if you were invited. Our Hall of Residence's server wouldn't have been able to deal with more. We were lent our own server at the beginning of the year, and we've been using that since then," says Adam Nemeth, one of the developers. He says it took hundreds of hours of work to make the site work as it does now. "We are developing it continuously, but I don't want to discuss the details." He claims to know how he'll generate income, though he declined to give details. "One thing's for sure: we won't sell it to Deutsche Telekom," he says, referring to iWiW, another social networking site.

Gabor Szando, who is working on a video sharing site called Studio, also has trouble finding servers. Users can go to Stubes.net to gather together films from various Hungarian and foreign video sharing sides, creating his own television channel. Users can embed movie players on their own sites or blogs. The site's advantage is that the user decides the order and the way in which he plays the various recording on his channel. "Stubes is my attempt to do something interesting that will attract other people's attention," Szanto explains.

He says other Hungarian video sharing sites were pleased for their material to appear on Stubes, but the larger foreign video sharing sites have not replied to his queries. He admits to not having a business plan that he could present to an investor. He knows that Stubes will not bring in any money. His service already has several hundred users, some of whom have put as many as 130 recordings on their channels. "It's hardly a surprise that I'm having trouble with servers. At the moment, the page is running on a shared server for which I'm paying $20 a month. But with this level of activity, I need to beef it up, otherwise the system will slow down perceptibly," he says.

But however ambitious their plans, it seems they have little chance of attracting investors' intention. "It's unusual in Hungary for venture capitalists to put money into young internet ventures," says Zoltan Bruckner, one of the founders of the Primus Capital venture capital fund. He adds that some media groups that are interested, but they will buy only completed products. Nonetheless, they are the investors to turn towards, especially if the technology could be used outside Hungary. Nonetheless, the chances of these ambitious young web developers finding an investor are slim, he believes. 

ANDRÁS DEZSŐ