Vozilla is not Wrocław’s first car-sharing service. It isn’t second either, as Wrocław has dabbled with vehicle sharing in the past. But it’s most definitely a first all-electric car-sharing service in the city and from what I can see around town, it’s the most popular one to boot. Vozilla uses Nissan Leafs as its vehicle of choice…
This month marks the end of my employment with a company I called home for the past seven years (sans 2 months). I started at GOVECS in March of 2011. I was hired through an online job listing, by an American dude who also happened to be the co-founder. Statistically speaking, what are the odds…
When my family arrived in the United States as Polish immigrants back in 1994, none of us spoke English. My dad knew a little, but when my parents somehow signed me up for middle school on Monday morning, having arrived in L.A. the day before, I had no idea how to even ask to go…
This past weekend had quite a lot going for it and I’ll try to do my best to explain my sudden South Africa Instagram photo shooting. First, I was invited to participate in item writing by Project Management Institute, a certification body behind my PMP certificate. Second, I was flown by PMI all the way…
On May 18 and 19 I took part in a two-day PMI Wroclaw event, and then followed that up with a PMI Connect evening during the week. Below is my personal write up of these events. 4th Annual PMI Wrocław Conference My first contact with PMI Wroclaw was exactly a year ago when a few of…
As part of ongoing testing prior to our scooter production launch this year, I have arranged for a team of our test engineers to spend a mandatory holiday in Spain. What a drag, I know. To spend a few weeks in a warm and sunny climate on the southern coast of Spain, while Poland is…
I made a little change to the naming of my blog. Most probably won’t notice; the polvadis.wordpress.com address still works, and the rest probably click over here from Facebook. I did however buy out the Kortas.blog address as soon as WordPress e-mailed me that a .blog naming was becoming available. I’ve had this blog for…
Today Ania and I attended a TEDx Wrocław event called Break The Silence. It was my third TEDx Wroclaw event, and it was the best TEDx Wroclaw to date! I’ve been a little critical of the past events, but this year the TEDx Wroclaw crew raised the bar way high with all aspects of the…
Only recently did I start to appreciate the wonder that is an audiobook. I never paid audiobooks much attention because I could never focus on listening to something meaningful while performing another task at the same time. Until I started regularly walking our chocolate lab Fado. Fado doesn’t really care if I walk along with…
Some time ago I did an SSD hard drive upgrade to my aging Mid 2012 MacBook Pro. I threw out the original Toshiba 750gig drive for a speedy Kingston 240gb SSD. The speed boost was extreme, but that was to be expected. What I didn’t expect was how quiet the laptop got. Totally, absolutely, dead…
I haven’t been to the Santa Monica 3rd street promenade in over five years so naturally a lot of stores were new to me. But one especially attracted my attention, and it was the Tesla store. I know that Tesla is bypassing the whole dealer network thing and doing the direct to customer AppStore style…
I’m currently abroad working in San Francisco, but also riding a lot of Scoot scooters around the city. I wish I could say you should try Scoot next time you’re in town, but Scoot is really meant for San Francisco residents and that’s actually one of their rental requirements. So no tourists allowed, but after…
Galactico installed their charge station right in front of our GOVECS windows, and we couldn’t be happier to oblige and charge up our privately owned GOVECS scooters every day. It also makes for a pretty cool photo op as we get more and more visitors charging at this station. Last week we had client from…
In what could definitely be classified in the top ten of the stupidest things I have ever done, I managed to drop a GoPro camera into a cup of tea on my desk, without its waterproof case. There, I said it. Stupid. I won’t get into the series of events that led up to it,…
Tesla’s are not a common sight in Poland and I haven’t seen one personally anywhere in Wrocław. There are only 12 registered Teslas Model S in all of Poland at the time of this writing, a country of roughly 38million people. But chances of encountering the 13th Tesla have been greatly improved as its owner…
This week GOVECS put together first pre-series test models for Scrooser. Owners of Scrooser were present as our engineers assembled, disassembled, tweaked, assembled again, repeat, etc… Scrooser scooters. The first are always the hardest, a learning experience in its own right when taking CAD modelled parts and assembling them together in real life. So hickups were…
Demise of a company is never easy. Having worked for startups over the years I know well how quickly unstable times may approach and how fast a company goes from conquering the world to “we have cash for one more month”. Last year I visited Vectrix, and American electric scooter manufacturer, on the day the…
This serves as an update to my GOVECS Charging post from December. I stopped by another charge station in Wrocław located at the Scandic hotel parking lot. No problems charging, however the charge station itself is placed inside a private Scandic underground parking structure, which means while the charging itself is free you do have…
This week marked the first time ever I charged my electric scooter outside of home or work. This actually seems strange to write but made me think and wonder about the usage of my scooter. Until now, I charged my scooter at home or work, went out for a city trip and charged back up…
GOVECS took part in Polish Congress of Renewable Energy last week with yours truly presenting. I spoke about GOVECS and electric mobility in general in a discussion panel focused on clean transportation. Poland is trying to spark a renewable energy movement, similar to the one happening just across its western borders. Germany currently produces 30%…
