Michael Marcovici
Michael Marcovici ( born September 27, 1969 in Vienna) is an Austrian artist and entrepreneur. His works deal with economy, technology, domains, sociology and politics. His first entrepreneurial activities took Marcovici even during school time - for legal reasons, his parents had him declared of age in this case. Until his first major commercial success, he worked primarily as a publisher of magazines. He is also the founder of the Austria Stock Report
Largest eBay retailer in Europe
2001 sold Marcovici a few devices, which were still of a magazine about tools in his office, on eBay. Astonished, which achieved the auctions about the high prices, he soon began under the name " Qentis Holding GmbH " commercial goods to sell. The other projects were put on hold, and set the first employee. Within just four years, the company grew to 60 employees - were sold towards the end of goods from China produced mainly on an OEM basis. The product range also included such complex products such as dental chairs, forklifts and off-road buggies - all sent by mail order to customers throughout Europe. After over 500,000 products sold on ebay and an annual turnover of 30 million, the company had a surprise for bankruptcy in early 2006. The news of the bankruptcy of the then largest ebay retailer in Europe, acknowledged the ebay stock price with a loss of 4%. In his short book published on Marcovici made especially financiers and the ebay system - which would not be suitable for such a large company - responsible, but also acknowledged the too rapid growth of the company. During the subsequent processing of his personal bankruptcy - Marcovici also stuck with its own assets - he gave lectures on trade on Ebay and translated his book into English. In addition, he began to realize his long-planned art projects.
Art
Marcovicis in the media usually discussed art object is the installation of " One Billion Dollars". There are several pallets of money in miniature scale of 1:6, which - as the name suggests - is supposed to represent the amount of a trillion dollars. The original plan to issue real money, failed because of the exorbitant interest rates for the making available of money, as well as to the requirement to potential financers safety requirements.
A project of the Marcovicis, which was released at the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis, is " Rattraders ". He presented laboratory rats in a special cage, which were trained according to him to act in real time to the financial markets. Although Marcovici described the project as a unique profit-oriented business idea, the impression was that it was a rather cynical art action with a subtle critique of the financial system. Marcovici - of himself in the late 80s to early 90s, the "Austria Stock Report " published - wanted to give a clear statement about the true motivation of his work even in a newspaper interview.
Domains
Since 2002 Marcovici is active in the domain business. In 2009, he merged his portfolio with other domain owners to the Domain Developers Fund. Marcovici is the founder and director of the Fund only invests in domain names. The Fund registered and buys domains, they are either parked or developed to websites or sold with appropriate impacts again. The Fund was registered on 10 March 2010 in the Cayman Islands as an offender Fund and is since August 2010 to refer via banks and brokers. Prior to the fund was made as a managed account and generated from 10 March 2009 to 10 March 2010, a performance of 155 %. In addition, the Fund Marcovici by Alberto Sanzde Lama is run as a co-director. On the Advisory Board of the Fund, Marco Rodzinek, Philipp Schindler and Stefan Piech can find materials. In addition to his work for the Domain Developers Fund Marcovici is also the owner of the domain index, a price index similar to the Dow Jones index for shares for domains. Another project is the Marshall Index, a project to measure the Populatität of words that is used by domainers in the Internet to enhance the popularity of certain words to fairs.
Publications
- Michael Marcovici: 1-2-3 by: RISE AND FALL OF THE EBAY POWER SELLERS NO.1 [Unabridged edition ] ( Paperback ) Vienna 2007, ISBN 3833499133