From Bank Processing to Internet Projects
Mas’s path into the internet began in January 1999, when, together with Ruslan Dmitrakovich, he launched the Ukrainian Banner Network. The project, written in Perl, was built in roughly three weeks at a cost of about $100. In 2000 Mas became one of the developers and conceptual driving forces behind, and on March 7 of that year he took charge of the “Ukrainian Portal.” Further down his résumé came “Vebman,” “,” the “Sova” search engine and the “Map of the Ukrainian Internet.”
Before the internet there was other experience. Mas graduated from the radio physics faculty of Kyiv State University, worked from 1993 to 1995 at the Research Institute of Applied Information Systems on the Tree system, then at Ukrainsky Kapital bank. From September 1997 to March 2000 he served at the National Bank of Ukraine, where he handled Visa card processing on HP-UX. It is precisely this work that he calls the turning point when he moved from banking systems to online projects.
Infostore: A File-Sharing Service with Limits
By spring 2006 Infostore had turned into a file-sharing service. Back in December 2004, during the Orange Revolution, it had been a site for citizen news, but over eighteen months its functions changed. The problem lay in access geography: downloading from abroad was impossible. Only customers of providers connected to the UA-IX traffic exchange point, through which Ukrainian operators exchange traffic among themselves, could download freely. For users outside that network, the files remained out of reach.
ITUA readers asked what would happen to the project next. Mas replied that after Infostore he was preparing two international projects and put each one’s chances at “about 40 percent.” For Ukraine he had in mind a “reworking of Infostore” and a public engine for building websites—that is, a tool with which a person can put together their own page without a programmer’s help. The interview itself does not say how far these plans were realized.
Cards, Phone Calls and a Book
In the interview Mas also recalled his work at the NBU. Visa processing was a responsible business: when a card failed on a trip abroad, the country’s top officials would call the bank. According to Mas, Kuchma and Yushchenko called precisely there. He was also writing a book about business at the time, and judging by his answers, that experience shaped his view of motivation and work.
To one reader’s question about laziness and productivity, Mas gave a blunt answer: “Laziness is usually a mask for weak motivation.” He assessed the internet in a broader sense, and that idea became the interview’s main quote:
“The internet is the medium that works on our minds and on our souls”
That formulation captured well how Mas himself understood his work: for him the network was not only a market but also an environment for communication in which new ways of working with information are created.
What Came Next
Two and a half years after the interview, the Infostore story had a sequel that was nowhere reflected in the answers to readers’ questions. On December 4 and 5, 2008, the Ministry of Internal Affairs seized Infostore’s servers: 18 servers, two storage systems and a switch. The search lasted 12 hours. A public debate erupted around these events, and on December 10, 2008, the Ukrainian Internet Business Association held a press conference at which what had happened to the project was discussed.
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