How it began
While studying at Kyiv University, Mas worked as a programmer on the Tree accounting automation system in the laboratory of the Research Institute for Automated Systems in Construction. The future founders of Viewdle, Yuri Musatenko and Konstantin Milshtein, also worked there, and it was there that he met Ruslan Dmitrakovich, with whom he later created his main project, the Ukrainian Banner Network.
Around 1997, he became the administrator of the HP-Unix Visa processing machine at the National Bank of Ukraine. That machine cost, in his words, “almost $1.5 million,” and it was there that he first saw the internet. Maxim Moshkov, known for the website, came to the bank as an expert from Moscow, and conversations with him, as well as the work with the network itself, finally determined Mas’s choice in favor of online projects.
His first website was the resource of the Kyiv science fiction workshop “Third Force,” which was led by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko. Mas was the head and webmaster there, and the site received about two thousand visitors a day. As he explained in the interview, he was seriously into writing science fiction at the time, and that is why his first project was connected with the literary community.
Ukrainian Banner Network
Mas and Dmitrakovich wrote UBN together in Perl, MySQL and Unix in three weeks, instead of the two weeks allotted in the plan. The server was hosted by the provider LuckyNet, and it cost about $100, which was all the expenses for the launch. The network’s competitors at the time were Russian Link Exchange, Ukr Link Exchange and the Odesa-based network Ping.
Advertising resources at that time were bought up by, and later by UMH. UBN was offered a choice: sell or receive payment for placing ads. The owners chose the latter, and the network was not sold. The sum offered for it, according to Mas, was earned in about two years. Mail.ua, of which he was the architect, passed to Mail.ru Group in July and August 2012, as confirmed by the company’s vice president Anna Artamonova.
In parallel, Mas developed other projects. In March 2000, he became director of “Ukrainian Portal” (UAPortal), and later was one of the creators of Infostore. He described the market in the interview without illusions: over the past year, the internet advertising market, by his estimate, had fallen two to three times, and this forced him to look for new directions.
iForum and a look into the future
Mas discussed the idea of iForum in early 2009 with Alexander Olshansky. Instead of a corporate party for UBN’s tenth anniversary, they decided to hold a conference on April 1. The first Ukrainian Forum of Internet Figures took place at the IEC on Brovarsky Prospekt and gathered 1,280 participants. Two years ago, according to the Book of Records of Ukraine, the forum gathered about seven thousand people, and in 2014 about five thousand. Entry to the forum is paid, but it is not a business for the organizers. The seventh iForum is scheduled for April 16, 2015.
Today Mas is working on mobile services and making plans for Apple Watch. His main forecast concerns wearable electronics that will work inside the human body. The experience with Google Glass, by his admission, turned out to be premature: they “rushed things a bit.” He formulated his position as follows:
“I think the future belongs to embedded devices that will integrate with humans”
On October 6, 2021, Oleksii Mas died in Kyiv at the age of 47 after an illness. His brother Viktor reported the death on October 8. Mas left a notable mark on the Ukrainian internet: from the first banner networks to a conference that became an annual industry event.
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