nowEurope

Robert wrote an interesting post on the huge differences in the average mobile phones bills in Centrope. Let’s take a look at some other sectors. Here are the figures for the Czech Republic …

Internet advertising
Czech advertisers spent roughly CZK 5 billion (€190 mil.) on the Internet last year. That represents about 10% of the country’s total advertising spend. According to the Factum Invenio research, advertisers spent CZK 3.3 billion on web banners, CZK 1 billion on search ads, and CZK 0.75 billion on directories.

Internet access in households
According to the Czech Telecommunication Office, 52% of inhabitants have Internet access at home. 44% of the households use Wi-Fi (twice as much as the EU average), 21% cable, 18% ADSL, 10% mobile phones, 5% traditional dial-up and 4% ISDN.

Broadband
According to the Czech Statistical Office there were 1.9 million broadband lines at the end of 2008. That represents an annual growth of 15%. The technology with the highest share is ADSL (681K users). 572k users prefer Wi-Fi and other wireless technologies, 360K use cable.

Mobile phone users
In 2008, the number of the mobile phone numbers increased by 500,000 to 13.57 million. Vodafone posted the highest growth (in total 2.89 million subscribers) while T-Mobile remained the operator with the highest number of active SIM cards (5.42 million) and the national incumbent Telefónica O2 5.26 mil.

WEF Global IT Report
According to the Global Information Technology Report 2008–2009 (published annually) by the World Economic Forum there are 27 personal computers, 43 internet users, 16 broadband subscribers and 128 active SIM cards per 100 inhabitants. That puts the Czech Republic in 32nd place among 134 countries after Austria (16th) and before Hungary (41st) and Slovakia (43rd). The ranking is led by Denmark, Sweden and the USA. The research was based on nine indexes evaluating environment (market, political, regulatory  and infrastructure), readiness (individual, corporate, government) and usage (individual, corporate, government).

Back in March, Ivo Spigel asked us all is Europe sleeping through the Twitter revolution? Little did he (or anyone else) know how prescient these words would seem only a few months later. Much of what the world saw of the recent Iran election protests arrived through Twitter, once the mullahs moved to shut down alternate media outlets. True, cell phones, text messages and word of mouth almost certainly played a larger role in organizing the protest within Iran, but Twitter was how the rest of the world followed what was happening.

Following Ivo’s call to action, I started paying more attention to Twitter. I set up my Tumblr page to feed into my personal Twitter account. I also created a Twitter account for nowEurope, and set up an automated feed from this blog. Even still, I confess to you all – I don’t really like Twitter-ing. Maybe I’m missing something?

What about you, gentle reader? I set up this poll way back then to collect statistics on your Twitter usage. Only a handful of you have taken part. Okay, maybe the problem is that the poll sits halfway down the page on the right-hand column. So let me put it in your face.

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Few users are more mobile, and juggle more information than clinicians. On average a clinician sees one patient every seven to nine minutes, with about two minutes travel between patients and for every ten patients he sees, anywhere from one to five questions arise which require further information (British Medical Journal, August 1999). Clinicians’ 24/7 access to information is absolutely essential to the quality of care they provide.

In 2000, a report stunned the medical community. It showed that medical errors are one of the nation’s (US) leading causes of death and injury. The report, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, estimated that as many as 44,000 to 98,000 people die in U.S. hospitals each year as the result of medical errors. This means that more people die from medical errors than from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS.

To compound this fact, errors in health care have been estimated to cost more than $5 million per year in a large teaching hospital, and preventable healthcare-related errors cost the economy from $17 to $29 billion each year (Translating Research into Practice. Reducing Errors in Health Care). An editorial in the BMJ extrapolates from a pilot UK study which showed that in England and Wales adverse events lead to an extra three million bed days at a minimum cost of £1bn per year (BMJ 2001)). The good news is that many medical errors are preventable. For example, research suggests that over half of all adverse drug reactions are preventable through alerting systems, controls on administration and ordering.

Continue reading ‘ICT can help reduce medical errors, save lives’

Studying the Commission’s 14th progress report on the single telecoms market, it is surprising to notice that the consumer price for medium mobile usage has dropped significantly in Austria, while remaining the same in other Central European countries.

In Austria, the consumer price for medium mobile usage  dropped from €16.36 per month in 2008 to as low as €7.31. This is the third lowest mobile rate in the EU. At the same time in the Czech Republic, the price rose by more than 20% (from € 21.99 to € 27.24), while in Slovakia and Hungary the prices remained the same as previous year (€ 25.97 and € 15.02 respectively).

I wonder what is the reason for this difference. How could the same multinational telecom company cut prices by more than 50% in Austria, while keeping the same price in HU and SK and increasing prices in CZ ?

Thanks a lot to Lucia for her post, and contributing to the discussion! Please let me add three remarks on this very good idea of an “open” workshop for “stakeholders”:

1. Talking about stakeholders: the easiest definition of “stakeholder” is someone who has interest and influence on a certain process and especially its outcome (although it is very common to call anybody “stakeholder” who is just interested). So it must be clear for what they are stakeholders and in relation to whom and what. Should they help with financing, are they customers, future business or research partners, are they subcontractors or cluster managers? Or do we invite them to some kind of brokerage, matchmaking or cooperation event?

Continue reading ‘Stakeholders, many cooks and the context of workshops’

Recently our organization, Pannon Business Network, had the opportunity to participate in launching a new concept in Hungary – home care for elderly people. This is a good example of how ICT can help create a human environment for people, and create new jobs at the same time.

As its population ages, Hungary faces the twin challenges of increasing cost of health-care, and the reduced ability of elderly people to pay for it. This financial phenomenon has only accelerated with the financial crisis, as described in this article in Somogyi Hirlap (the article is Hungarian).

Continue reading ‘Telecommunication initiative improves human health, while reducing costs’

With the growing popularity of innovation initiatives, ever more companies are launching their own actions. However, many are going forward in a piecemeal fashion, running a brainstorming event here, trying out an ideas campaign there and promoting innovation in vague ways in marketing communications. Such an approach works, somewhat, but it is not ideal.

The best approach is to have a comprehensive innovation process management (IPM) structure that treats innovation as a series of cycles that run within a grand, enterprise innovation process cycle.

The Innovation Process Cycle

An innovation process cycle combines creative problem solving (CPS) with scientific peer review evaluation and some typical business tools.

Continue reading ‘The eight steps of Innovation Process Management’

If you look at the bottom of this or (any other) nowEurope post, you’ll see a green icon labeled ‘Share This.’ Ages ago, I added this feature, but I have to confess I’ve only recently started to use it. Suddenly I find myself becoming a fanatic convert.

Over the years, I’m made a habit of forwarding useful information to my friends and business contacts. This habit is a friendly way of keeping in touch – the digital equivalent of saying ‘hello, I remember you.’ It’s also clever way of offering value, provided I don’t overwhelm my friends with irrelevent information. The key is moderation, as well as relevency.

Playing with Share This, recently, I discovered that I could also add this feature to my browser. (In Firefox, it’s a plugin, in Safari it’s a bookmarklet on my toolbar.) What’s more, Share This also includes a contact manager. You can import your contacts from Gmail, Hotmail and many other services. Before I discovered these features I used to copy and paste URLs into an email, the copy and paste bits of relevent text. Who has the time for that? Now, from any web page, I can open Share This from the browser, select a friend’s email address, and add a personal message. Away it goes.

I admit, Share This might not appeal to everybody. But then again, you might find yourself liking it. Why not take a minute to play with the Share This feature at the bottom of this post. If you find it useful (or anything else you read at nowEurope) take a half minute to let your friends and colleagues know about it.

A couple of weeks ago I met Charles Ward in London, who works at the IT network Intellect. Intellect offers similar services to Vienna IT Enterprises (VITE). However, Intellect is a privately run enterprise thus the member fees are a lot higher.

One of the most striking differences between the Austrian and the British market is their access to the Eastern European market. It is a well known fact that Eastern European business partners play an important role for the Austrian and especially Viennese IT sector. Furthermore, various international companies coordinate their CEE activities via Vienna. This is why Vienna is known as the third largest IT location in Europe, after London and Munich.

But the Eastern European IT market is not that important to enterprises in the UK, aside from some big players. Charles Ward could not explain why and found it rather astonishing. My advice would be to locate British enterprises in Vienna to benefit from their experience and strategies, especially from those of the CENTROPE region, and then expand to Eastern European countries. Charles Ward strongly supported my suggestion. If this is really going to be implemented cannot be foreseen. However it could be a new starting point for further and stronger cooperation between Austria and the United Kingdom.

The other day I was talking to an old friend of mine who runs one of Budapest’s largest and well-known commercial real estate companies. He told me in confidence that his business is down 80% this year. Yikes!

It seems everywhere in the business world, today, you see pain and misery. And yet, what we’ve discovered at Howdy Group is that a recession is also a wonderful time to build partnerships. When two or more parties direct their resources and energies toward a common goal, the result is MUCH more powerful. The general reaction this year is shock, pessimism and retreat. That means this is EXACTLY the right time to build, partner, grow and prepare for the eventual recovery.

Case in point: this morning I read in the Wall Street Journal that over half the companies on the 2009 Fortune 500 list were started during a recession. This finding emerged from a study (PDF) just released by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. “Despite the pain of the current recession, there is reason for hope,” the study concludes, “good things do grow out of recessions.”

The same WSJ article also mentions Prezi, a Hungarian start up I have previously written about. Actually, the WSJ links to an article at Harvard Business Publishing which calls Prezi as “the best business model in the world.” The author is Umair Haque, director of Havas Media Lab. Check this quote:

If I was on the corp dev team at Google, I might think hard about whether Prezi is the Powerpoint-killer that will be the final nail in Microsoft’s cash-lined coffin.

This is a Budapest startup. We’re all in this recession together. My question to you, gentle reader. Are you thinking big enough?