nowEurope

[This post introduces our newest nowEurope contributor, Toby Elwin, writing from Boston - a regional US tech hub often overshadowed by Silicon Valley and New York City. Toby also has deep career experience working in Hungary and China. He'll be looking at Central Europe from a comparative perspective - Steve Carlson]

My interest in Hungary and the region stems from an opportunity to study an advanced business degree in Budapest.  After living in America and China, two countries that dominate both their region and much global news, Hungary, the size of Pennsylvania, was a distinct change of perspective.

In 1999 I arrived in Hungary, straight from China.  The country and many of the seven countries that border Hungary were shaking off decades of planned-economy paralysis.  The region was entering a renewed sense of opportunity and Hungary was stabilizing its voice in the region, in Europe, and in the world.

The opportunity, and the challenge that lay ahead, for Hungary and others in the region was to set the proper goal.  The more I worked and studied at Central European University, the more I discovered a region, from the Czech Republic through Mongolia, full of immensely brilliant, able people to have an impact on a global scale.  With a brilliant work force, many in government chose a low-wage competitive strategy.  I felt then, as I do now, the race to the bottom is a short-term solution.

Continue reading ‘Central Europe: the view from Boston’

Hungarian attendees seemed more pessimistic than I did about what we saw this week at BarCamp Budapest, at least according to my random sample of conversation. I enjoyed thoroughly being one of the only foreigners at hand, along with TechCrunch Europe editor, Mike Butcher and a handful of presenters. The best English-language tweet of the day came from Julia Krysztofiak-Szopa (AdTaily).

with all due respect for the #barcamp #budapest speakers – powerpoint presentation suicide & u don’t have to speak magyarul to notice it.

The truth is I hardly watched any of the presentations, except to occasionally poke my head in the door. I had been lead to believe that at BarCamp, the audience is the content, and so I used this as my excuse to largely ignore the prepared program and talk with people about what’s currently happening in the Hungarian online market.

Everybody’s heard about Jeremie, and several people I met had a business idea in their back pocket. The ad recession hit hard last year, and revenues are down across the board. One local media agency, Arcus, recently imploded. I have the impression that a good number of talented people are knocking around for opportunities.

Continue reading ‘What I learned by ignoring the presentations at BarCamp Budapest and talking to the audience’

This week is ground zero for Hungary’s nascent startup market. Eight new Jeremie VC funds are still in startup mode, and literally any day now they will be flush with EU cash – roughly €160M all told – with four years to invest this money. What better timing for a startup competition?

The BarCamp concept isn’t new, nor is it new to Budapest. What is new is that this fifth edition of the Web 2.0 Symposium / Bar Camp Budapest features a startup competition sponsored by Budapest Bank. Each of six finalists will be given 10 minutes to present their business ambitions to a jury of professional investors. The first three finalists will win undisclosed ‘valuable prizes’.

However, that’s not why I’m going. I go to these kinds of events to meet the other attendees.

A cursory glance through this event’s attendee list suggests that I’ll be one of the oldest people in the room. I know most of the older generation of entrepreneurs and investors, but we are clearly the minority.

The one constant in Budapest is change. I played a small part in Hungary’s last startup boom (1999-2001) but I have very few preconceptions about what and who I’ll discover this Wednesday at BarCamp Budapest. This is a new generation.

I do find one thing remarkable, though. The conference materials are available only in Hungarian, but the two keynote speakers are English-speakers.

Continue reading ‘BarCamp Budapest is ground zero for Hungarian startups’

CEE Chips bills itself as an online investment network that connects businesses from Central and Eastern Europe seek funding with investors from all over the world. I came across CEE Chips, when founder Alexandar Petkov sent me a contact request at LinkedIn. He offered me free access to his site, and so I had a look around.

The concept of online investment brokerage isn’t new, but to the best of my knowledge this model has never been applied specifically in this region. The US market leader appears to be Funding Universe, but I’m more familiar with Angelsoft. The logic behind such sites is obvious: entrepreneurs want money, and investors want dealflow. Success mean building a critical mass of investors and deals, and providing both parties the means to evaluate each other and build trust.

So the question is, will CEE Chips be able to build that critical mass in Central Europe?

Continue reading ‘Bulgaria embraces entrepreneurial spirit with CEE Chips, but is Central Europe ready?’

It’s one thing to dream about changing the world with your revolutionary business idea. It’s quite another thing to convince an investor to put up the money. Your supporters might praise your idea, but they won’t provide you 40 hours of labor each week until you offer them a paycheck.

Money has a way of making things real.

Part of our job, with CITT, has been to share a dream. Centrope designates the border regions of four countries (AT, HU, CZ & SK). The distances are short, but the cultural differences are big. This region has great potential for innovation, but most of this knowledge is locked away in research labs, divided by increasingly abstract national borders.

CITT’s dream is to knock down those borders. Fortunately, we are not the only ones at work on this vision. If CITT and similar projects are successful, the results will be measured in new products, new companies, new jobs and new opportunities.

This is a big dream, and big dreams need money.

Continue reading ‘What Jeremie means to nowEurope & CITT’

I have just found an interesting guide, published by the project “USEandDIFFUSE” that was co-financed by the European Commission DG Research under the 7th Framework Programme. They have produced a guide packed with helpful information advice, quotes and real-life examples from SMEs that participated in 24 Best Practice projects (most of them in the ICT domain, some even in Central Europe). You can download the report here.

I found it interesting because it provides several hints on how you can transfer/uptake technologies!

We read several posts here in nowEurope about the latest social media services. You can also see these fancy tools around this site.

However, I personally still keep myself away from Facebook, Twitter etc. My biggest doubt is how to separate the different aspects of my real and virtual life from each other. What are these aspects?

1. I work on several projects with interesting people, but basically they don’t care about my sport or hobby activities.
2. I do different sports. In one of my sport activities, most of the team don’t know each others’ business background. It is simply not important, we are there to enjoy the same sport.
3. I’m a member of an online community. We are there for a certain hobby, but don’t care about others’ business or sport activities.

Continue reading ‘How to keep privacy in social media?’

There’s tons of ICT conventions, and here’s another one, you might say, reading these lines. Yes, but (a frequent initiation in my blog posts, as I’ve recently realised), this is different. Why? Because ICT Centrope offers, as it says: A view on the ICT landscape of a region that was no region for quite a while. Since 1989, a lot has happened, and if we think of Europe, we must get rid of political structures that were initially created about 90 years ago.

The ICT Europe event looks at ICT business and research in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia, focusing on technology transfer, highlighting opportunities and obstacles, and presenting best practices. Although this is an “end of term event”, this conference is the unofficial launch of a new project aiming to build a Centrope-based ICT cluster.

Our keynotes speakers are John Tait, Chief Scientific Officer at IRF, Vienna, and former Professor at the University of Sunderland, Francisco Eduardo De Sousa Webber, the CEO of Matrixware and Chairman of the Executive Board of IRF, and Eugen Antalovsky, CEO of the Vienna based Europaforum platform.

Our CITT team will present their findings, plans and tools. Regional experts will outline the technological and economical features of Centrope. Potential stakeholders and interested parties will have the opportunity personally meet the representatives of the cluster project.

The conference will be hosted by Vienna’s business agency WWFF and welcomes ICT entrepreneurs as well as researchers, opinion makers, strategists and decision makers, people who are involved in national and European ICT strategies, representatives of ICT platforms and the press.

Admission is free, but registration is required. For more information, click on the ad on this page or got to www.centrope-itt.eu.

Centrope is not just a new geographical term. With projects such as CITT which is behind ICT Centrope, and its successors, it is being filled with life. Join!

The centrope_tt team has just published a comprehensive map of R&D institutions, which provides the location and further details of more than 2,200 R&D facilities in the CENTROPE region. My organization, Pannon Business Network, took part in building this map.

With the quick search function, you can find easily who is who in R&D in Centrope. As I mentioned in a previous post, the centrope_tt international voucher system awards 50 fortunate companies up to € 5,000 worth of research service, at no cost. This call will be published some time before summer 2010, so stay tuned, Meanwhile, use the R&D Map to located your potential partners, and let me know what you think in the comments!

I confess that TEDx Danubia completely slipped in under my radar. Having said that, I was looking forward to attending TEDx Budapest - which was previously announced, but yet to be scheduled. Confusing? Yes. The events appear to be competitors, but I don’t know the background.

TEDx is a spin-off of the popular TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) event series, organized around the mantra ‘ideas worth spreading.’ Speakers are strictly limited to 18 minutes. TED videos featuring prominent figures including Bill Gates, Al Gore and Gordon Brown are widely linked and commented, helping to spread the TED meme. The TEDx format offers independent event / community organizers a license to hold one event at a time, following the event format guidelines.

Upcoming TEDx events in Central / Eastern Europe include Vienna, Sarajevo, Sofia, Zagreb, Tartu (Estonia), Warsaw, Bucharest and Cluj (Romania). Vlastimil, does this give you any ideas?

TEDx Danubia takes place this coming Wednesday just down the street from my apartment in downtown Budapest. I’ve made a last minute application, so hopefully I can still get a spot. Attendance is limited to 200, and judging by its Facebook page, the event will be well attended. Wish me luck, and if I make it in I’ll post my impressions in a follow up post.