I was recently contacted by Jedlet, an eLearning group in Canada, for comments on an article, discussing eLearning developments in Hungary.
The conclusions? The best you could say is the need is growing, but according to local experts it’s still too early to talk about any kind of ‘breakthrough’.
The most interesting insight came from Dr. Arpad Balogh from the College of Nyiregyhaza:
“We have the largest IT centre in Hungary’s northeastern region, and recently student enrollment has increased from 3,000 to 15,000 students. In order to cope with this increase, we are developing our e-learning initiative rapidly in the hope that the demand on our physical resources will decrease while providing flexibility to both professors and students.”
The page also offers links to an article called eLearning at home: what’s stewing in our saucepans?.
Two years ago an old friend visiting from New York asked me for a list of local wireless hotspots and I just laughed at him. We searched downtown Budapest together and discovered just two.
My how times have changed.
Here’s a cool little interactive map of Hungary’s wifi hotspots. You can search by location, and it break downs the results into ‘free’ and ‘commercial’.
Who would have guessed that Hajd?szoboszl? has seven hotspots?
An international consortium headed by the German company Empirica is carrying out a survey on e-business use in ten European economy sectors. The a eBusiness Watch survey, which has been in progress since 2002 and will continue at least till the end of this year, focuses on small and medium enterprises.
In February 2005, 5200 phone calls were made with managers of companies from the following ten sectors (food processing industry, textile industry, printing, pharmaceutical industry, machine- building, automobile industry, aeronautics, tourism, information technologies and civil engineering). The results regard the following seven EU countries: Czech Republic, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Poland and UK and were published in May 2005. Next to the survey, 110 case studies were elaborated in last two years.
Continue reading ‘Survey on e-business in ten European economy sectors’
An international consortium headed by the German company Empirica is carrying out a survey on e-business use in ten European economy sectors. The a eBusiness Watch survey, which has been in progress since 2002 and will continue at least till the end of this year, focuses on small and medium enterprises.
In February 2005, 5200 phone calls were made with managers of companies from the following ten sectors (food processing industry, textile industry, printing, pharmaceutical industry, machine- building, automobile industry, aeronautics, tourism, information technologies and civil engineering) in seven countries including the Czech Republic. Survey results were published in May 2005. Next to the survey, 110 case studies were elaborated in last two years.
Continue reading ‘Survey on e-business in ten European economy sectors’
It was in 1994 when Jeff Bezoz and his few employees created a web site and database in Bezos’ Bellevue, Washington garage. It was few months later when he approached local venture capital (VC) firms in search for valuable growth capital. None of the venture capitalists invested – they evaluated the idea good, but company not attractive enough for investment. Today, with about 45% stake in Amazon.com Bezoz’s share is worth at least an easy $2 billion, while initial investment he received from business angels totaled marginal $1.2 million.
Ironically, a year later angel and venture capital investments soared and investments were made into virtually everything that went on Internet. Total venture capital investments in the USA increased nearly 15 fold in six years, from a mere $6.3 billion in 1995, to an unworldly $90 billion in 2000. However, the feast did not last long. Everything came back to earth again in 2001, when dot com bubble eventually burst, and when forty-nine out of the Silicon Valley’s fastest 50 lost value, with the majority experiencing market capitalization declines of 80%.
Continue reading ‘National seed capital fund to be rolled out in Estonia in 2006?’
For a small country with insufficient pool of human resources, pan-European programmes such as Framework Programme (FP) represent an excellent possibility to embark on collaborative R&D projects and exploit their part of research capacities. For researchers the collaborative projects represent a possibility to do the best research together with excelling research partners, for SMEs the projects provide unique opportunity to share risks of their R&D with EU funding, but also create strong partnerships with possible end users and address future markets.
On the other hand, limited funds (tentatively, the budget of FP6 is less than 5% of all EU Member States R&D spending) and high interest amongst FP constituency underline very competitive nature of participation in the programme. With average success rates well below one fourth, it is the programme for the very best and experienced. Frequently, it applies also for countries – countries with higher innovation capacity, strong science and technology coordination policies and experienced support structures have also leading edge in Framework Programme, as their competitive position is better suited to the very nature of the programme. Thus, the chances of new member states to be particularly successful in FP is more a wishful thinking than current reality, as framework for participation in those countries is different.
Continue reading ‘Estonian participation in FP6, current status’
Europe developed an early lead in mobile telephony, in large part because the major players agreed on the GSM communications standard. Using one common standard made it easy for operators to share network infrastructure, and ensured that clients could easily roam from network to network, as well as from country to country.
In a similar manner, the FP6-funded SEMOPS project – led by a mostly Hungarian consortium of companies - has created an infrastructure for making payments with a mobile telephone, which they see as the first step toward an era of ubiquitous m-commerce.
A major barrier to the wider adoption of mobile payments is the lack of a cheap, secure and universally applicable payment infrastructure. Mobile payment systems that exist today are limited and proprietary solutions. Such systems are relatively expensive to build, and their application is limited to a single purpose. For example, in many cities, motorists may now pay their parking meters with a mobile telephone, however these solutions cannot be used at the flower shop round the corner. Continue reading ‘Semops: Launching an era of mobile payments’
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