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Monthly Archive for March, 2009

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Cluster is just another word for ‘project’

Published on March 31, 2009 in Business innovation and Case studies. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

I would like to express my support to ideas and arguments of Mr. Vit Skala in his post, Facilitators vs. Managers. I believe that a combination of sales activities and project management, as it is usual commercial practice, should be a model for cluster building.

Mr Skala suggests the following approach of cluster creation: A Facilitator should lead the project or cluster in the formative stages, and a manager takes the responsibility for the running stages. The approach which Mr. Skala suggests is already applied as a standard business practice in the commercial world for project delivery.

The ‘project’ is the predominant method for the delivery of products or services in many different industries. During the sale phase of the project, a sales manager (account manager or salesman) is the driver of the business case. His goal is to sell the project, to attract potential customers and to demonstrate the potential benefits and advantages of accepting his offer. He makes promises on behalf of his company. These tasks require very much the same talents, skills, abilities as a facilitator of cluster creation. (A cluster is anyway a project.)

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Against the windmills In Europe’s minds

Published on March 31, 2009 in Business innovation. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

Recently Ivo Spigel (Welcome!) opened one of his posts stating “We’re all used to the fact that most trends, paradigm shifts and business model disruptions originate in the US, and then, sometimes quickly and sometimes more slowly, make their way across the Atlantic, first to Western and then gradually to Central and Eastern Europe.”

This made me think. Not that I wasn’t aware of it, on the contrary. All those EU-sceptics should have a look at a world map – the US, China, Russia dominate it, and then there’s Europe with its pretty little gardens, well fenced in, enormously self confident when it comes to questions about “sovereignty” and stuff. When it comes to global questions, though, there’s a lot of hot air, but rarely solutions.

Anyway, that’s not my topic. My topic is Ivo’s introduction: “We’re all used to the fact…”. Although the paradigms have changed slightly (GSM came from Europe, etc), our minds are programmed to accept and adopt anything that’s labelled as “glamorous” from across the Atlantic.

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Greetings from the Hungarian blogosphere

Published on March 25, 2009 in Facts, figures & trends and Hungary. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Thank you, Steve, for welcoming me to nowEurope. Steve and I work together at Howdy Group building and running social networking websites. Two of the projects I work most closely with are Howdy’s Hungarian-language entertainment website, Hali.hu, as well as our Romani language site, Kaskosan.com.

I’ve had quite a lot of experience working with publicly-funded ICT projects, but for the last two years I’ve been working on the commercial side of things. Today I would like to present you with a Hungarian view of the web – specifically, I’d like to introduce some of some of our notable local language bloggers. (The following links are in Hungarian.)

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TT and R&D: The “Ivory Tower” is an institutional problem

Published on March 25, 2009 in Austria and Innovation policy. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

During the last weeks I read a few articles and opinions about Technology Transfer and R&D (one here at nowEurope by Günther Krumpak). It seems that researchers are often blamed for their “ivory tower” mentality and in consequence for a lack of willingness to cooperate with industry. Whereas this might by the case for many researchers I would like to highlight another reason for the gap between universities and SMEs:

The phenomenon of the ivory tower mentality is the consequence of an old fashioned institutional setting, which has been changed only superficially within the last universities reforms (like e.g. “the Bologna process”)

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Welcome to Ivo Spigel and Gyula Vamosi

Published on March 23, 2009 in About CITT and Hungary. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

We’ve just seen two posts from our newest nowEurope contributor, Ivo Spigel. I’ve known Ivo personally for more than ten years. As CEO and chief marketing guru of Perpetuum Mobile (I’ve always liked that name) Ivo is one of the most connected people in Zagreb, Croatia concerning IT and Internet media.

Oddly enough, Ivo has been a social media holdout for several years, refusing my invitations to a number of such sites. I’m pleased to learn that he’s now on Facebook and today I sent him my friend request. Oddly enough, I’ve been a Twitter holdout for the past few months, but Ivo has encouraged me to get more active on that channel. (What’s your position on Twitter? Look down the right-hand column and tell us your opinion in our reader’s survey.)

Gyula Vamosi is certainly no social media holdout. We work together at Howdy Group running Hali.hu (for Hungarians) and Kaskosan.com (for the Roma community). Stay tuned for more.

The gathering storm & ICT

Published on March 21, 2009 in Current events. 3 Comments Tags: , , , .

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout”

king-lear

King Lear was defiant against the wind, be it light or hurricane. It seems now that a storm is gathering, and that the countries of Centrope will have to think about shouting defiantly to the rampaging economic elements.

Our countries have been hit variously. I haven’t been following all that closely, I must admit, but it seems Hungary has taken a particularly bad hit so far. Slovenia and Croatia, meanwhile, have only started to feel the strength of this storm, and Croatian political leaders (at least) are doing their best to bury their heads in the sand, hoping, like children, that if they only close their eyes the crisis will not see them and will somehow pass by without noticing our little country. Unfortunately, that’s not very likely. The ruling party hopes, at least, that the worst will not come before local elections scheduled for early May. After that – que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be.

So what about ICT? What about innovation in this stormy weather?

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Congratulations: Joobili won at Seedcamp

Published on March 20, 2009 in Current events and Hungary. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

I just received this message from Joobili CEO Jared Salter:

Joobili just won the competition in Warsaw. It’s great news for us, and for the larger Hungarian start-up community.
Congratulations, to Jared and his team!
Note: I googled for an official announcement that I could link to but all I could find (so far) was two mentions on Twitter.

Is Europe sleeping through the Twitter revolution?

Published on March 18, 2009 in Facts, figures & trends. 9 Comments Tags: , , .

twitter_logo2We’re all used to the fact that most trends, paradigm shifts and business model disruptions originate in the US, and then, sometimes quickly and sometimes more slowly, make there way across the Atlantic, first to Western and then gradually to Central and Eastern Europe. I wonder – is the same thing happening with Twitter?

For those who might not be familiar with it, Twitter is a microblogging tool which allows users to post remarks of 140 characters at a time – clearly meant to be used via SMS as well as “normally” from desktop or mobile Web browsers. I’ve been actively using Twitter for several weeks now and have found it fascinating (note: I’ve completely skipped Facebook until two days ago, but that’s a different story). As a Twitter user I’ve found that the people I follow, as well as those that follow me, fall into two main geographical areas – those very near me (i.e. from Zagreb and some from Croatia) and those exactly one ocean away, in the US.

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Joobili.com selected as promising CEE startup

Published on March 13, 2009 in Business innovation, Current events and Hungary. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

Congratulations are due to Jared Salter and his team at Joobili.com (pronounced Jubilee) for being selected as one of 20 finalists in SeedCamp’s Central-Eastern European start-up competition. Joobili bills itself as a travel inspiration website that uses trip dates to suggest festivals and other time-sensitive travel experiences across Europe.

I met Jared a few months when he was just preparing the beta launch of Joobili. He came up with the idea while working on an MBA degree at the Central European University here in Budapest. He obtained seed money from Esther Dyson as well as a local business, Hamu es Gyemant.

What I find interesting about Joobili is that, in contrast to other travel websites, it revolves around your date of travel rather than your destination. This appeals to my sense of adventure. It also distinguishes this site from the thousands of other travel-oriented sites out there.

New feature: Introducing Newstin

Published on March 11, 2009 in Business innovation and Czech Republic. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

If you scan down the right-hand column of this page, you’ll find we’ve added a new feature to nowEurope – an RSS feed from the Czech news aggregator Newstin. The feed offers current headlines and links to news stories about European ICT.

This year, Newstin was selected as one of the Red Herring Top 100 Global Companies. We hope this feature offers further value to you, our reader. We’re also happy to support a successful Central European startup.

If you want to know more about, have a look at this a recent video interview with Robert Scoble …

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