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How odd that I came across this story on China’s People Daily Online, the erstwhile propaganda organ of the Chinese Communist Party.

According to the World Bank, Hungary’s neighbors now provide a more competitive business environment, while the Slovaks lead the region in providing a cozy home to global capitalism:

Hungary is the second most expensive place in terms of gross national product percent capitation to start up a new company in the region after Poland. Almost every country in the Central Europe Estate region beats Hungary, according to the World Bank survey. Slovakia is well ahead in 36th place due to its business-friendly reputation and flat tax.

But wait, there’s more bad news. (Are the Chinese actually mocking Hungary?)

Continue reading ‘World Bank names Hungary as CEE’s least welcoming place to do business’

Last week I received a call for project proposals, called “Open Source for Vienna”. The technology funding agency of the city of Vienna has launched a call for proposals that support the switch of the local government to open source software (OSS).  They claim the city has been using OSS since 1989 for the public administration. They see OSS as an enabler for efficient and lean government.

The call hopes to attract visionary ideas to better communicate between the Vienna city government and its citizens as well as to solve future administrative challenges in a modern and economic way.

You can find additional information about this call at http://www.zit.co.at/foerderungen/aktuelle-calls/open-source-fuer-wien.html (Only in German).

How are your local and national governments thinking? Is this a general trend for public administrations? Is the city of Vienna in this respect a front-runner or follower?

I have just read the following information that I would like to share with you:

The European Commission is now in the process of preparing the next ICT research Work Programme for years 2011-2013. In view of this, the Software & Service Architectures and Infrastructures unit is updating the research community’s vision for the area, identifying key technological challenges and research priorities, and establishing a research agenda for the coming years.

This is achieved through consultation with external experts, with industry and with academia, while additional input comes from a number of initiatives that are developing roadmaps and research agendas for Software and Services, such as ‘Future Internet’ (http://www.future-internet.eu/).

The main objectives of this consultation are to identify the key technical challenges, the success factors, the expected impacts, and to derive a list of research foci and priority actions to be implemented. For this, a wide range of aspects should be addressed including technological issues, research challenges and standardisation approaches. The timeframe to be considered for this Work Programme is 2011 to 2013.

The consultation can be accessed at http://www.eu-ecss.eu/contribution_list_2010.

It will be possible to add contributions starting from 21/09/2009 until 02/11/2009; after this date, the consultation will be closed, and the resulting ideas and suggestions will be used as a valued input for the next research Work Programme.”

I am convinced that our CITT partners and readers should actively contribute!

According to Reuters, SMEs can play a big part in Central Europe’s economic recovery:

Imploding demand and tighter credit have held back eastern Europe’s small and medium firms in the economic crisis, and how they cope could significantly determine which countries in the region recover quicker.

Small businesses provide 60-70% of all jobs across Central Europe, and pay at least half the taxes. That makes SMEs critical to the region’s economic recovery. (Other important factors are governments’ fiscal discipline, demand from Western Europe and the pace of foreign direct investment.)

A major issue for SMEs is limited access to credit. Lending rates in Central Europe have traditionally been less than in Western Europe. With the financial crisis, small business credit across the region has virtually frozen.

How many of you have heard about the Jeremie Fund? This is European Commission initiative to provide seed funding and other support to innovative, early stage companies. Most of what we’ve heard in Hungary has been word of mouth. There’s been very little published in the Hungarian press, or on the Internet.

RealDeal.hu published this brief announcement:

Eight winners have been announced in a tender for the New Hungary Venture Capital Program (Új Magyarország Kockázati Tőkeprogram), which will see venture capital funds receiving EU backing to help finance local start-ups.

The eight winners were selected from among 18 applicants, and will be managing nearly Ft 45 billion (€165.75 million), of which the local firms will provide Ft 13.4 billion and the EU Ft 31.5 billion.

Does Jeremie operate in other CENTROPE countries?

One of the challenges of running a blog – especially one written by a team of collaborators – is to ensure the ‘right’ editorial focus. About a year ago, Vlastimil Vesely and I decided to provide regular feedback to our circle of contributors by asking them to vote each month for the two best articles published to nowEurope in the preceding month.

The result of this vote is the ‘featured posts’ block displayed on the right-hand column of this page. This is intended as an aid for you, the reader, to find the best content posted at nowEurope. However, Vlastimil and I got to talking and we realized it might be a good idea to publicly highlight some of these posts, and describe why they were chosen.

Continue reading ‘Best of blog: what is our editorial focus?’

Nowadays, there are awards in almost any kind of area. Ranking from very well known awards in the area of pop culture such as the Oscars or the World Music Awards to awards for young academics in various fields. Last week I was made aware of an award in the area of technology that is taking place in Vienna. In an effort to stimulate and advocate the innovative potential of the Viennese technology sector, the ZIT (Centre for Innovation and Technology), Vienna’s technology agency, organises the Content Award 09. Until October 30^th, participants can submit contributions in various fields such as computer games, short movies or videos with animated content. There is also a category for innovative concepts with the aim of bringing the city of Vienna closer to its citizens with the usage of broadband technology. The contest has an “Under 18” and a “Fempower” category in order to specifically get young people and women to participate.

Looking at that contest raised the question within me, whether or not such awards would make sense for the Centrope region as well?

Continue reading ‘Innovation awards for Centrope?’

Along with the increasing popularity of the technology debate in Austria during the last years and after numerous discussions with ICT researchers in the Centrope countries I realised that there is a striking resemblance in their complaints, although the statements themselves express the respective opposite. See also http://noweurope.com/2009/09/08/barriers-cooperation/#more-1293 by Vlastimil.

Simply speaking, the Austrians complain that there’s not enough money for basic research as all goes to applied research, whereas the Czech and Slovak Republics as well as Hungary (representing the situation in virtually all new EU member states and beyond) complain that universities concentrate too much on basic research and do not understand the importance of applied research. Continue reading ‘Basic vs. applied research: Potentials unused?’

This year our company InfomatiX (Budapest, Hungary) has won the Deloitte technology Fast 50 award. The Fast 50 is awarded by market analysis company Deloitte and is based on revenue increase of enterprises in the Central European region. It grew out of a program initiated in Silicon Valley, California as a part of a global effort to identify the fastest growing technology companies all over the world.

Being very proud of this award, let me introduce our flagship product: MobiAccess.

Continue reading ‘InfomatiX Wins Deloitte Fast 50′

Just recently a mail was forwarded to me, whose original author was Mr. Sergiy Protsiv from the Center for Strategy and Competitiveness (CSC) in Stockholm. The mail provided information on a document published four times a year with the title: “European Cluster Organisation Directory”. This database represents 1,100 clusters across 203 regions (NUTS II classification) and 142 industry indicators.

After trying out the database for a while, I found it to be a helpful source of contacts. It provides a rough picture of what is happening in cluster work around Europe and which areas are most active and advanced. It is definitely not just a tool for first glance information, but rather a detailed source of crucial information about many clusters in Europe.  The European Cluster Organisation Directory presents itself as the first comprehensive compilation of cluster organisations in Europe.

Continue reading ‘European Cluster Organisation Directory’