nowEurope

I’m still trying to get my head around Kitchen Budapest. This facility, also known as ‘KIBU,’ describes itself as “a new media lab for young researchers who are interested in the convergence of mobile communication, online communities and urban space and are passionate about creating experimental projects in cross-disciplinary teams.” I guess what surprises me the most is that it’s located in Hungary.

It used to be the tradition here that nearly any young Hungarian with ambition and talent would leave the country to seek their fortune. Not only does KIBU offer opportunities at home, but they also offer guest residencies to foreigners.

The other shocker is that Kitchen Budapest is funded by Magyar Telekom – apparently with few strings attached.

Continue reading ‘Something’s cooking at Kitchen Budapest (couldn’t resist the pun)’

European ministers say they have agreed on a plan to introduce a common EU-wide patent system that could save companies millions of euros.

Sweden’s foreign ministry says industry ministers reached a deal on the main elements of the EU patent and setting up a single European Patent Court.

via BBC News – EU moves towards common patent system.

Delicious (originally spelled: Deli.cio.us) is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. You might think of Delicious as an ancestor of micro-blogging services like Twitter or Tumblr.

The focus of Delicious is links, and you can further organize them with add text and tags. The site was the brainchild of a solitary coder, Joshua Schachter, who sold his service to Yahoo! in 2005. For most of the first two years he ran the service part time. Lucky guy!

nowEurope has had its own Delicious account for several years now, but I confess we’ve hardly used it. When Vlastimil and I relaunched nowEurope at the beginning of the CITT project, it was our intention to use Delicious. We even added a widget to the right-hand column of this blog that shows you our latest Delicious links. It’s still there.

I’m now getting into the swing of Delicious, but I have my reservations. Maybe you can change that.

Continue reading ‘Social media experiments, part three: Deli.cio.us’

I have been following the nowEurope blog for a while now after my colleagues at VITE directed my attention towards it and want to take the opportunity to thank Steve for welcoming me to the community. It is very interesting to see how opinions are shaped and also can change in just a few months of time. In March this year, a discussion about Twitter took place in this blog. Back then, my colleagues from VITE both had the oppinion that Twitter is an interesting phenomenon but they didn’t believe in its full potential yet.

Now it is November and VITE has it’s own Twitter and Facebook accounts that are being constantly updated and utilised to be in regular contact with the IT community in Vienna and beyond it’s national borders. Being hesitant about the usefulness of Twitter at first, we at VITE have received very positive feedback for offering this additional source of information to our members and to everyone who is interested in the Viennese IT community.

Continue reading ‘Twitter revisited’

Amber Johnson at OnlineColleges.net just wrote to say she’s included nowEurope in her list of 100 Best Blogs for International Business Students.

Thanks, Amber!

The Eurecan European Venture Contest, aims to identify world-class innovative companies with the potential to dramatically impact their industry and contribute to increasing European competitiveness and growth.

For the past five years, Europe Unlimited, has been running these events, and I’ve taken part in several as an expert reviewer. I also took part this year, at the EEVC 2009 event held recently in Budapest.

This year was different. Thanks to more than €100M arriving from the European Commission in December 2009, a large number of these companies actually have a chance to win funding.

Continue reading ‘Assessing Hungary’s current generation of startups – the rules have changed’

A central goal of the CITT project (under which nowEurope is financed) is to work out strategies to improve technology transfer between the business and research communities within the Centrope region.

However, a larger issue throughout the European Union is increasing the cross-border business activities of SMEs. Euractiv writes:

[M]ore than 99% of EU companies are small and medium-sized enterprises with no more than 250 employees and a maximum turnover of €50 million. However, only 8% of them engage in cross-border trade and just 5% have subsidiaries or joint ventures abroad, according to the European Commission.

According to experts, the key barrier is differing tax regimes.

Continue reading ‘Tax issues the main barrier to cross-border SME business in Europe’

I just found another interesting activity of the European Commission for our readers. On the IPR Helpdesk the following article has been published:

The European Commission has launched the new online service “eBusiness Guide for SMEs: eBusiness software and services in the European market”, which can be found on the European Commission’s Europa portal. This service gives enterprises an overview of the eBusiness and information and communication technology (ICT) market and helps them select the proper software products, solutions, and ICT service providers.

Providers need to register and provide overall information on their products and services in their national language. Then, users of the online service can find specific solutions by selecting a certain country and language. The service is free of charge. Currently, this tool features more than 1,000 eBusiness solutions providers and 1,500 products, including open-source software solutions.

You can find the eBusiness Guide at http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/e-bsn/ebusiness-solutions-guide/.

I just read an article that the European Commission has adopted the “Recommendation on mobilising Information and Communications Technologies to facilitate the transition to an energy-efficient, low-carbon economy”.

The EU has committed itself to expanding the use of renewable energies by 20%, achieving a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and a 20% increase in energy efficiency, all by 2020.

ICT products and services currently cause about 8% of the consumption of electric power of the European Union. By that they cause about 2% of all CO2 emmissions in Europe.

On the other hand ICT can act as an enabler to save electricity in energyintensive sectors like buildings, transport and logistics. EU estimates that ICT can reduce the CO2 emmissions in these sectors by 15% until 2020.

You can find more details at http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/sustainable_growth/energy_efficiency/index_en.htm

Following Bernd Kopacek’s post, I studied this year’s statistics of the applications to Hungarian higher educational institutions.

I was shocked to learn that 61.3% of applicants haven’t passed a foreign language exam. Only 30% have a medium level certificate, and 7.1% have high level language knowledge. (The source, in Hungarian, is here)

It is sad that these figures refer to university applicants, and not just those who have completed their secondary education.

In my opinion, one result of secondary education should be a strong knowledge of one or preferably two foreign languages. Unfortunately, this is not the current situation in Hungary. The only chance for more than 60% percent of the students is to make up for this deficiency during their university years.

I assume that your country is in a better situation. Could you share some statistics?