Created in 1986, Vibratec is a French SME performing in the acoustic and vibration sector. It currently employs 50 persons. The company provides a range of services such as measurement, diagnosis, modelling or simulations, mainly to transport constructors.
Continue reading ‘Vibratec: Participating in European projects is a long run investment’
ArchivePage 5 of 17
The European Commission is going to hold a public hearing on future EU patent policy on the 12th of July 2006. This public hearing is following a public consultation launched in January 2006 with the aim of collecting stakeholders’ views on the patent system in Europe and of seeking views on what measures could be taken in the near future to improve this system.
Continue reading ‘The European Commission’s public hearing on future patent policy’
Yesterday I sat down with Gabor Cseh, the former director of the IWIW project at Virgo Systems. Earlier this year, Gabor and his colleagues sold Hungary’s leading social networking site to T-Online for HUF 1b (about $4.3m). I’ve invited Gabor to speak at our next Entrepreneurship Forum at the Central European University (July 11) and I wanted to hear more about his story.
One point that intrigued me is that Virgo only sold T-Online the Hungarian-language rights to IWIW, meaning they can use the code to launch similar services in Hungary’s neighbors. Can Virgo make the magic happen twice?
There exists an interesting initiative of Hungarian IT companies in the field encouraging FP6 participation, which can serve as an example of how genuine sharing of information and expertise can benefit both information provider and receiver. Some 15-20 companies came together in December 2004, that were all interested in joining EU funded R&D projects within the framework of the FP6 program. Most of these were SME-s, some associations and some university research centers. Some of them already had experience in participating in EU funded projects while others came only to learn how to do this.
Continue reading ‘Self organising SME cluster in IT to help each other in FP6 participation’
Certain dating service concepts seem to be so successful that they are used in company match making as well. A good example is the ‘SpeedDating’ initiative of the Hungarian Association of IT Companies IVSZ - the largest professional association of the Hungarian ICT sector.
IVSZ organises match making events for small and large member companies. The concept is that during such an event, 3-4 large IT or telecom company manager provides an opportunity for 7-8 SME-s each to introduce themselves and to try to sell the idea why they could be a valuable partner to the large company.
Continue reading ‘IVSZ: Speed dating as applied to IT matchmaking’
The ICARE project is a Collective Research project involving fourteen SMEs and seven research-centres as well as five European industrial association/groupings - representing 9200 SMEs - which will be responsible for training their members and disseminating the project’s outputs. ICARE received a financial support from the FP6 amounting to 2 million euros in a view (i) to develop a rapid and cost-effective analytical method that will enable SMEs to monitor Neo-Formed Contaminants (NFC) accumulation during the heat treatment of food and (ii) to perform pre-normative research, providing EU regulatory authorities with a fast method for NFC quantification.
Continue reading ‘ICARE: A research project intended to agro-food SMEs’
Priceminister is a website that allows private individuals or professionals to buy and to sell to each other cultural and entertainment products. At start, Priceminister was only targeting cultural products (books, CDs, DVDs) but is now offering wider ranges of products, especially multimedia hardware. The specificity of Priceminister is that they have a database of “product sheets” (including the bar code or SBN code) which are continuously created by users themselves.
The advantages of e-trade services are numerous (no stock, no logistics, and no requirement for working capital). Nevertheless, because they only charge 15% on each transaction, Priceminister has to deal a very large volume of products and, for this reason, had to make an initial investment in marketing. As they did not have any personal assets and had already hired people, Priceminister?s partners sought for business angels’ assistance. Luckily, business angels were reactive and knew the sector very well so that they understood the logic of entrepreneurship and of their business.
Continue reading ‘Priceminister only financed by business angels’
The Sheffield Hallam University was the coordinator of the two-year CRAFT project entitled “Low Voltage Accelerated Curing Systems for Concrete” (LOVACS), which involved 7 SMEs from United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Spain, Czech Republic and Poland. The project was awarded about a year ago.
A Hungarian company has been claiming it has developed a vaccine against bird flu, however it has not sought regulatory approval from the EU. The Hungarian government has approved sale of the drug, however, the certification documentation is not public because it contains ‘protected information’.
The Hungarian government contributed $9.8m to develop the vaccine, but according to Bloomberg.com, opposition politicians are pushing for an inquiry, and scientists at Hungary’s National Epidemiology Center stated they might have been hasty in declaring it ready for market.
What’s more, the company that developed the drug is owned by an obscure company in Cyprus and the main sales representative is a dodgy Iraqi businessman with no experience selling pharmaceuticals who was previous investigated in connection with a missing shipment of medical aid to Iraq.
A clinical trial with 146 volunteers is now underway in Budapest, according to the article.
Around 1% of Polish Internet users have made a purchase online. Of those, 40% made their first purchase within the last six months. A third of Polish shoppers declared that they intend to increase their number of online purchases. These figures come from a 2005 survey of Polish eCommerce conducted by Polish web measurements company, Gemius, in association with Money.pl.
What struck me is that the most popular method of advertising among Polish emerchants is paid search. Here in Hungary, my impression is that local advertisers have been relatively slow to adopt search, however I haven’t seen any recent figures on the Hungarian market for paid search.
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