Several years ago, a former business partner and I were speculating about how the mobile operator industry would evolve. The mobile phone business was booming, but it was already clear that growth had limits. What to do once every citizen had a handset?
The solution seemed obvious even then. As mobile services evolved, the phone would eventually be used as a payment mechanism. By controlling the payment interface, operators stood to make a fortune from transaction fees. Could mobile operators eventual evolve into financial institutions or even banks?
Something like this has happened in Austria, as I learned at a recent conference, IIR’s Mobile and NSF Payment Strategies, held here in Budapest.
Continue reading ‘Want to launch mobile payments? Buy a bank’
In late 2005, we published a list of Central European ‘companies to watch’ which you’ll find at the top of the nowEurope links page. The list consists of technology companies based in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. The main selection critera was the subjective opinion of the NETIES consortium team members in each of these countries.
It’s now time to review the list and consider whether those companies are still worth watching. And what better way than CoolSW, a new service launched by Intel which Wired Magazine describes as a DIGG for software companies.
The burning question: Are Central European software companies ‘cool’?
Continue reading ‘Is Central European software ‘cool’?’
The 6th Framework Programme is practically over and so it is our NETIES project. In last two years we surveyed over 750 SMEs, organised 32 networking events, workshops or conferences attended by 1750 people in six countries. The consortium provided 84 individual consulting sessions and coached 31 companies in the area of finding foreign partners, improving and presenting their business plans or FP6 applications.
22 contributors from 11 countries published more than 300 posts here sharing their experience, views and comments on the topics of technology innovation, R&D funding, venture capital and Central and Eastern Europe. NowEurope attracted totally 30,000 unique visitors over the period. Thank you all.
Continue reading ‘NETIES is ending’
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’
Régens Rt. [www.regens.hu] is a Hungarian SME which has been consistently increasing its market share in the field of logistics information systems and related fields since its foundation in 1993. Today Régens is a steadily growing company with 35 employees and EUR 1.6m in turnover. One of the key elements in Régens’s success is an emphasis on - and constant investment - in innovation.
Régens is one of the relatively small number of Hungarian SMEs in the IT sector that believe in innovation as a source of competitiveness and have acted consistently with this belief. New products mark this all along the history of the company. One of these products, the Régens CUSTOM[r]S customs system, won the Hungarian Innovation Award in 2002.
Though there have been some Hungarian grants available for innovation support earlier, a new window of opportunity opened in 2004 when Régens realised the potential in the FP6 program of the European Union (though Hungarian organization could participate in the Framework Program as early as of FP4, this was not widely known outside the academic community).
Thus the company has started to explore FP6 opportunities in early 2004, and by early 2006 they became really successful in participating in winning consortia.
One key to this success has been to hire a dedicated person as an international project coordinator whose main task was to build a knowledge base of FP6 opportunities and practical knowledge as well as to actively search for appropriate collaborators and build a network of potential partners in proposals. The coordinator started visiting FP6 events in Hungary as well as international FP6 events. She established contact with a number of FP6 SSA projects in Hungary and was also an active initiator of an SME network established for exchanging FP6 experiences.
These efforts resulted in Regens taking part in several FP6-IST, FP6-SME, CRAFT and e-Ten proposals over the past two and half years, many of which were indeed successful. One of these is FLUID-WIN, a project which aims at developing an innovative B2B solution in the field of logistics.
Régens builds heavily on innovation in the company strategy, even to the extent that they explicitly integrate innovation activities into their competitive advantage offering and PR activities. Ms. Réka Moksony (moksony.reka@regens.hu) now heads the business development division. She also happens to be the dedicated person the company hired to build the FP6 knowledge of Régens, looks positively into the future and always welcomes potential partners for innovative projects.
InterSoft, a.s., was established in 2001 as a company operating in information technologies.
The basic idea in establishing the company was the association of partners of the international R&D project Esprit 29065 “Web in Support of Knowledge Management in Company (KnowWeb)” supported by EU in the 4th Framework Program. The company was founded with the intention to build on international experiences of software development for domestic or foreign customers, to exploit the status and international business contacts of partners and to capitalize the competitive advantage resulting of this association.
In 2004 the company changed the scope of its business activities with more accent on modern information and communication technologies, and with a view to provide new types of services in this field. The change was related to Slovakia’s entry into the European Union and to the resulting global context for the company. Continue reading ‘InterSoft: Mastering the FP’
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