nowEurope

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’

Juri Kaljundi, a passionate ICT entrepreneur based in Tallinn, sent me (and Steve) a few questions before his presentation at the Techcrunch meeting in Stockholm. Unfortunately I was too busy to answer them in time and so now I’m taking this opportunity to comment on the summary at his personal blog.

I still remember very well Juri coming to Brno before his CV-online international roll-out and then his introductory speech at one of our very first First Tuesday Prague meetings. Now he is providing a very good insight of the Baltics we can compare with our Centrope region.

Continue reading ‘What do the Centrope and Baltics ICT scenes have in common?’

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.

Continue reading ‘Against the windmills In Europe’s minds’

Ashley Friedlein at E-Consultancy alerted me to the upcoming 2008 Innovation Awards. Hosted by E-Consultancy, the award recognizes ‘original and pioneering work’ in the fields of e-commerce and online marketing. The application deadline is Friday, October 24, 2008 and you can apply online for a fee of £150 + VAT (£120 + VAT for E-Consultancy members.)

The site doesn’t mention a prize, other than publicity and recognition, but presumably the winners will also be included in the company’s Innovation Report, available for $299. (Say, that’s a rather innovative way for E-Consultancy to generate revenue, wouldn’t you agree?)