My fellow nowEurope contributor, Guenther Krumpak, recently pointed out that European universities consistently rank at the bottom of the Times Higher Education Supplement university rankings. Geunther suggested a possible Anglo Saxon bias in the list. Perhaps. It would depend on the methodology.
What I’d like to know is how well are European universities keeping relevant with important commercial trends. I read today that Stanford University has a launched a new course to train iPhone developers. Wired’s Gadget Lab reports that worldwide demand for iPhone developers has jumped 500% in the last six months.
Can you imagine a Centrope university that responds so swiftly to market demand?
Continue reading ‘Why isn’t this a Hungarian, Czech, Slovak or Austrian university?’
The old Indextools website is gone. The new Yahoo! Analytics website is minimalistic, offering just the home page and a second page describing the features. That’s appropriate, because this incarnation of Indextools doesn’t have to sell. It’s Yahoo! And it’s free.
However, the technology behind the screens is still 100% Indextools. They probably have four or five times more server capacity, but the features are essentially the same ones I described on the original site. (Disclosure: I was the marketing director in 2004-2005.)
In the first part of this case study I described how Indextools minimized its weaknesses to compete with VC-funded US companies. This time around I’ll talk about how this scrappy Hungarian startup maximized its natural strengths to build a world class business.
Continue reading ‘Indextools: How to maximize your strengths (part two)’
It was in 1994 when Jeff Bezoz and his few employees created a web site and database in Bezos’ Bellevue, Washington garage. It was few months later when he approached local venture capital (VC) firms in search for valuable growth capital. None of the venture capitalists invested – they evaluated the idea good, but company not attractive enough for investment. Today, with about 45% stake in Amazon.com Bezoz’s share is worth at least an easy $2 billion, while initial investment he received from business angels totaled marginal $1.2 million.
Ironically, a year later angel and venture capital investments soared and investments were made into virtually everything that went on Internet. Total venture capital investments in the USA increased nearly 15 fold in six years, from a mere $6.3 billion in 1995, to an unworldly $90 billion in 2000. However, the feast did not last long. Everything came back to earth again in 2001, when dot com bubble eventually burst, and when forty-nine out of the Silicon Valley’s fastest 50 lost value, with the majority experiencing market capitalization declines of 80%.
Continue reading ‘National seed capital fund to be rolled out in Estonia in 2006?’
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