WINNERS OF THE EUROPEAN YOUTH AWARD 2016

These are the category winners chosen by the Grand Jury in Cyprus in September 2016. The Grand Jury event was kindly hosted by The Republic of Cyprus and the Digital Champion Cyprus  and facilitated by by the Uclan Cyprus university. The event was supported by CYTA, MTN, European Commission, CITEA, Cablenet and PrimeTel as well as by the Council of Europe.


Category: Healthy Life: (fitness | nutrition | healthcare | med tech)
Winning projects:  Be My Eyes | DayCape | Mira 

Category: Smart Learning (education | e-skills | open science | infotainment)

Winning projects: Animal Hero Universe | Unimersiv 

Connecting Cultures: (language | travelling | diversity | new communities)
Winning projects: VEASYT Live! 

Category: Go Green(sustainable energy | mobility | smart cities | climate change)
Winning projects: HAIZE | Fresh.land 

Category: Active Citizenship (citizen journalism | social cohesion | human rights | (wo)men empowerment)
Winning projects: FreeCom | AdoptGrandFather.org 

Category: Money Matters (financial literacy | employment | fundraising | fin tech)
Winning projects: Poslonaut/HireApp 

Special Category: migration | integration | inclusion | refugee movement
Winner: to be announced on October 19, 2016 

Special category: know-center_knowawardKnow Award
Winner: to be announced on October 19, 2016

More information on the winning EYA projects and the EYA Festival Graz, go to:
http://eu-youthaward.org/winning-projects-2016/

BPN 1613: Frankfurt Book Fair: checkpoint book industry

This week the annual Frankfurt Book Fair will be held again. Some 7.000 exhibitors from 100 countries will be there. Some 280.000 visitors from 129 countries are expected. They will be looking for books and nothing else but books, from literature to scientific books, from fiction to non-fiction.

Over the years the fair has changed. Was the fair a necessity to acquire new to be translated books formerly, now e-mail and skype have made negotiations possible on a daily scale without travelling.

But also the product book has changed. The book portfolio exists of printed books formerly, now the offer has been expanded with electronic books. This year also the apps have been added as a product and as marketing tools. This also shows in the booth arrangement as, there are not only booths for printed or electronic books, but there were also booths reserved for integrators and apps developers.

This change has had a long  and slow start. In 1970 the book industry started to change the process of typesetting and page make-up aided by computers. In 1985 the CD-ROM was introduced as a mega book, ready to store a 25 volumes encyclopaedia. For the Encyclopedia Britannica it was the beginning of the end, which took place in 2012, when the decision was taken not to print an encyclopaedia anymore.

This whole process was characterised as electronic publishing. The term did not only entail the computing of the production process. But on the Frankfurt Book Fair 1993 the term was expanded to electronic products, derived from books, in the EC report New Opportunities for Publishers in the Information Services Market (1993, Consulting Trust). The electronic products were embodied by the first Sony e-readers and minidisk e-books. In 1996 the term electronic publishing was canonised with publishing of EC Electronic Publishing: Strategic Developments for the European Publishing Industry towards the Year 2000.

Electronic publishing started to penetrate into the realm of readers in 2006, when the first e-readers with e-Ink screens reached the market. Besides, the publishers were eventually forced by Amazon to publish e-books. And e-books are doing well. E-books can now be bought, hired and streamed to the screen.

And this is only the start. The big bang is still to come and the first rumble can already be heard. At the Frankfurt Book Fair an e-reader has been announced for TEN euro (10 euro). Dependent on the quality of the screen and built-in facilities e-readers cost from 99 to 350 euro. But the German txtr beagle can keep the price so low as it did not put in high-tech in the device. The e-reader contains facilities built into smart phones. So no wifi, but blue- tooth to transfer a book. An Android app takes care to put the books into place. Users of the beagle do not need cables to connect to plugs, but just two AAA batteries which will keep the reader going for a year. And when they are empty, just change them. The txtr beagle has a 5 inch screen with a resolution of 800 x 600. The device weighs only 128 grams, including batteries. The memory is 4Gb. The e-reader can handle epub and pdf.  The German company presented their own e-reader at The Frankfurt Book Fair 2009, but the e-reader never reached the market. But having been acquired by 3M, a new e-reader has come off the drawing table, ready to go into mass production.  

UPDATE 14 October 2012 Just saw an interview on YouTube in which the announcement was made for a Kobe Mini e-reader. This will cost 80 euro in The Netherlands; 79 US dollar in the US.

BPN 1417 Grilling an old hand

This afternoon Ms Neelie Kroes, the EU commissioner designate for the Digital Agenda, will be grilled by the European Parliament, said the headline. This sounded alarming, but does she have to fear anything? First of all it is not het first grilling session. When she was appointed to be the EU Commissioner for Competition, she was grilled for the first time. Critical questions were fired at her on her favouring particular companies in the past. She was able to refute the charges. The grilling sessions have a strict format: every member of the parliamentary committee will be able to ask questions. The representatives have a minute to pose their question and the EU Commissioner to be has two minutes to answer.

Questions for Neelie Kroes will centre on her relationship with Microsoft. During the period as EU Commissioner for Competition she really took on the monopolist. Other questions will be on open software and broadband networks. Will Ms Neelie Kroes stimulate open software and open content, especially in government? Another issue will be copyright. So real critical questions on which she can slip can hardly be posed.

Besides her portfolio is Digital Agenda. This is not a field she does not know anything about. In her first turn as EU Commissioner she had to deal with the economic aspects of computing issues. She wanted Microsoft to unbundle Windows and Internet Explorer. Finally Microsoft bowed, but a browser company like Netscape lost the fight with Microsoft and the open-source browser Mozilla gains only followers, now that the unbundling is official.

But also before her turn as EU Commissioner she was involved with Digital Agenda issues. As the rector of a business school, she invited Bill Gates to Holland in 1996 to bestow an honorary doctorate on him.

(c) NBBI/EMR, 1980

But even before that, she dealt with Digital Agenda issues. In fact she was early involved in online services. From 1977 till 1981 she was Deputy Minister of Traffic in the Netherlands and dealt with new media. In 1980 she opened the Dutch node of the Euronet-Diane network, a datanetwork set up by the European Community (see illustration above). At the accompanying exhibition, the Euronet Diane network was demonstrated by the EC official Franco Mastroddi (see illustration left).

(c) NBBI/EMR, 1980


At that time online networks and services got introduced. In 1978 videotex was shown at a consumer electronics fair Firato. In 1980 Viditel, the first Dutch public online service based on videotext and run by the PTT, the state mail and telephone company, was opened. The launch had been planned in the summer, so that the service could scale up easily. Ms Kroes was at that time on holiday in the Dutch lake district of Friesland. And to give the launch a touch of innovation, she was going to launch the service from a yacht. Officials and journalists were gathered in The Hague for the launch ceremony and looking at a televised transmission. Just before the moment supreme, the television cameras started to snore and the lights to glow. And then everything went dark, when she pushed. It was a real omen for the future of the service.

It will be hard to grill Ms Neelie Kroes on the subject of Digital Agenda; she is an old hand.

Update 15/1/2010: The hearing session of Ms Neelie Kroes by a commission of EU parlementarians had a surprising end: Ms Kroes will be invited for a resit. Not all of her answers had been strong, it was said. However, this seems to be a political excuse used by christian democrats and socialists parliamentarians as some of thier candidates for other European Commission positions are being criticised.  This is unbelievable: many of her interogators were still wearing pampers, when Ms Kroes started to use new media! To be continued next week.

Blog Posting Number: 1417

Tags: content, copyright, open software, open content

BPN 1358 Dead media publishers want assistance

A number of European publishers of newspapers and magazines have requested the European Commission for stricter copyright laws in order to develop an online earning model. The publishers say that re-use of material by websites and news aggregators undermines a business model for internet. And as advertisements are decreasing, publishers look for methods to earn on content. the 'Hamburg Declaration' was introduced on 8 June and has so far been adopted by 149 German publishers.



In Germany it has been suggested to have neighbouring rights for textual content, like for the re-use of songs. The publishers want to have a stricter regime on copyright legislation. They work on the technical system ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) with which they want to force news aggregators to use this protocol.

This is just one of the signals that European publishers are having problems to survive. With an annually decreasing number of subscribers and the revenue decrease of ads in this economic recession, the revenues of the publishers are getting lower year by year. In the meantime they do not compensate the decrease with income from internet.

The problem is of course not limited to Europe only. Also in the States newspapers and magazines publishers feel the decrease and have no compensation from internet. As I recently wrote, only newspapers in India seem to be able to expand as more people start reading and are offered newspapers in more local languages.

In the meantime publishers complain and look for subsidies, grants and extra charges, saying that the newspaper scene should remain pluriform. This is strange by asking subsidies and grants, they become dependent of the government and not free to comment.

Recently a former Dutch minister, mr Brinkman, presented a report on the Dutch newspaper market. The report contains a series of obligatory phrases about the freedom of journalism and then constitutes that the revenues of the newspaper publishers are going down in such a fast way that they need to be assisted financially. Like in a magic show the commission chairman conjures up a white bunny: every internet user should pay a surcharge for the newspaper industry.

You can imagine the reactions to this proposal: an internet levy for dead media. At once the whole report, which was well documented and provided with sharp analyses, was forgotten. Intellectuals turned up their nose, while others started to express curses and abuse. And of course, the Dutch publishers have the same global problems and their own problems. They have never invested in innovation, except for the metal of their presses. When internet came around the publishers did not really experiment with for example an own national aggregator service; they left it to others. They increasingly started to depend on news wire services, having for 60 percent the same news items as other print papers and internet services. Regional newspapers have become less local and have not concentrated on social networks. Glossy weekly magazines were set up for 10 million euro in a time that the money should have used as internet green shoot. Internet services for ad acquisition were set up by new players like Google. And when the editorial and advertisement staffs set up experiments and networks, they were called back by board members, saying that internet was like teletext and not a serious medium. They spilled a lot of money by partnering hedge funds and buying rights to movie libraries. And now people that use internet should be paying a surcharge for lack of initiative on the part of publishers.

Should a surcharge be set on the use of internet. Of course not; that is really ridiculous. Should publishers get assistance in order to turn around their business. Not really. They should only get funds matching their own project money and only after that projects have been evaluated for innovation by internet and content experts. There are enough ideas to be incorporated by newspapers companies: cross media, social networks, not customised , but personal mobile services and crime maps, for example. Oh, and recommending eReaders as an innovation will not save the forests and newspaper world. Publishers should start seriously confront themselves with the digital future and phase out their print products over the next five years: the year 2015 should be the year print went out of fashion for newspapers.

Blog Posting Number: 1358

Tags: newspaper

BPN 1213 EU Telecoms Reform: the 6 Most Important Issues

During the telecom debate the European Parliament addressed, in plenary session on September 2, 2008, the so-called EU Telecoms Reform. On 13 November 2007, the European Commission had proposed to the European Parliament and the Council of Telecoms Ministers to reform the EU Telecoms rules (in place since 2003) to reinforce competition and investment and to create a Single Telecoms Market in the EU with innovative cross-border services and wireless high-speed broadband for all (IP/07/1677). Following an intense debate and many hearings, the European Parliament's Industry, Research and Energy Committee (ITRE) and the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee (IMCO) voted on amendments on 7 July (MEMO/08/491). The debate in the European Parliament's plenary with its 785 members is expected to pave the way for a vote on the Commission's entire EU Telecoms reform proposals in first reading on 23 September. Depending on the outcome of the vote and the discussions in the Council of Telecoms Ministers of 27 November, a political agreement on the final legislative texts could be achieved between the three institutions by the end of the year. The new regulatory framework would then become the law in all 27 EU Member States by 2010.

The following is an overview of the 6 most important reform proposals still under discussion between the European Parliament and the Council:

1. Independence of national telecoms regulators
What has the Commission proposed? For the Commission, independent national regulators are the indispensable backbone of an efficient, fair and competition-oriented system for telecoms regulation in Europe. To improve the application of telecoms rules, the European Commission therefore wants to strengthen the independence of national telecoms regulators (such as CMT in Spain, Bundesnetz­agentur in Germany, AGCOM in Italy, Ofcom in the UK, or ARCEP in France).
In the Commission's view, national telecoms regulators should not take in­structions from any other body in relation to the day-to-day performance of their tasks, and should enjoy financial and operational independence both from governments and from operators. Moreover, to strengthen the independence of the regulator, dismissal of the head of the national regulator should only be possible if certain criteria are met, such as serious misconduct.
What is the position in Parliament and Council? The proposal for stronger independence of national telecoms is supported by the European Parliament while the Council is more hesitant. The Council especially indicated that it could only accept a stronger independence of national regulators in the context of market-related regulation, but not in politically sensitive areas such as spectrum management or security.

2. Functional separation
What has the Commission proposed? The Commission wants to give national telecoms regulators the additional tool of imposing functional separation when it can be demonstrated that other remedies have failed or are likely to fail to achieve effective competition. This should increase the effectiveness of national regulators, allowing them to tackle remaining competition bottlenecks more effectively.
The implementation of functional separation aims to give all market players, including the incumbent operator's service division and new market entrants, the same network access under equivalent conditions. Functional separation, which (unlike ownership unbundling proposed in the debate on energy markets (IP/07/1361)) does not require divestiture of assets, has already been implemented with success in the UK and several other Member States have taken steps in that direction, most recently Sweden.
Common EU rules on functional separation will ensure better regulatory convergence in the Single Market and avoid distortions of competition that could result from a divergent understanding and application of this regulatory tool.
What is the position in Parliament and Council? The Commission's proposal has received a lot of support in the European Parliament's lead committees, and is supported by a majority of ministers in the Telecoms Council. Furthermore, national telecoms regulators have unanimously welcomed this proposal. However, in view of the strong opposition of several incumbent operators to the introduction of the tool of functional separation, the final outcome of this debate is still uncertain.

3. Spectrum: The digital dividend and "broadband for all"
What has the Commission proposed? The Commission's proposal for radio spectrum reform aims to achieve a more efficient and consistent management of spectrum to promote innovation and achieve high-speed "broadband for all" Internet access in Europe. The Commission also proposes a coordination of approaches in the EU to optimise the overall benefits of the digital dividend (the radio spectrum freed as a result of the switchover from analogue to digital TV), particularly by encouraging new wireless services and also new TV channels in high definition quality.
A more efficient use of this scarce public resource of a high economic and societal value, while ensuring protection against harmful interference, would be a major boost to competitiveness and innovation in Europe. The Commission expects additional economic benefits from better spectrum management in the EU to be in the region of €10 billion/year.
What is the position in Parliament and Council? The European Parliament and the Council support several of the main Commission proposals, such as a more flexible use and harmonised spectrum tradability. The European Parliament's lead committee also has shown a legitimate interest in a stronger European coordination, inter alia by advocating the creation of a new expert committee to advise the EU institutions on spectrum-related matters. However, the Council, continues to be rather reluctant to accept any coordination of spectrum management across borders or a stronger say of the European Parliament.
In this context, the European Parliament debated a specific motion for a resolution on the digital dividend, prepared by MEP Mrs. Patrizia Toia. The decisive issue here is whether the Parliament will support the Commission's proposal for a common roadmap on the digital dividend to coordinate Member States' approaches. A positive vote would allow the Commission to launch the required preparatory work – including the launch of a socio-economic study to quantify the benefits of various options for coordination at EU level – by the end of this year.

4. Investment into new networks
What has the Commission proposed? The Commission believes that legal certainty and effective, fair regulation of network bottlenecks are the best recipe for competition and investment in the telecoms markets. In addition, the Commission's proposal for a better management of radio spectrum (see point 3.) aims at freeing this very valuable source for new wireless services, thereby triggering more competition and attracting significant investment into these services. Furthermore, measures have been proposed by the Commission in order to improve the rules for facility sharing, by introducing in the EU's regulatory framework provisions that allow national regulators to impose entries to building, to ducts, manholes and street cabinets.
The Commission is also working on providing further guidance to national regulators (by means of a Recommendation under the existing EU telecoms rules) with regard to the conditions under which access to so-called "next generation networks" should be granted. The need for a fair return on investment is already written into the present telecoms rules, but a more coordinated approach of national regulators on this important matter could enhance legal certainty and the necessary level playing field for operators.
What is the position in Parliament and Council? There is a broad consensus in the Parliament and the Council about the need to maintain and strengthen competition, in particular to continue access regulation. Both Parliament and Council also support the promotion of investment into new networks as long as competition is effective. The European Parliament's lead committee is favouring in particular clear regulatory guidance on the return on investment for new networks to which access needs to be given to ensure effective competition. In the area of spectrum, the European Parliament and the Council support several of the main Commission proposals, such as a more flexible use and harmonised spectrum tradability, but there is a certain reluctance, especially in the Council, to accept any coordination of spectrum management across borders.

5. Number portability for European consumers
What has the Commission proposed? Consumers should be able to change their fixed or mobile operator while keeping their phone number – number portability – within 1 working day. For the Commission, this is a key facilitator of consumer choice and effective competition. At the moment, it takes 8 days on average to switch a fixed or mobile operator in the EU while keeping one's number. Europe's best performers are France for the fixed market and, for the mobile market, Ireland and Malta. It still can take up to 30 days to switch fixed operators in Estonia and up to 20 days to switch mobile operators in Italy and Slovakia.
What is the position in Parliament and Council? The European Parliament is generally favourable to the Commission's proposal, even though amendments have been tabled to allow a maximum of 3 days for number portability. The Council is so far hesitant to follow the Commission's proposal, in view of the additional cost it could entail for operators.

6. European Telecoms Regulator
What has the Commission proposed? To deliver more coherent and consistent rules across the EU, the Commission proposes to create a European telecoms authority, called "European Telecoms Market Authority". The idea behind this new authority is to create a level playing field for both telecoms operators and consumers in the EU's emerging Single Telecoms Market. This new body would not replace national regulators, but would allow them to play a stronger and more effective role at European level, vis-à-vis both the Commission and individual regulators. It would therefore build on the experience of national regulators, and thus be close to the market.
Tools proposed by the Commission to make the new body more efficient than the present loose cooperation among national regulators in the "European Regulators Group" (ERG) include: the move to majority voting; a small, but efficient permanent and independent staff enabling the body to swiftly and efficiently analyse and give opinions on proposals of national regulators for market analyses and remedies from 27 EU Member States; a stronger accountability of national regulators to the European Parliament; and a permanent and independent Director appointed, after a hearing by the competent European Parliament's committee, for a term of 5 years. In order not to create a new administration at EU level, the Commission proposed to merge the new European Telecoms Authority with the already existing European Network and Information Security Agency ENISA, which already has a staff of 50.
What is the position in Parliament and Council? The European Parliament's lead committee is keen to strengthen cooperation between national telecoms regulators and make it more effective. For this purpose the Industry Committee has proposed to create a "Body of European Regulators in Telecoms" (BERT), a Community body that would replace the present ERG and advise the Commission, national telecoms regulators, and the European Parliament. The body would take decisions by majority and have a small, permanent staff at its disposal. If the body were to vote against a national regulators' proposal, the Commission would request the proposal's withdrawal.
However, in contrast to the Commission's proposal, the new body would not be dealing with network security issues and therefore not be merged with ENISA, the mandate of which the European Parliament wants to prolong for 3 years. The Parliament's lead committee also appears to favour having two-thirds of the new body's budget financed by the EU Member States. The Commission instead advocates financing it from the EU budget to bolster the independence of the body and to ensure equality among the 27 national regulators within the body.
In the Council, a number of Member States agree with the need to strengthen the Single Market and cooperation among national regulators. However, many in the Council have serious reservations about the creation of a new Community body. The Council of Ministers is also against combining telecoms regulation and network security responsibilities and would like to prolong ENISA's mandate for 3 years.
With regard to ENISA, EU Telecoms Commissioner Reding has said: "I have to accept that Parliament and Council at this moment in time do not want to reform ENISA. However, I seriously believe that network security challenges will require soon a strong, coordinated European response. Recent cyber attacks in Estonia and now again in Georgia have shown that one country alone can be very vulnerable. I call therefore on the European Parliament and the Council to start early in 2009, an intense debate on Europe's approach to network security and on how to deal with cyber attacks and also to include the future of ENISA into these reflections. Also the new tools made available by the Lisbon Treaty should be seriously taken into account in this debate. Europe cannot afford to lose time when it comes to the security of our networks. Network security is identical to the security of our public administrations, our economy and our citizens."

Blog Posting Number: 1213

Tags: telecom

BPN 1212 EU Telecoms Reform: 7 Very Concrete Improvements

The European Parliament has debated, in plenary session, the so-called EU Telecoms Reform, proposed by the Commission on 13 November 2007. Of particular importance in this debate were the proposals made by the European Commission to give consumers of fixed and mobile phones and Internet services more rights and better choice (IP/07/1677). The debate among the European Parliament's 785 members should pave the way for a vote of the Commission's entire EU Telecoms reform proposals in first reading on 23 September. The French presidency could broker a political agreement at the Council of Telecoms Ministers on 27 November. New consumer rights would then become law in all 27 EU Member States by 2010.

The following is an overview of the 7 most important consumer issues which were debated by the European Parliament on September 2, 2008.

1. More transparency and better information for consumers
To be able to choose the best offer available on the market, consumers need better information about prices, tariffs and other conditions. The European Commission therefore proposes that operators should be obliged to publish such information in an understandable and clear manner so that it is easy for consumers to access it and compare deals. Consumer organisations or businesses willing to produce easy-to-use interactive guides facilitating consumer choice will be free to use such tariff information. Where service providers fail to deliver, national telecom regulators will make the guides available themselves. They will also be responsible for setting detailed rules regarding the form in which such information is published.

2. "Broadband for all"
The Commission proposes to reform the management of radio spectrum by the EU Member States. This should facilitate the roll out of wireless services in Europe, especially of high speed wireless broadband connections which also reach less populated and rural areas outside the main cities. The Commission in particular proposes a coordination of approaches in the EU to optimise the overall benefits of the digital dividend (the radio spectrum freed as a result of the switchover from analogue to digital TV), thereby allowing new wireless services and also new TV channels in high definition quality to develop. Radio spectrum is a scarce public resource of a high economic and societal value, and a more efficient use of it could be a major boost to competitiveness, innovation and concrete consumer benefits in Europe. The Commission expects additional economic benefits from better spectrum management in the EU to be in the region of €10 billion/year, and consumers would be the main beneficiaries of this.

3. Switching service providers in 1 day without changing number
Consumers should be able to change their fixed or mobile operator while keeping their phone number – number portability – within 1 working day. For the Commission, this is a key facilitator of consumer choice and effective competition. At the moment, it takes 8 days on average to switch a fixed or mobile operator in the EU while keeping one's number. Europe's best performers are France for the fixed market and, for the mobile market, Ireland and Malta. It still can take up to 30 days to switch fixed operator in Estonia and up to 20 days to switch mobile operators in Italy and Slovakia.
EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding says on the issue of number portability: "In Australia, it is possible to switch operator within 2 hours – we should really be able to get this done in 1 day in Europe."

4. Better data protection: mandatory notification of security breaches
In the Commission's view, consumer trust in the security of communication services and the protection of their personal data is essential. Telecoms operators should therefore be obliged to inform their customers without delay whenever their personal data has been compromised (for example, illegally accessed, copied, or lost) as a result of a security problem.
This will allow people to take precautions against financial loss or ID fraud, for example by closely monitoring their bank accounts. The risk of bad publicity should also give operators an extra incentive to invest more in the security of their networks and services.
Recent events in the UK and in Germany have reaffirmed the need for action on data privacy, as identified by the Commission already in November 2007 when it made its reform proposals.

5. Better access for users with disabilities
The Commission wants to make sure that communications devices like PCs and mobile phones can be used by people with disabilities (eAccessibility). Users with disabilities will benefit from better access to telecoms services such as the 112 emergency services or TV channels with subtitles, audio descriptions or sign language. On 2 July, the Commission launched a public consultation on further measures that Member States can take to make websites, and other electronic services like ATMs, in Europe more accessible for the disabled (IP/08/1074). Making these services more accessible to, for example, the hard of sight, is also important because 25% of the total population is expected to be aged over 65 by 2020.

6. Securing basic "Net Freedoms"
For the European Commission, the open architecture of the Internet is of key importance for the Information Society. The Commission in particular considers that the following "net freedoms" should be general guidelines for regulators and policy makers: right for users to access and distribute (lawful) content, to run applications and connect devices of their choice.
The Commission therefore proposes, in the EU Telecoms reform, a transparen­cy mechanism concerning possible restrictions on consumers’ choice of lawful content and applications so that consumers can make an informed choice of services and reap the full benefits of technological developments. In practice, consumers will get clear and timely information from their service providers about any restrictions that the providers place on their access to or use of Internet or mobile content and applications. This will allow them to pick and switch to the operator which best suits their needs. Where consumers have no alternative, service providers should not be allowed to block or restrict such access.

7. A more effective 112 European emergency number
The Commission proposes to improve access to emergency services, in particular through better caller location information and greater awareness of the single European emergency number 112. All providers of outgoing calls to public telephone numbers - including certain Voice over IP providers – will be obliged to provide access to emergency services. This should speed up access to emergency services in case of accidents or other emergencies. On 112, see the recent overview made by the Commission of the effectiveness of implementation in the 27 EU

Blog Posting Number: 12

Tags: telecom

BPN 1204 EU film support programme triggers interest

In the past years Europe has been funding films through its MEDIA programme. Some of these films have been awarded the Palme d'Or and the Grand Prix du Jury at the Cannes Festival and Oscars at the Academy Awards. This has created a strong demand from around the globe to cooperate with the European film industry is in. The results of the first call for projects of a new EU initiative, the MEDIA International Preparatory Action, show a lot of interest from audiovisual professionals around the world in working with Europe's film and audiovisual sector. The EU will provide nearly €2 million of funding for 18 projects involving partners from Canada, Latin America, India, China, South Korea, Japan, Morocco, Bosnia, Turkey and Georgia. The projects include joint training of film professionals, reciprocal promotion of films and cooperation between cinema networks. This could set the stage for a broader EU film cooperation programme called MEDIA MUNDUS, coming in 2011.

Of 33 applications received in the first MEDIA International call for projects, the European Commission has selected 18 proposals to receive funding for continuous training of audiovisual professionals, the promotion and distribution of cinematographic works and the development of cinema networks.

11 projects deal with continuous training through partnerships with Latin America, India, Canada, Turkey, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia covering films, TV shows, animation, documentaries and videogames. For example, the Cartoon Connection project will organise a joint training on developing and financing international co-produced cartoons for professionals from the EU, Latin America and Canada. Primexchange is a workshop for authors and producers from India and Europe on financing and marketing audiovisual works, with special focus on digital technologies.

The six projects selected by the Commission for promotion of audiovisual works focus on boosting co-production, which can help companies access foreign funding and new markets. For example, the European Producers' Club will organise co-production workshops in China and India and invite local producers to two major forums in Europe. The DOMLA project will organise a documentary month, releasing 12 European documentaries in Chile and vice versa distributing Latin-American documentaries in Europe. The Paris project is a co-production event for European, Japanese and South-Korean producers.

Finally, MEDIA International will support the first international network of cinemas, coordinated by Europa Cinemas, including 230 cinemas in Europe and 148 cinemas from the rest of the world (10 in Brazil, 7 in South Korea, 6 in Japan and Argentina).
The proposals accepted today are part of a Preparatory Action called MEDIA International, for which the European Parliament voted a budget of €2 million last December. It aims to explore ways of reinforcing cooperation between European and third country professionals from the audiovisual industry. MEDIA International will run for up to three years and is also designed to pave the way for a broader MEDIA MUNDUS programme.

In the context of a public online consultation on this future programme (IP/08/909), a public hearing was held in Brussels on 25 June 2008. The French Presidency of the EU held the Cinema, Europe, World colloquium on 8 July to reinforce EU external audiovisual action. On the basis of these contributions, the Commission will decide before the end of 2008 on a proposal for a MEDIA MUNDUS programme.

Blog Posting: 1204

Tags: film

BPN 1187 EU annoyance with the digital library for Europe

The European Commission is not happy with the contributions of the EU countries and the speed of the formation of the European digital library, Europeana. The digital library is supposed be launched on November 28, 2008, but the museums, libraries and digital preservation institutes are slow in bringing their digital collections online. Europeana should be a milestone for the European Union, showing Europe's cultural diversity in books, music, paintings, photographs, and films open to all citizens at the click of a mouse via one portal. (The access ticket is taken from the presentation Europeana in the European context and strategy by Marius Snyders, EU Digital Content and Cognitive Systems Directorate).

In a Communication the Commission called on Member States to raise digitisation capacities to make their collections available for Europe's citizens and to team up with the private sector. The Commission's assessment also shows that in many cases there is a gap between the objects which have been digitised and their online accessibility. For example, only one in four German museums that have digitised material offer online access to it and only 1 per cent of the material digitised by Polish archives is online.

However, further efforts by the EU Member States are needed, said the Commission in a new Communication on making available digital versions of works from cultural institutions all over Europe. Digitisation of cultural works can give Europeans access to material from museums, libraries and archives abroad without having to travel or turn hundreds of pages to find a piece of information. Europe's libraries alone contain more than 2.5 billion books, but only about 1 per cent of archival material is available in digital form. The Commission therefore called on Member States to do more to make digitised works available online for Europeans to browse them digitally, for study, work or leisure. The Commission itself will provide some120 million euro in 2009-2010 for improving online access to Europe's cultural heritage.

The Commission confirmed its commitment to help Member States bring their valuable cultural content online. In 2009-2010 no less than an extra 69 million euro from the EU's research programme will go to digitisation activities and the development of digital libraries. In the same period, Europe's Competitiveness and Innovation Programme will allocate about 50 million euro to improve access to Europe's cultural content. However, the total cost of digitising five million books in Europe's libraries is already estimated at approximately 225 million euro, not including objects like manuscripts or paintings. Realising the vision of a European Digital Library (Europeana) needs substantial investment from national institutions, but at present most countries only provide small scale, fragmented funding for digitisation. The countries are advised to address the following priorities:
- More funding needs to be allocated to digitisation, along with plans for how much material will be digitised.
- Most countries still lack methods, technologies and experience for the preservation of digital material, vital so that content remains accessible to future generations.
- Common standards need to be implemented to make different information sources and databases compatible for and usable by the European Digital Library (Europeana).
- Resolution of copyright issues, above all legal solutions to the problem of orphan works - works whose right holders cannot be found to consent to digitisation (IP/07/508).

Visitors to digital libraries can digitally discover copies of the famous Gutenberg bible – the first real book ever printed – at the British Library's website, the voices of Maria Callas or Jacques Brel at the French Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, or Da Vinci's masterpiece the Mona Lisa at the Louvre - without a ticket. The Dutch museum Mauritshuis has put paintings of the painter Vermeer on internet, while the French National Library is showing the poems of Baudelaire.

The EC however has also praise for some Member States, which have taken exemplary steps to accelerate digitisation of cultural collections. Slovenia adopted a Public-Private Partnership Act in 2007, providing new opportunities for private promotion of digitisation projects in public institutions. Slovakia has rehabilitated an old military complex as a large-scale digitisation facility using page turning robots. Finland, Slovakia and Lithuania used European Structural Funds to secure extra funding for digitisation.

Blog Posting Number: 1187

Tags: digital preservation, e-culture, museum, library

BPN 1164 A weblog register for the EU: bad idea Ms Mikko

I read this week about the excitement around a proposal of a member of the European Parliament (MEP) to start a webloggers’ register. Ms Marianne Mikko main recommendations in a report on media called on the European Commission and EU member states to apply competition law to the media to ensure media pluralism and in a sideline remark she proposed a weblogger’s register. She wants to know about the reliability of a weblogger. If she proposed a register – and I have my doubts about the context -, the lady must be a stranger in the Wired Wide World.

The postings I have read so far, have it, that Ms Mikko likes to see a register indicating the reliability of a weblog and its producer(s). It does not necessarily mean that the weblogger has to be registered with full name an address with a CV and a profile of the weblog... However the name of the weblog could also suffice with a register mentioning the weblog’s name and voluntary labelling of blogs by their authors (whatever that may be). I guess that she wants some keywords. This is strange as every serious blog uses tags, making it easy for Ms Mikko to search a weblog and ascertain the reliability. In an interview with the EU Observer she said: “We need some credentials, a quality mark, a certain disclosure of who is writing and why. We need this to be able to trust and rely on the source”.

Just the thought about a register, is ridiculous. Internet started as a free internet not bound to any rule or law, just to netiquette. Gradually it I integrated in laws, rules and measures. Just look at the music downloading; illegal downloading was a problem, but now it is becoming a sin, with letters sent straight from the confession box. Weblogging started as a freer form of journalism. Where journalist normally bound t a publication by contract or by association, a weblogger could publish whatever, whenever and wherever he/she wants.

I wonder why the MEP wants to have a register with or without the name of the webloggers. The blogs are there and most of the professional blogs have tags. So searching on a tag will give the reader already an impression on the seriousness or the ill will of the weblogger.

Brussels, i.e. the European Parliament and The European Commission, has many ritual dances and registers. Journalists have to get registered with the press office and the press office decides who is an accredited journalist. Also lobbyists have to register with the European Commission, just as they have to do with many governments. Are the lobbyists now more reliable since they registered and do the MEPS and EC officials now only see registered lobbyist and consultants? Of course not. When non-registered lobbyists want to meet a MEP, the MEP does not invite them on EU premises, but in Belgian or French restaurants and cafés or in O’Reilly, the Irish pub in Brussels.

The question of reliability does not come about with the institution of a register. It lies of course with the MEPS and EC officials, and their use of journalists, lobbyists and consultants. Perhaps Ms Marianne Mikko should look into another direction and start a European counterpart of Maplight.org, an organisation mapping the correlations between money and politicians in the USA.

Blog Posting Number: 1164

Tags: weblog, blog, politics

BPN 1141 Tough talk for telcos by two EU ladies

Lower charges, greater consistency, more competition; that is the matra of the two tough female commissioners of the European Commission, Viviane Reding (photograph left) and the iron lady Neelie Kroes (photograph right). They have asked the Commission to have a round of consultations on bringing down mobile phone tariffs in Europe. In the past years the telcos were forced to bring down costs of telephone calls from abroad. Recently the telcos were asked to bring down the costs of SMS originating from abroad.

Now the Commission, after assessing over 770 regulatory proposals by national regulators over the past 5 years, warned that price regulation of termination markets across Europe lacks consistency. It said that gaps between fixed and mobile termination rates and between mobile termination rates imposed by national regulators cannot be altogether justified by differences in the underlying costs, networks or national characteristics. This could have the following negative effects:
- Legal uncertainty and increased regulatory burden for operators providing cross-border services.
- National regulators bringing down mobile termination rates in their country risk punishing their own mobile industry if a neighbouring regulator still allows higher rates.
- Investment in new networks and services hampered if operators face different regulation in every country.

At present, fixed operators and their customers are indirectly subsidising mobile operators by paying higher termination rates for calls made from fixed lines to mobiles. This cross-subsidisation is estimated at €10 billion in Germany for 1998-2006 (WIK Consult) and €19 billion in the UK, Germany and France for 1998-2002 (CERNA-Warwick-WIK).

The Commission yesterday presented a draft Recommendation for convergence of termination rates in Europe, including clear principles on which cost elements should be taken into account when national telecoms regulators determine termination rates, an efficient costing methodology, and symmetric regulation (where the same price caps apply, within a country, to mobile and fixed operators, respectively). This will help foster an effective regulatory environment and avoid distortions such as cross-subsidies from fixed to mobile consumers. The advice of the European Regulators Group (ERG), which has made several attempts towards more consistent regulation of termination rates since 2006, was taken into account by the Commission in the draft Recommendation and the Explanatory note.

The Commission will issue the final text of the Recommendation on the regulatory treatment of fixed and mobile termination rates in October under article 19 of the Framework Directive of the EU Telecom rules, which allows the Commission to further harmonise the application of EU Telecoms rules in the single market to promote competition and consumer benefits. Member States have to ensure that national regulators take "the utmost account" of Commission Recommendations.

Blog Posting Number: 1141

Tags: telecommunications, mobile termination costs

BPN 1043 The 2008 eContentPlus call is out

Today I received from my good friend from Italy Marco Bergometti a message telling me that the call for proposals of the eContentPlus Programme has been published. The deadline for the submission of proposals is the 12th June 2008. A pre-proposal service has been started; this service can be used to test a project idea with the Commission.

The total budget earmarked for co-financing indirect actions is EUR 42,5 million. Participation in the eContentPlus Programme is open to legal entities established in the EU Member States plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway. Croatia, Turkey and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia can take part in a proposal, but will only receive funding if a bilateral agreement with the relevant country has been concluded to this effect.

The call covers three areas: geographic information, educational content and digital libraries. The grants will go to best practice networks and targeted projects and a thematic network for co-ordinating and supporting the European Digital Library

Some information days are planned:
Roma: 8th April
Copenhagen: 10th April
Warsaw: 18th April
Prague: 21st April
Malta: not settled yet

eContentPlus is a multi-annual Community programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable. The 4-year programme (2005–08), has a budget of € 149 million to tackle organisational barriers and promote take up of leading-edge technical solutions to improve accessibility and usability of digital material in a multilingual environment.

The Programme addresses specific market areas where development has been slow: geographic content (as a key constituent of public sector content), educational content, cultural, scientific and scholarly content. The Programme also supports EU-wide co-ordination of collections in libraries, museums and archives and the preservation of digital collections so as to ensure availability of cultural, scholarly and scientific assets for future use.

The programme aims at facilitating access to digital content, its use and exploitation, enhancing quality of content with well-defined metadata, and reinforcing cooperation between digital content stakeholders. It will tackle multi-lingual and multi-cultural barriers.

There is more information on this eContentPlus call.

Blog Posting Number: 1043

Tags: content

BPN 1041 EC: DVB-H standard for mobile television

The European Commission decided to add the Digital Video Broadcasting Handheld standard (DVB-H) to the EU List of Standards, which serves as a basis for encouraging the harmonised provision of telecommunications across the EU. The addition of DVB-H which has been developed by European industry, partly with the support of EU research funds is a new step towards establishing a Single Market for Mobile TV in Europe that will enable all EU citizens to watch TV on the move. Mobile TV could reach a market of up to € 20 billion by 2011, reaching some 500 million customers worldwide.

An EU-wide adoption of DVB-H will provide operators/industry with the necessary market scale to launch mass Mobile TV services across the EU. A European common standard will also benefit consumers, who will be able to watch TV on their own phones or mobile devices at any time, anywhere across Europe. After publication of the Commission decision in the EU List of Standards in the EU's Official Journal, Member States will be required to encourage the use of DVB-H. This clear support to the DVB family of standards is also an important signal given to third countries about to take a decision on the technology for digital and mobile broadcasting, using DVB-T, DVB-H and DVB-SH.

DVB-H is currently the most widely used standard for Mobile TV in the EU. DVB-H is currently between trials and commercial launch in 16 countries. Commercial DVB-H services are already available in Italy, with further launches expected later this year notably in Finland, Austria, France, Switzerland and Spain.

A transparent intellectual property rights regime, based on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and allowing low price of devices, is key to the success of Mobile TV. The Commission will therefore continue to closely monitor progress made towards the constitution of the DVB-H patent pool.

Efficient procedures for authorising Mobile TV operators are essential for the fast take-up of the service. In February 2008, the Commission discussed best practice for Mobile TV authorisation with industry and Member States, asking for contributions on the issue from all stakeholders. Guidelines on best practice are currently under preparation to help Member States to deploy Mobile TV without delay. Light-touch regulation and clear licensing regimes will give industry the legal certainty they need to launch their Mobile TV services without undue impediments.

The Commission considers 2008 to be a crucial year for Mobile TV take-up in the EU due to important sports events, such as the European Football Championship and the Summer Olympic Games, which will provide a unique opportunity for raising consumers' awareness and for the adoption of new services.

DVB-H is the only standard used worldwide; it is now being tested or commercially available in 16 European countries. IN The Netherlands KPN is using the DVB-H standard to deliver a mobile tv service. But other local standards are used in South-Korea, Japan , China and the USA (Qualcomm). But in Europe not all countries are happy with the DVB-H standard. Countries like The Netherlands, Germany and UK think that the market should make the standard and not governments or supra national institutes. Alternatively use is made of UMTS, a technology for which companies ever paid billions of euro in order to acquire a frequency. In the Netherlands for example public broadcast has experimented with operator independent UMTS for livestreams and on demand video of the skating world championships in Nagano (Japan). It is a run up to mobile broadcasts of the Olympic Games.

For more background: IP/07/1118, MEMO/07/298 and IP/07/1815.

Blog Posting Number: 1041

Tags: mobile television, DVB-H

EC: 1 million sentences in 22 languages

The European Commission’s collection of about 1 million sentences and their high quality translations in 22 of the 23 official EU languages — including those of the new Member States — is the biggest ever collection in so many languages and is now freely available. The data can help the development of other linguistic software tools such as grammar and spell checkers, online dictionaries and multilingual text classification systems. By offering free and open access to this JRC-Acquis collection of sentences, the EU hopes to foster multilingualism.

The EU institutions have more multilingual texts than any other organisation in the world because of the requirements that EU law exist in each of its 23 official languages. Their translation services work with 253 possible language pair combinations and produce around 1.5 million translated pages a year.

Whereas large amounts of translations of English or French texts can be found on the Internet, such resources are scarce for languages such as Latvian, Romanian or Dutch, and they are practically nonexistent for the combination of two languages for which few resources exist.

Through co-operation between its translators and its in-house scientists, The EC is releasing large collections of sentences from legal documents covering technical, political and social issues which are available in 22 languages (Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, German, Greek, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish and Swedish). In this translation repository it is possible to find sentences with their equivalent in all other official languages . Only Irish translations are not yet available. This release of language data is a good example of the Commission's open policy of re-use of its information resources and follows the opening of the EU's documentary and terminological databases Eur-Lex and IATE.

The EC has extensive experience with the development of multilingual text processing tools and is at the forefront of multilingualism, offering publicly accessible news search sites covering up to 35 languages via its European Media Monitoring tool. The 7th Framework programme for research and development – in its Information and Communication Technologies strand – supports research on machine translation and other language related technologies.

Blog Posting Number: 985

Tags: machine translation, multilingualism

EC welcomes intervention by Dutch regulator OPTA

"I welcome the determined move by the Dutch regulator OPTA", said EU Telecoms and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding (see photograph) in reaction to the fast and effective intervention by the Dutch telecom watchdog. "Spyware, spam and malware are a real plague for Internet users. The decision of OPTA, which applies EU legislation vigorously, will therefore help considerably to make our European information society a safer, more trustworthy place for consumers and businesses. I call on the regulators of other countries to follow the positive example set by the Dutch regulator."

Yesterday, the Dutch Telecom Regulator OPTA imposed a fine totalling 1 million euro on three Dutch enterprises for illegally installing software - so called spyware and adware - on more than 22 million computers in the Netherlands and elsewhere.

The companies fined now by OPTA operated together under the name DollarRevenue, which was considered to be among the 10 largest spyware distributors in the world. They managed to install the software on personal computers via downloads from the Internet and by exploiting security loopholes in computer programmes. The illegally installed software allowed the companies to spy on the consumer's on line behaviour and triggered pop-up windows containing specific advertising material.

Unlawful access to a personal computer to stall information such as spyware and adware is prohibited under European law, namely article 5(3) of the EU's ePrivacy Directive of 2002. National regulators are called upon to enforce this prohibition by deterrent measures. Yesterday's decision by OPTA is the first time that a national regulator has resorted to drastic fines against a company acting in violation of the EU ban.

In 2004, the Commission has set up an informal network of the EU's national enforcement authorities (Contact Network of Spam enforcement Authorities, CNSA) to improve cooperation among national regulators and the Commission on fighting spam spyware and malware.

To strengthen the regulatory regime underpinning the Information Society, the Commission adopted on 13 November 2007 its proposals on the Telecom Reform, which include further provisions to reinforce security and privacy. Under the proposals national regulatory authorities will be given the power to issue binding instructions to companies on the security measures that are required to secure their electronic communication networks and services and to oversee proper implementation. Specifically in relation to spam, the proposals introduce the possibility for Internet Service Providers to take legal action against spammers.

Blog Posting Number: 958

Tags: spamware, adware, spyware