Dot.eu

In 1999 the European Council began discussing a single top-level domain for Europe. After several years of consideration, the European Commission appointed EURid as the operator of the .eu registry in 2003 and the general registration for the domain began in April 2006. Five years after its establishment, “dot.eu” internet domain name has more than 3.4 million registrations and has become the 9^th biggest top-level domain on the Internet and ranks in 4^th place in Europe.

This is an EU policy in action that has particularly benefited small and medium enterprises, which top the registrations. It can add value to rural businesses as it raises their profile on European markets by providing them with a pan-European identity on the internet. An “.eu” web presence is instantly recognized by customers who may otherwise be suspicious of a country domain name they do not recognize. A study of the brand strength of the “.eu” done in 2009-2010 found that “.com” had the strongest brand, but among the recent domain names .eu was most recognized (70%).

An additional benefit for rural businesses across Europe is that “.eu” in any of the 23 official languages of the EU and so does not require good knowledge of English for registration and for managing problems. It also allows the use of special letters such as "é", "ö", "ç" or "č" as well as non-Latin scripts such as the Cyrillic "ю", "ф", "ж", "й" or the Greek "ε", "ω", "μ", "φ" to the left of the ".eu" web-address, which is especially good news for Bulgaria.

The domain is most popular in Germany, where it has more than 1 million registrations, followed by the Netherlands with almost half a million, UK and France. In Bulgaria there are only 20,000 .eu registrations. However, in 2010 the increase in .eu registrations was driven by dramatic growth in Bulgaria (43%) and Estonia (39%).

Broadband access cost, speed and bundling

I came across interesting findings in the Broadband Access Cost study done for the European Commission. The study covers all EU countries, the EEA countries and some non-European countries for the period 2007-2009.

In terms of technologies used for providing broadband in the EU the xDSL offers are declining steadily since 2007, while the cable offers have the highest increase, followed by the fibre to home (FTTx) offers.

There is a steady decrease in the offers, which provide internet access only. Increasingly providers are bundling internet with telephone and television, with more than half of all broadband Internet access packages containing multiple services. This trend to bundle offers is to be observed for nearly all countries. Within the bundle market, Internet Access + Telephone offers are still predominant (24.6%) , but triple play (combining internet, telephone and TV) offers have become more important. Triple play is what we are using at home and I consider it a good option, although the speed is not very high (1MBPS). However, when we lived in Brussels, we were forced to use triple play, although we didn’t use neither the TV nor the telephone, simply because the triple play offer was cheaper than internet only access.

Our big surprise in Belgium was that all providers we checked had only metered offers, limiting the downloadable volume per month (we had 30 GB limit), something which is not done in Bulgaria for years. It turns out that apart from Belgium, Canada, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland and the UK, are also still having some metered offers in terms of limited number of hours per month or limited downloadable volume. The great majority of providers throughout EU, however, are offering unmetered internet access.

The study considers broadband access ranging from 144KBPS to 20+MBPS. The conclusions are that overall the prices decreased since 2007, with prices for lower speeds slightly increasing and prices for higher speeds decreasing. The decrease in prices is more significant in new member states (NMS). In general, within one country, the offers with higher bit-rates tend to be more expensive offers.

There are some countries, including Bulgaria, and also Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Slovenia, which offer all the different speed segments from slowest to fastest internet.

When comparing the average Broadband Internet Access Cost (based on the least expensive offers per country and expressed in EUR/PPP) in the New Member States (NMS) with the average in the EU15, prices in the former are higher in 2 of the 7 baskets. In October 2009, the average cost in the NMS is lower in the following baskets: 144-512 kbps incl., 512-1024 kbps incl., 1024-2048 kbps incl., 4096-8192kbps incl. and 8192-20Mbps incl.

The comparison over time of the Broadband Internet Access Cost in the New Member States (NMS) indicates a further decrease of costs, already observed in April 2009, in the baskets 4096 kbps - 8192 kbps incl., 8192 kbps-20 Mbps incl. and 20+ Mbps. This could possibly be stimulating consumers in the NMS into migrating to higher speeds.

This study provides some good news for rural and mountainous areas. The general tendency of decrasing prices makes the internet more accessible, especially in NMS where the prices are decreasing most rapidly. For the countries, which offer a wide range of broadband services with different speeds, rural and mountainous areas benefit of being able to choose different packages, including lower-speed packages at lower prices. The study mentions certain packagesm, which are not offered in all regions of a country, but they mainly include higher speed packages. The tendency to offer bundled packages including internet, telephone and TV also will add value to the service in rural areas.

ITC, Soft Skills and Women

I came across a study of managing organization and business readiness towards information technologies and information society implementation. The study quotes evidence from different authors that despite the huge investment in IT/IS (e.g. in US IT capital investment has reached 50% of business capital spending), the return on investment and the take up by industries has been disappointing. The authors argue that the main reason is that too much focus has been given to “hard issues” of IT/IS implementation, while the “soft issues” which underpin the capability of the organization to successfully implement IT into its work practices have been left behind. They argue that e-readiness capability assessment is essential to reduce the pitfalls and yield positive outcomes.

It seems that in addition to the hardware, broadband, internet speed and quality, the soft issues of people, their skills and their readiness to participate in the information society are equally important for e-inclusion and bridging the digital divide.

To me it is particularly interesting how women are acquiring IT skills and why they are so underrepresented in the IT and engineering occupations.

Commissioner Neelie Kroes in a speech on the EU initiative to get every woman digital is asking: “Can anyone name a woman who set up and run their own huge ICT company? In that hall of fame, the names you think of are Jobs, Gates, the Google guys, the Skype guys, Zuckerberg and his friends. It’s time we saw a woman on that list.”

I found a study trying to explain why there are so few women in technology and science (e.g. in US in 2008 only 20% of computer programmers and engineers were women, and only 7% of mechanical and electronics engineers were women). The study found that social and environmental factors clearly contribute to the underrepresentation of women in technology and science.

Negative stereotypes about girls’ and women’s abilities in engineering and science persist and can adversely affect their performance in these fields. The research shows that not only do most people associate math and science with “male,” they often hold negative opinions of women in “masculine” jobs or positions, like scientists or engineers.

Research by Mahzarin Banaji, a former AAUW fellow, and her colleagues at Harvard University shows that even individuals who consciously reject negative stereotypes about women in science often still believe that science is better suited to men at an unconscious level. These unconscious beliefs or implicit biases may be more powerful than explicitly held beliefs and values simply because we are not aware of them. A test has been developed to see people’s unconscious believes in this field. I took the test and to my surprise the result was that I have very strong unconscious bias against women participating in science and engineering.

It seems that in the information age we need to not only develop infrastructure and hardware and train and prepare people, but to overcome our biases from the past.

Public funds for support of the network economy in rural and mountainous regions

In rural and mountainous regions, where the installation of broadband and other technology innovations are considered unprofitable by the private sector, public funds are often the only option to fill in the gap.

Here are some examples of how European funding supported the e-economy and e-government in rural and mountainous areas throughout Europe.

The project Bridge Me in the Kozani mountainous region of Greece installed a high-speed wireless network with a budget of just EUR 350 000. It was promoted by the local authorities and led to connecting all the municipalities and 200 local government bodies in the Kozani region. Based on Wi-Fi and Wi-Max technologies, the network covers wireless links of 472 km, which successfully transfer Voice over IP/video and data in high altitude areas regardless of weather conditions (snow, rain, fog, wind). The project led to the introduction of a whole range of new electronic services, including e-payments, e-voting at local elections, job seeking, “back office” services via the internet, and forest fire prevention).

A project in South West England, initiated in 2010 and costing 137 million Euro, including European funding, is for deployment of super-fast (up to 100 Mb/second) fibre-based connections to 86% of all businesses in the region. 10,000 businesses are expected to benefit from the new network and it will indirectly lead to around 4300 permanent employment opportunities.

In the far North of Sweden, some 3000 km of fibre optic cables were installed with European and government funding of 10 million Euro. The works were entrusted to a public company, owned by the Council and the 14 municipalities in the County and the Local Councillors had to decide on the order of priority for connecting the villages. Once they had been equipped, various Internet service providers took over and the public support was no longer needed. Over 300 villages were connected, creating 60 jobs and three businesses. The project resulted in innovative applications in three specific areas:

- education with all schools in the region connected and having access to a variety of educational opportunities;

- e-health offering services such as post-childbirth check-ups and assistance for new parents and monitoring the quality of healthcare in old people’s homes are offered.

- industrial research and engineering networking - access to broadband has enabled companies like Volvo to remotely test their new vehicles in real time where pilots and test platforms are directly connected to the manufacturer’s laboratories, a thousand kilometres away.

The examples show that government and European funding is essential to lay the grounds for digital inclusion in rural and mountainous areas, and once the infrastructure is deployed, businesses take up the new opportunities with no need of further support.

Are social networking sites the next investment bubble?

Social networking is the fastest-growing internet activity. Internet traffic today, and the data generated by Facebook, is estimated to surpass that of all the world’s e-mail. Facebook alone has half a billion users, a little less than 10% of all the world’s population.

This is quite impressive, but even more impressive is the figure $50 billion, Goldman Sachs’ market capitalization estimation of Facebook, which even more recently has been cited as $82,9 billion. This is equal to twice the annual GDP of the whole of Bulgaria. Is it realistic for a social network occupying a single building?

Facebook is not alone. A number of other social media firms, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga and Groupon, are also valued in the billions. It’s true that they have built a vast community of committed users – with half a billion users of Facebook, 200 million “twitters” and 80 million users of LinkedIn.

The prevailing wisdom is that money from advertising will naturally flow from the large user base. LinkedIn has been successful in charging users for additional information on other users while Groupon gets a cut of each deal that its users buy, but Facebook, Twitter, Zynga and other sites rely on advertising that is more difficult to properly customize. In fact little is actually known about the sales and profits of the social networking companies as they are still private and don’t have to issue public financial statements.

According to media reports, Facebook generated about $2 billion in revenue in 2010, and so the $50 billion valuation means investors have awarded it a multiple of 25 times sales, compared with a nine-times multiple for Google, and Amazon's 2.5-times multiple. Facebook generates $4 per user, compared with Google's $24 per user and Yahoo's $8 per user, according to a recent report by JPMorgan.

Advertisers say there’s currently not enough advertising to go around and even if there was, why market to a mostly young audience that thinks you’re stepping on their personal conversations?

Apart from the threat that new technologies or rivals may easily replace the existing social networking business models, the big issue which may lead to bursting of the bubble is exactly privacy. As Scott Cleland puts it: “Simply what fuels Bubble 2.0 is the patently false core assumption that the current unfettered, widespread, and largely clandestine data mining of individuals private information in order to target specific individuals with personalized online advertising is aligned with real user interests; is a forthright business practice consumers are aware of and have meaningfully consented to; will not be legally constrained in the future; and will become the accepted norm. The holy grail here that has everybody so excited in the online-ad industry is that they understand that the more private details they can secretly learn about an individual user, they have a vastly higher chance of influencing them to do what they want them to do”.

And the new data privacy rules are already coming. Social-networking sites such as Facebook, or search engines such as Google, may face court action if they fail to obey planned EU data privacy rules. The European Commission wants to force companies to allow Internet users to withdraw any data held by the websites, calling it the "right to be forgotten," as well as make the firms provide more information on what data is collected and for what purpose.

“Work-around” solutions for rural areas

My online research led to a lot of examples where rural and remote areas and emerging markets are using innovative approaches to “work around” the lack of fixed-line broadband services and to fully benefit from the digital economy. It seems that such solutions can bring a competitive advantage of rural areas in the information age.

One way is the use of mobile data, which according to the Digital economy rankings 2010 (http://graphics.eiu.com/upload/EIU_Digital_economy_rankings_2010_FINAL_WEB.pdf) is becoming an important mode of broadband access and in emerging markets smartphones are increasingly used as a primary form of connecting to the internet. In Jakarta, for example, one-third of the inhabitants have a BlackBerry and Jakartans are among the world’s leading citizens in use of text messaging and mobile Facebook, largely because they lack fixed-line broadband services. What started as a technology “work-around” is now evolving to make full use of the digital economy. Currently online journalists and bloggers are thriving, using smartphones to report and publish, which led to a strong growth of mobile advertising spending. In addition, Jakarta now has a strong community of mobile application development entrepreneurs that source work globally. (http://graphics.eiu.com/upload/EIU_Digital_economy_rankings_2010_FINAL_WEB.pdf).

Another example is an innovative e-commerce platform put in place in Chinese rural areas, linking rural consumers and urban business (http://www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com/news-events/press-room/press-releases/online-shopping-opens-new-doors-for-villagers-and-retailers-in). The e-commerce solution is an integrated end-to-end service, which contains an online Catalogue Sales Platform (CSP), on which urban businesses can upload their products for marketing to rural customers. The service is delivered to villagers through local entrepreneurs, who provide shared internet access to the online shopping platform.

The success of IT outsourcing in India, Brazil, as well as in Bulgaria, has also been a proof that these countries compensate lower connectivity levels with digitally innovative business. In fact, according to the Digital economy rankings 2010 (http://graphics.eiu.com/upload/EIU_Digital_economy_rankings_2010_FINAL_WEB.pdf), innovative digital practices and applications are put into practice in the rural and emerging markets faster than in the developed world.

With the increased usage of mobile data tools and services, especially in the rural and emerging markets, interoperability, which is defined as being able to accomplish end-user applications using different types of computer systems, operating systems, and application software, interconnected by different types of local and wide area networks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interoperability), becomes a pressing issue. It is not a surprise that the EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes puts interoperability at the heart of the Digital Agenda for Europe (http://www.euractiv.com/en/infosociety/kroes-interoperability-heart-digital-agenda-interview-495525).

Digitally Divided by the Great Firewall of China

Some of the provinces of China, like Macao, have the most accessible broadband in the world, accounting for only 0,3% of the average monthly income there (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11162656). But as the technical and financial aspects of connectivity are overcome, a different kind of digital divide is emerging. The so called Great Firewall of China or the Golden Shield Project censors internet content thus creating a new kind of digital exclusion. Censoring is done through IP blocking, DNS filtering and redirection, URL filtering, connection reset. Access is blocked to sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall_of_China). In essence Chinese citizens are deprived of access to certain information and social networking and though they may have Internet access, they still suffer digital exclusion.

The censorship in China caused Goolge to retreat from the Chinese market as the company was no longer willing to censoring their results on Google.cn (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html). A “work-around” solution Google found was to put a link to Google.com.hk, the Hong Kong google, where they are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/update-on-china.html). I wonder if “work-around” solutions can be found for Facebook and YouTube.

According to the Digital economy rankings 2010 report of the Economist Intelligence Unit (http://graphics.eiu.com/upload/EIU_Digital_economy_rankings_2010_FINAL_WEB.pdf) when the primary mission of countries was to become “e-ready”, the interests of various stakeholders were aligned around a shared vision to increase digital access. But as the imperative turns from availability to greater usage, those interests can start to diverge. For reasons of safety and security, for example, governments take an interest in how constituents use the Internet. China’s interest is particularly keen, but China is far from alone in trying to control its digitally enabled citizens: the Committee to Protect Journalists names China, Vietnam, Syria, Iran and Egypt among the toughest countries to be a blogger, and has recently criticised Vietnam for shutting down political blogs (http://graphics.eiu.com/upload/EIU_Digital_economy_rankings_2010_FINAL_WEB.pdf).

Internet access a “human right”?

Last year Finland became the first country in the world to make broadband a legal right of each citizen (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10461048). Few months later it was followed by Spain (http://thenextweb.com/eu/2009/11/19/finland-spain-broadband-legal/). A poll of the BBC World reveals that four in five people around the world believe internet access is a fundamental right (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8548190.stm).

In Europe this is easily achievable. But what about the rest of the world? A UN report from 2010 reveals that the “digital divide” is widening both in terms of access and in terms of cost (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11162656). The Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Malawi, Guinea and Niger are the most expensive places with broadband access ranging from 10 to 40 times the average monthly income there. At the other end are Macao in China, Israel, Hong Kong, United States and Singapore, where the broadband access costs between 0,3 and 0,5% of the average monthly income in these countries. In Bulgaria this human right seems within reach as the cost is about 2-3% of the average monthly income. But Africa seems to fall short in achieving yet another human right.

“In the Cottage, Yet Industrious”

Having an interesting and important job, “saving the planet” has always been a priority for me. But with the arrival of my little daughter things have changed. Working from home, and even better, from my second home – my mountain cottage – seems just the right thing.

Studies on teleworking (http://www.eto.org.uk/faq/faq03.htm) suggest it provides a number of benefits: it saves costs for premises; it increases productivity as teleworkers avoid travel time and the interruptions of an office environment; it improves employees’ motivation, it increases organisations’ resilience in the face of external disruption such as transport strikes, severe weather and natural disasters. Teleworkers enjoy better work-family balance, reduced travel time and costs, flexible hours and increased job opportunities as they are not confined to a geographical location. On a more general scale teleworking reduces traffic congestion and urban pollution.

It is now easier than ever to take care of business no matter where you are, says the New York Times in “In the Cottage, Yet Industrious”. With a computer, internet access and a few telecommuting tools one can work from wherever his second home may be. “Cloud computing with web applications” allows using files and applications stored and run on the web. Thus if a report has to be reviewed by multiple colleagues, you can upload it to Google Docs and share it, and always have access to the latest version stored on the server. Or alternatively, “remote-access software” can tie you into your home or office computer directly and so you can work as if you’re in your office.

Not so easy from my cottage. I can only use mobile Internet access with limited traffic. And no wonder, as Bulgaria is on the last place in Europe with 33% of households in 2010 having Internet access, as reported by Eurostat (http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=STAT/10/193&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en).We are also on the last place in the European Union with only 1.6% of workers using teleworking at least a quarter of the time or more (http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/eiro/studies/tn0910050s/tn0910050s_3.htm). The good news is that this figure doubled since 2006 and that 62% of the households with children have Internet access. And I’m waiting to see teleworking become mainstream.