European Union News - Information Society

CoRehab, Quuppa, Volumental are the three start-ups chosen to compete for the EIT Entrepreneurship Award 2013. Klaus Beetz, Business Director of the EIT ICT Labs stated that the EIT Entrepreneurship Award is a great opportunity to highlight and encourage entrepreneurial ventures that are coached and supported by the Business Developers of the ICT Labs.

MEPs at the Industry Committee approved draft EU rules that will enable companies or persons to get access to data such as maps, statistics, weather data, infrastructure listings, data from publicly funded research projects, and digitised books from libraries, which they can then use to develop their businesses. According to MEPs, EU firms could save billions of euros thanks to these draft EU rules that would enable them to re-use public data instead of producing them from scratch

Google has made proposals to try to address the European Commission's four competition concerns. The Commission has concerns that Google may be abusing its dominant position in the markets for web search, online search advertising and online search advertising intermediation in the European Economic Area (EEA). Therefore, the Commission is seeking feedbacks on commitments offered by Google to address these competition concerns.

Alexander Ljung & Eric Wahlforss of SoundCloud are European Entrepreneurs of the Year while Jon Reynolds of SwiftKey is Young European Entrepreneur of the Year (under 30 years). The Europioneer awards are a partnership between the European Commission and The Next Web. On this occasion, 908 nominations were received from across Europe.

The European Commission adopted a Green Paper that opens a public consultation to explore what this Internet on TV and TV on Internet convergence of technology and content could mean for Europe's economic growth and innovation, cultural diversity, and consumers. In particular, the Green Paper asks whether the current approach will also be appropriate in the future.

The European Commission welcomed the launching of the first pan-European 'MOOCs' (Massive Open Online Courses) initiative. The initiative is led by the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU) and mostly involves open universities. So far, it counts with around 40 courses, covering a wide variety of subjects, will be available free of charge and in 12 different languages.

The Permanent Representatives Committee of the Council endorsed the compromise reached between the Council and the European Parliament in their negotiations on a new financial and governance framework for the European satellite navigation systems (EGNOS and Galileo) for the period covered by the multi-annual financial framework for 2014-2020.

Among the conclusions of two new Joint Research Centre (JRC) studies on ICT and employability, there is that more attention should be paid to the role of ICT in this field. According to the JRC, reviewed literature shows that ICT are crucial for employability, as they enable the development of a large set of individual skills, and also allow job seekers to have access to more creative jobs and enhance their career prospects.

The European Commission presented a draft regulation aimed at cutting by 30% the cost of rolling out high-speed Internet. The new rules leave organisational issues very much to the discretion of member states.