More accesible contact details in Tenders and Commercial Opportunities

As we have already told you in some occasions, one of our main concerns in Euroalert.net is make life easier for all our users. Well, one might find this objective a little bit too ambitious :) but, at least we try to do so by giving you as much information as possible and always in the most accessible and easy way.

This is the general idea that inspires the widgets that Euroalert.net provides in order to display EU contents automatically in any website or intranet, and is also the purpose to implement new features in our contents, such as we did, not so long ago, with the site plans of the Commission's DGs that appear in the Calls for Proposals.

Making things easier for users is also what we are intending to do by adding a new address layout for contact details in the Calls for Tenders.

Until now, the Calls for Tenders used to display the relevant contact details for each Call, such as the Contracting Authority, the institutions where further informations or documents can be requested, or any other relevant contact; just as part of the general text of the Call. From now on, these informations (the name of the contact person, the address, telephone, fax the e-mail, website...) will be isolated and highlighted in a box, and each of them will be identified with its own icon.

All these data are, of course, marked following the hcard microformat, according to our strict commitment to meet open standards and recommendations from the most prestigious international organizations.

So, with a quick overview you will have a straight forward access to the basic data of the contacts related to the Call you are interested in. This is one more way to make informations more usable and accessible for all Euroalert.net users and subscribers!

Waiting for Google Chrome

Over the last week, there have been a lot of, generally, enthusiastic announcements about how fast Google Chrome is acquiring a significant share of the Internet web browsers market. Some specialized webstats companies like StatCounter or XiTi, have already published shares between 1-2% less than 72 hours after the launch. Blogs for more or less geek users, such as SearchEngineWatch, have announced shares around 5% (Wow!!). The usage share in the first days of the new-born browser, at least in those hype moments, seem to make it the definitive browser.

In Euroalert.net we do not want to feel less than anybody, and therefore, want to publish our own data... So, we have to publicly announce that this week we almost haven't received any visit with Google Chrome. As these figures only show that a limited 0,5% of our traffic has been generated using this new tool, we can't even make any speculation about which browser has been substituted by this new one.

Those figures make us very proud, because they show something we already suspected..., that you, the users who usually visit Euroalert.net to look for relevant contents about the European Union for your work, do not have time to install the ultimate-most-fashionable browser and make tests. This is something you do later at home, when you are relaxing just reading your favourite blogs... :)

In any case, those figures encourage us to keep on offering you the best information about EU funding opportunities, commercial opportunities available in more than 30 countries, and, of course, the hottest EU News. This is the best way to keep the Community of Euroalert.net users always growing and growing, no matter the browser you use.

By the way, just as a curiosity, here is an image to show you how Euroalert.net would be displayed using Google Chrome: