First (tender) announcement of the year... in Euroalert.net

2010 has been such a busy year for Euroalert.net that we didn't even realize to wish you all a Merry Christmas or to publish the traditional end-of-the-year post listing all the achievements and highlights of the last twelve months... Those of you who also follow Euroalert.net Twitter account of joined our Facebook page have already received our Christmas greetings, but for all who don't here the best wishes for year 2011 from all the Team who makes Euroalert.net, we hope it will be a year full of good projects and new opportunities for all of you.

The truth is that this year, in addition to Euroalert.net's usual activity which brings you every day all the information on EU News, funding opportunities and EU grants as well as government contracts and public procurement in the Union, we have started offering a daily update on the legislation published by the Official Journal of the European Union, and we have also inaugurated the new Euroalert.net on-line store.

But 2010 has been above all THE year for Open Data, a year which brought us the occasion to take part in all the events for open data community we managed to attend, even opening some of the data related to public procurement which are managed by Euroalert.net and releasing them in our project ShowMeTheTenders.net; a year in which we were also honoured to be one of the cases of PSI reuse to be mentioned by some of the most relevant Spanish media such as El País, Expansión or Cinco Días. This year Euroalert.net also contributed to Commission's public consultation on PSI Directive, as well as the consultation launched by the Spanish Ministry of Industry on the PSI-reuse Royal Decree. We are sure that all these common efforts will lead to a more favourable Open Data legislation quite soon.

This is not going to be a the detailed count of all 2010 achievements, not at all..., but just as an example of Euroalert.net activity over the past months, on 30 December - almost closing up the year, we launched the new tailored alerting service on public procurement 10ders Alerts - more details will follow in another post. This new service, together with some more in the pipeline, will complete over 2011 the most comprehensive tool kit of information services to help SMEs to access public procurement and government contracts.

In some countries there used to be some sort of traditional expectation about which would be the first TV commercial of the new year... as a “tender version” of such tradition, here comes the first announcement - tender announcement of course..., of year 2011: those interested in multilateral tendering, at your marks, first announcement of year 2011 is a EuropeAid forecast for a contract to provide support to the Kosovo Judicial/ Prosecutorial Council under funded an IPA instrument.

Happy 2011 to every one and good luck to all those bidding this year!!!