The Euroalert Community expands to Google+

In addition to wish you a happy and great 2012, we want to start sharing with you our new Euroalert's Google+ page. This page has been created to provide a new place to share our contents and for the conversation among the Euroalert Community members. If you add Euroalert page to your Google+ circles, you can make comments to the most significant contents provided by Euroalert. Of course, you can keep doing +1 to any content we publish and you liked or that have been useful for you.

Likely you are already part of one of the platforms and services that we use to enable to the Euroalert Community members a direct way to enjoy our contents. However, we will use this post to summarize all the services where you can find our contents completely for free. For example, more than 2200 users are already following Euroalert.net content concerning the European Union in both English and Spanish via Twitter. If you decide to follow Euroalert on Twitter, you will be able to find the latest news about the EU, the EU grants to finance projects and information on relevant public contracts and tenders. In other words, you will enjoy a small sample of the free contents published on the Euroalert website and included in more advanced products and services that you can find in our online store.

If you use other social networks like Facebook, Euroalert has also a page there and you can always contact us through this page, and through Euroalert page on Linkedin. Our team is available to receive your comments and suggestions through these channels in addition to other more traditional ways such as our e-mail.

On the other hand we also want to remind you about Euroalert free newsletter, that is currently being sent to several thousand people every week, and in which we inform on the most significant up to date European content, EU grants and public contracts. Besides of course this blog, which has as main objective to keep you up to date on our product enhancements and our small achievements as a company. Through Euroalert's profile on SlideShare we share materials from all the events where we participate with the aim of contributing with our experience as a company. From Euroalert albums in Picasa you can download the photos that we have taken in our visits throughout Europe and that we provide to the whole Community.

We would like to know your opinion, as we are always listening to our users in order to figure out the best ways to improve our services, so you can enjoy all the content related to the EU that we provide to the Euroalert Community. By the way, just for those who are already part of our Community, you will enjoy special offers and promotions like the one that we have just launched. Inserting the EURLRT11 code, you are able to get a discount on public contracts alerts and on the customized newsletter on European information.

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!!!

Eurodatum.com, a new link to EU information

A couple of weeks ago we posted on the recommendation made about Euroalert.net by the program "Press Corner" on EuroparlTV, something we got to know from our dear Macarena García, who's already an habitué of this blog, and from our friends from Eurodatum.com, who were also recommended on EuroparlTV. It was hight time for us to make the due introductions to our friends on Eurodatum.com (sorry, no way we can tell you their names; that's the best kept secret in the Union... ;-) ).

The directory of EU links Eurodatum.com, was launched on the summer of 2009 with the aim to gather the most useful websites related to the European Union, its institutions, history, job market and stakeholders. This website, whose followers grow every day, offers today a solid basis of around 750 links sorted by different types of categories which allow quick access to many informations about the EU. In fact, among the links gathered by Eurodatum.com in the category of Paper & Internet EU Media you can also find Euroalert.net, something we would like to take this occasion to thank them for.

The main objective of Eurodatum.com remains to provide with quick EU-related links and data, something which its own creators have expressed saying that they “cruelly missed such a tool in our professional lives and designed it as a dashboard for all EU-interested people out there, as a must-have link to keep at the top of their Favorites’ list”.

Something that was highlighted on EuroparlTV "Press Corner" was the multilingual character of Eurodatum.com, something that, as it is the case for Euroalert.net, is said to be highly appreciated by European internauts. Eurodatum.com is already available in English, French and Spanish, but following its global vocation its founders plan to soon offer more language versions.

Apart from EuroparlTV, Eurodatum.con has been recommended since its creation by some quite relevant actors on the EU scenario, such as different national and regional governments in Spain, Belgium or Bulgaria, think-tanks, European studies associations within and outside the Union, or prestigious Universities like Berkeley, Boston, Barcelona or Turku, blogs...; and, of course, they count upon Euroalert.net recommendation!

You can go to their website, and also visit Eurodatum.com page on Facebook, or get in touch with them through the email info@eurodatum.com.

It is always a real pleasure to find dynamic people with good ideas which make easier to access EU information, something which has been Euroalert.net raison d'être since its very beginning and for what we keep on working everyday. All Euroalert.net team welcomes Eurodatum.com and wish them very good luck to make this project grow.

Good luck Eurodatum.com!

Euroalert.net... now in Twitter!!

In Euroalert.net we are always up to the minute. It has been a year since we announced you from this blog that we had created our fan page on Facebook.

Now we go a step further and begin using the microblogging service that has even generated a new language: of course, we are talking about, where Euroalert.net has opened a new channel of communication with the community.

Following us on Twitter you will find the headlines of Euroalert.net daily news, the community programmes published on OJEU and calls for proposals as soon as we elaborate them for Euroalert just as they are published in the Official Journal of the European Union.

You can now follow our tweets, as you follow our Facebook page and thus we will have one more way to interact with you, to collect and understand your views on the current European affairs and, as always with Euroalert.net, to keep abreast of the latest news happening in Europe. The Swedish Presidency of the EU is already following our tweets!

Euroalert.net will participate in FICOD 2009 in one of the panels on open government

10,000 attendees, nearly 200 journalists and bloggers, 45 workshops, 28 roundtables, 9 plenary sessions, one Hollywood star ... and we are proud to announce that Euroalert.net will participate in the roundtable on re-use of public sector information (PSI).

The third edition of the International Forum of Digital Contents, FICOD 2009, is coming soon. The 17, 18 and 19 November, the Congress Hall Juan Carlos I in Madrid will be the focus of the present digital content industry in Spanish language, and will have U.S.A., world leader in the industry, as a invited country.

Many media have echoed that Kevin Spacey will present at the inaugural keynote The social network, his biopic about the three founders of the most popular social network of the moment, Facebook. However, for us, the news is that Euroalert will be in FICOD to share its experience adding value through the re-use of the EU public information that you know so well: tenders and public procurement contracts and project funding opportunities.

José Luis Marín, our CEO, will be among the speakers at the roundtable "O-gov: creating value through the reuse of public sector information" which will be held on November 19 at 15.30 in Room 1, and which will undoubtedly contribute to the work that Aporta project began last year. The interim panel includes in this same table Chris Corbin, from ePSI Platform and Javier Hernandez-Ros, European Commission, among others. And there, we will explain how Euroalert.net has adapted its business model, which was documented as a case study in the book "Web 2.0: The Business Model", with a great deal of technological innovation to exploit new opportunities of the Internet: to contribute value to public information for all our readers, customers and subscribers, and then it is reused again in their own websites automatically through our widgets.

With the boost of the Secretary of State for Telecommunications and Information Society of the spanish Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism, FICOD born in 2007 to promote the products and services from digital contents industry and as to enable the exchange of good practices and experiences among attendees. Red.es is responsible for organizing this great event, framed and funded within the Avanza2 Plan for the Development of Information Society and Knowledge.

Professionals coming from sectors as diverse as television, music, publishing, film, videogames, websites and online publications, online training and many other come together each year in FICOD, their meeting point. For that reason and because of you, the Euroalert community, that make Euroalert possible, we are honoured to be among the protagonists of this year.

We will keep on informing you about our participation in FICOD, but for now remember that you have an appointment with us on November 19! Registration is free and the provisional agenda is available from the website of FICOD.

Bye, bye 2008...

We have almost reached the end of the year and, as everyone does, it's time for Euroalert.net to turn a look back and see what these last twelve months of work have been.

In 2007 we already paved the way for new developments and set some objectives for this year always seeking to offer you more and better contents and tools. We are not going to bore you with a listing of aaaaaal the posts we've sent you this year (for those of you who are in a nostalgic mood today, you can have a look at the list of post published by month... :)), but what we would like to do with you is remember those changes and improvements we are most proud of.

2008 has been the year when we formally launched the new international version of Euroalert.net and, as a consequence, when this international Euroalert.net official blog was born. Since then, we have little by little been adding to this version features and tools which were already available for the Spanish version, and today, nearly at the end of the year, we can affirm that the international Euroalert.net version has already become an adult ...

Some new features were added during this year for the automatic publication of EU contents in any site or blog using Euroaler.net widgets, such as new icons, buttons and tools to improve their aspect when you implement them in your own web or blog, and some other possibilities to improve their layout and give you more options to include them.

But we have also made some improvements in the way we publish everyday contents in the Euroalert.net site. As accessibility is one of our main concerns when developing such features, one of the changes we introduced was the new format for the contact addresses which are referred to in all the tenders and commercial opportunities we publish.

Some challenges we had to deal with over the last year came directly from the EU, such as the adaptation of the tenders and commercial opportunities section of Euroalert.net to the new published CPV codes, which we made from the very first day of their official introduction, both for the publication in Euroalert.net and for the filters introduced in our widget.

Besides all this, the blog itself has also come through some improvements. Once the Euroalert.net Official shifted its regularity from a fortnight to a weekly basis, we decided that these posts should also have their place in the newsletter, giving an opportunity to all those who did not knew about it, to join the Euroalert.net community.

As we found out that it was an interesting information for you all, we started to create the Euroalert.net Directory of EU blogs. Your contributions have been, and still are, really valuable for this task, and we therefore keep on encouraging you to send us all your suggestions about useful interesting EU blogs.

And, for those of you who are Facebook users, 2008 has been the year when we released the Euroalert.net Facebook fan page, so that the community would have a new space where they can meet and interact.

Let's leave this post as an exercise to review the work of a whole year. A year in which we hope Euroalert.net has provided you with more useful and interesting contents for your work. We will post on our new ideas for 2009 and the projects we plan to launch when the New Year comes, as the starting shot...

So, the last thing for us to do, is to wish you all to celebrate a great farewell for 2008 and welcome year 2009, which we hope it will be full of joy, success and new projects for all of you. We also hope to be here with you, offering always the best.

Happy 2009 for everyone!!

Euroalert.net opens its facebook fan page

Today we are making a very brief-August-type, but still exciting, announcement: Euroalert.net just joined Facebook and opened its fan page!!!

As every new release, it is still very simple but we hope it will grow and become a great space where all of you, the Euroalert.net community can interact, share and of course meet each other.

You are all invited to become facebook fans and supporters and join the Euroalert.net facebook page!!!