Euroalert will participate in the PSI Meeting 2010, organized by Proyecto Aporta and ePSIplatform

Lately we have announced you that Euroalert has been participating in several events and conferences where we share our experience and learn from our collegues. And we love it.

Our next participation will be in June, when the director of Gateway SCS, José Luis Marín, will be one of the speakers at the PSI Meeting 2010 "Realising the value of Public Sector Information", a meeting aimed to evaluate the economic and social benefits of the policies for the reuse of public sector information.

Invited by the organizers of the event, ePSI Platform (European Public Sector Information Platform) and Proyecto Aporta, our director will participate in the second round table, entitled "Turning the reuse of public sector information into new business models and innovative services", where he will contribute with the Euroalert experience at creating a business model which daily offers you the best content about the European Union, adding value to public sector information: call for proposals for funding projects, daily news about EU and tenders in european countries.

You can already consult the draft agenda of "PSI Meeting 2010" and, though the names have not been made public yet, we can tell you that several high profile speakers representing very high-level institutions in the field of Open Data have confirmed their assistance. The other three round tables are entitled:

• Overview of Europe’s Information Society Strategies: Best practices in policies to release the economic potential of PSI re-use.
• Measuring the economic potential of PSI re-use
• Social Value of PSI

The Proyecto Aporta, under the framework of Plan Avanza, aims to contribute to place Spain in the European vanguard in terms of reuse of public sector information. To this end, from the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade, Aporta promotes a culture of reuse of information in the field of public administration. For its part, the ePSIplatform, funded by the eContentPlus programme of the European Commission, aims to stimulate the action, to report and to monitor progress towards a stronger and more transparent environment for the growth of national and European reuse markets.

Recently we have been announcing events, initiatives and other activities where Euroalert.net has shared its experience and knowledge, as our participation in FICOD 2009, contributions to the community of open data, such as the publication of data on the British public bodies with notices in the OJEU, or as a case study in terms of business model, as happened with the book Web 2.0. The Business Model with the chapter "Doing business by selling free services", focusing on Euroalert.

The last time was a few months ago when Euroalert participated in the seminar "Smart construction: doing business in the Netherlands", organized by Enterprise Ireland, where we contributed with our experience in tendering and business opportunities with the public sector across the European Union.

You can already register to attend the event in Proyecto Aporta website. We remind you that the meeting will be at the headquarters of the Secretariat of State for Telecommunications and Information Society of the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade, at 41, Capitán Haya street, Madrid, on June 8 from 8.30 am . See you there!!

The current European Union news widget

In the series of posts specially dedicated to the new features released by Euroalert.net, we now have the pleasure to announce you the launch of the new Euroalert.net Current News widget. This new widget allows you to display up to date European Union Current News form Euroalert.net automatically on your website, and for free!

If you already have your Euroalert.net API key for the EU Calls for Proposals widget, you will not need a new one for this new widget. They can both coexist along-side one another in the same page, as you can see in the right sidebar of this blog, where we have installed both of them as an example. But if you don't have your API key yet, all you need to do is sign up with the Condelway platform.

We are not telling you any news about how to install, customize and use this widget, because this information is exactly the same we gave you last week, when we announced the release of its twin brother, the widget that allows you to publish EU Calls for Proposals. All the necessary documentation and examples are available on the EU news widget page within the section Widgets and tools for the Euroalert.net community.

We would especially like to thank our friend Macarena from La Oreja de Europa for her her input whilst launching the new widget.

In Euroalert.net we will keep on working to provide you the best information contents about the European Union as well as the best tools to make them useful for your websites.

Euroalert expands the information about tenders and commercial opportunities

As many of you may already know, Euroalert.net calls for tenders and commercial opportunities section has already been reactivated. We have not been updating new calls for tenders for a short period and now we have relaunched this section with a lot of extra information.

This halt was caused by the needs of the deep changes we were developing in order to provide a better service for you. Among those improvements, one of the most important you will find, is that now we are publishing in Euroalert.net the full content of each call for tender instead of the summary we used to publish in the previous version.

There has also been some important changes like the amount of calls for tenders or the updating frequency. You can now find every day, early in the morning, all the commercial opportunities published in the S Series of the Official Journal of the European Union, which have a complete English version.

As the amount of contents we can provide is too large to be easily published and browsed in Euroalert.net, we are delivering this information for our subscribers filtered in widgets. This way, companies on their intranets or associations and public bodies on their websites, can automatically display nearly effortless calls for tenders and commercial opportunities that are relevant for their corporate users.

Whatever, in the next days we will be posting about the possibilities of this service and the way some of our subscribers are using it. In the meantime, we invite you to have a look to the features of the Euroalert.net One Web Full Content service.