Euroalert brings you the latest European funding opportunities

The European Union regularly publishes grants through its institutions, bodies and agencies addressed to all audiences and stakeholders such as NGOs, SMEs, universities or government agencies. You only need to find them... on time!

Euroalert makes easy this task by publishing grants, i.e., the calls for proposals to apply for funding opportunities that count with European funds, and offers a personalized service to filter to get only what you are looking for. We can already say that you will find gathered in Euroalert these grants in all topics before than anywhere else.

The task may seem simple, but it is not. Not all EU grants are published in the Official Journal of the EU (OJEU). Nor all the information is published in more than one language, even the most basic information. For free, Euroalert provides grants that are published in the OJEU and whose most basic information is usually published in all 23 official EU languages. You can directly access to the latest grants published in OJEU through the Euroalert's calls for proposals website, to subscribe to the free weekly newsletter or to install the free widget onto websites and blogs, all for free and without further obligation.

But as we said, not all EU grants are published in the OJEU. Euroalert customizes the search by offering even more, both in number of grants by topic and in ways to access information that may interest you the most. An example of a grant which has not been published in OJEU, which is by the way very interesting nowadays, is "Erasmus for young entrepreneurs". The European Commission through its Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme annually publishes this grant that can help many entrepreneurs. Euroalert provides key information relating to this call in English. To keep track of this opportunity and many others not published in the OJEU, you can try for ten days, with no-obligation, the Customized Newsletter on EU information. This newsletter sends you directly to your e-mail only the most relevant information and by applying the delivery options, only when you need it.

Of course, Euroalert also proposes to provide this service in the form of “payment widget”, so you can use more advanced content as already do many institutions and companies. You can customize it to your needs and those of your users and customers in order to allow them to get information on grant opportunities in the most useful way possible. If you want to learn more about this service and the ones referred above, or any other offered by Euroalert, you can call +32 2 318 03 01 or use any of these forms of contact. As you see, Euroalert makes easier to find the funding opportunities that best fit your needs.

Euroalert presents its Social Media Newsroom

In order to make the cooperation with press, media and others interested parties easier, Euroalert has created a Social Media Newsroom with specific material published. In this section of our website, we provide you a Press Kit for Media, different ways to contact us and, among other interesting things, the social media that we use to communicate our services of information about the European Union and our competitive intelligence products on public tenders. In addition to this, we also provide you a sample of our  past participation in different media.

A few months ago, Euroalert presented its extension into the Google+ circles. This network is one of the ways to contact us to know more aboutour products and to potential collaborations. Other social networks that Eurolert commonly uses, are also included in our Social Media Newsroom. 

Euroalert is open to all kinds of collaborations with the media and other stakeholders. For example, did you know that Euroalert provides EU breaking news through a widget? We offer this personalized service for only €30 a month. For this service and many others that may be of your interest, you can phone us +32 2 318 03 01 or use our Contact page. We hope our Social Media Newsroom is useful for you and we thank you in advance to help us to improve it.

9 of May: Celebrate the Europe Day with Euroalert

Since Robert Schuman delivered his famous 'Schuman Declaration' on 9th of May 1950, Europeans celebrated that day the Europe Day. This statement officially has started what is today known as the European Union, but back then it started the European Coal and Steel Community. 

Although 9th of May is not a national holiday in any of the 27 Member States, as you can see on the calendar that we created, Representations of the European institutions such as the Representation of the European Commission in Spain, they do celebrate that day events to promote the European spirit. Among these activities, the European Commission in Spain has made available a mobile application  for Android and iPhone, and with the collaboration of Euroalert, so as not to miss any detail of the celebrations and that also allows you to know the latest news related to the EU.

In Euroalert, most of the content is related to the European Union. You can access to the EU breaking news from our News section and select the specific topic that interests you. You can also install a widget on your website with this news and customize it. On the other hand, if the information you need is related to financing and business opportunities in the EU, you can check the grants issued by the European institutions and also adapt them to your web through a widget that you can customize. Regarding the business opportunities that are published in the EU, among other competitive intelligence products, we "alert you" on the public tenders relevant to your business through our alert system 10ders Alerts. We can not forget the European legislation that is published daily in the EU Official Journal (OJEU). You can also follow it in Euroalert through our newsletters. In the coming weeks, we will announce important developments in our products competitive intelligence in public tenders that surely will be very useful for you.

This is the way that Euroalert has to celebrate the 9th of May, Europe Day with you: bringing you the European information you may need and what else you might be interested. If you want more information about any of our products you can visit our online store or contact us via e-mail or via Twitter and Facebook.

Euroalert.net gets ready for the changes in the new TED website

As you all know Euroalert.net publishes and distributes a set of different information products related to public procurement announcements from European Union countries which are published in the OJEU. This means that we follow closely any change made by the Office of Publications of the European Union regarding the structure and characteristics of the publication of these public procurement notices.


A few changes, which can probably be considered as some of the most relevant ones affecting public tendering information and publication in recent times, will take place in the coming days: the new TED website will be available from March 16th, changing its interface and some of its functionalities. As we all know big changes sometimes cause some inconveniences to users, as it will be the case with the loss of saved search profiles for TED users, which will have to be saved and redefined in the new system once the new TED site is launched.

Since the announcement of the migration a couple of months ago, we started working to ensure that as far as possible any of Euroalert.net users and subscribers will be affected by the changes to be introduced in TED website. This changes will restructure essential elements such as NUTS codes and some other characteristics for filtering announcement and notices.

One of the key values of the services provided by Euroalert.net is being able to prepare ourselves and ensure a completely transparent transition for our customers so that the system remains up and running and their functionalities are still the same from the very first day on all our services: 10ders observatory, with data mining services on information from public markets, Euroalert widgets for the automatic publication of procurement notices in the web of our subscribers and web services for content delivery.

Since we started offering business opportunities in the EU public procurement market within the Euroalert.net website there has already been some relevant changes in TED structure which have been immediately assimilated by Euroalert.net, always ensuring the best service for our customers and subscribers. Not so long ago, this was the case for the update of cpv codes in 2008. One of our main commitments is to be prepared to offer to those who rely on Euroalert.net the best possible service.

We will continue keeping you up to the date with these changes and making sure that Euroalert.net always provides you with the best information services on EU public procurement in the most reliable way and at very cost-effective prices thanks to our innovative search technology.

One more step towards an ever closer Union on public procurement..., and more filters available for Euroalert.net

By the end of last year, and more precisely on December 20th 2009, the transposition period given to Member States to adapt their national legislations to Directive 2007/66/EC (the so called Remedies Directive), ended up, being that at the beginning of 2010 only France, Poland, Slovakia and the United Kingdom had fulfilled their obligation and notified the Commission about the measures taken to do so. Given that only three more MS had notified partial transposition measures, it leaves twenty MS which had failed to notify the Commission about transposition measures concerning Directive 2007/66/EC by the beginning of 2010.

Looking back, it was in May 2006 when the Commission put forward a proposal to amend the Remedies Directive aimed to ensure a more equitable environment in public procurement and encourage EU companies to tender in any MS by providing them higher legal certainty. This review based on previous consultations, was intended to improve the effectiveness of pre-contractual reviews as well as providing a way to fight against situations where redress measures were not sufficiently clear for unsuccessful bidders or even situations of “race to the signature” in which there is not a reasonable period between the award of the contract and its signature.

One of the key elements of this revision on Remedies Directives has been the introduction of a harmonized 10-day Mandatory Standstill Period between the award of the contract and its signature, in order to allow unsuccessful bidders to request additional information and take appropriate actions if they consider that their right has been harmed by breach of the rules. If the standstill period is not respected or the contract has been illegally awarded, the Directive provides the possibility to bring it to the Court and declare the ineffectiveness of the contract. The ineffectiveness of the contract can be declared on various grounds such as the failure to advertise the contract in the OJEU or the breach of the standstill period and the automatic suspension, and can be claimed up to six months after the contract award.

Apart from any dogmatic issues which have already come to the Palestra, it seems that contracting authorities, economic operators and national Courts will now have to face the legal consequences of declaring a contract's ineffectiveness, the compensations, as well as the eventual practical issues arising from that declaration such as protection of properties, subcontractors rights protection or any other situation originated. It seems, indeed, quite an interesting debate...

The new Remedies Directive targets very specially the illegal direct award of contracts, which has been considered by the European Court of Justice as the most serious breach of Community law in the field of public procurement on the part of a contracting authority, giving the Courts the possibility to declare ineffective a contract directly awarded if transparency and open competitiveness has not been respected.

Further to these redress measures, Directive 2007/66/EC also introduces some new practical issues such as the introduction of a new form, the so-called Voluntary Ex Ante Transparency (VEAT) notice, which allows contracting authorities to avoid ineffectiveness of the contract based on failure to advertise by giving the required transparency. This type of document will generally be associated to the award procedure of a contract without prior publication of a contract notice or the negotiated without a call for competition procedure.

In addition to improving access to information concerning Community public procurement, the implementation of Directive 2007/66/EC will also have some practical implications, providing new filtering options for the information tools which allow Euroalert.net users to publish EU procurement notices in any website, allowing them to publish these type of notices automatically in their sites.

We have already mentioned in several occasions the difficulties that many EU companies face when taking part in public procurement market. These barriers to access public procurement market, which are even being considered under the scope of the new European Innovation Plan, burden very specially small but very innovative companies, as it is considered that promoting innovation by public procurement could be a good contribution to rationalize public expenses. This is one of the reasons why Euroalert.net keeps its commitment to continue to facilitate access to information about public procurement opportunities in the European Union for all interested public.

We will keep you posted on any new feature which comes up to improve Euroalert.net tools, as well as any new possibility that new developments on EU public procurement rules may offer for all of you.

Euroalert keeps on crossing borders ... together with Infosistema in Portugal

In September we announced you that Euroalert went to Lisbon to attend meetings and events of the business delegation of Castilla y León that accompanied the President of the Junta de Castilla y León, Juan Vicente Herrera, to the Portuguese capital.

In that mission we had the opportunity to promote Euroalert.net EU information services: business opportunities in the public sector and community funding, in the business meetings that ADE Internacional EXCAL, the external trade promotion Agency of the Junta of Castilla y Leon, had organized.

Well, as a result of our expedition to our neighbour country, we have reached an agreement for the distribution of Euroalert.net services in Portugal through the company Infosistema, with whom we share important values such as commitment to innovation and value creation for our customers. Thus, the service that we provide to Euroalert subscribers in Portugal will be improved thanks to a much closer presence and to the local knowledge that the team of Infosistema will provide us.

As always, we want you to feel participants in this new success in Euroalert expansion, because when Euroalert.net advances and overcomes another barrier, alll of you jump with us. Thank you so much for this new jump!!

Próxima estação do Euroalert.net: Lisboa!!

If this autumn you are travelling anywhere in Europe, you'll probably meet a member or associate of Euroalert.net, because we won't stop!! We had already told you that at the beginning of October Euroalert.net will be in Brussels to assist to Open Days 2009, but, before that, we are visiting the capital of our portuguese neighbours.

Among 21 and 23rd September we will be in Lisbon to promote Euroalert.net EU information and public tender services, to visit some customers and clients and to participate in events and meetings prepared for the delegation of entrepreneurs from Castilla y Leon that will accompany the President of the Junta of Castilla y León, Juan Vicente Herrera, to the portuguese capital. We will have the chance to meet Portuguese entrepreneurs in the business meetings organized by ADE International EXCAL, the Junta of Castilla y León agency for external promotion.

E agora nossa estréia em português neste blog...: Estamos seguros de que esta viagem será uma oportunidade perfeita para reforçarmos os laços com as instituições e agências portuguesas, e convidamos a todos aqueles de vocês que estejam interessados em ser parte da comunidade Euroalert.net em Portugal e aproveitar as ferramentas da Euroalert.net para a distribuição de conteúdos, informações e oportunidades de negócios no sector público europeu, a que nos enviem um email.

A comunidade Euroalert.net cresce e atravessa fronteiras!

Crisis? What crisis?

Many of the contents Euroalert.net provides with to all our users and subscribers have lately been focused on the same burning issue, which is in fact one of the main concerns European citizens have expressed to their institutions: economic crisis. And the truth is that crisis is actually the talk of the town: it is in all newspapers front cover, opening all TV news and, of course, a new very common topic for chitchat...

In Euroalert.net we know crisis is there, that it is really serious and is probably going to be one of the historic events our grand-children will study at school. However, we would not like that a newcomer in conversations and news, makes anybody do without something that has already become an essential tool for our subscriber's work: Euroalert.net information widgets.

We all agree that information has become an essential item, at it is not a luxury thing one might do without in hard times. For that reason, Euroalert.net will not change tariffs for widgets this year, therefore maintaining the same pricing lists as for year 2008.

From Euroalert.net we aim not only to provide contents, but also solutions and tools to get out of the economic turn-down. Public procurement, as well as being one more source of wealth and employment for countries, is also a secure and reliable opportunity for businesses. EU Programmes boost many different areas such as research, training, culture or business support, and there are constantly calls for proposals which may be of great help in such fields. Euroalert.net offers them every day.

All these essential resources will keep on being available for everybody browsing our web to be informed about the European Union, as well as through Euroalert.net free widgets. And for all those wishing to enjoy a service adapted to their own needs, we will continue to provide Euroalert.net personalised widgets in the same conditions as we did last year.

So, quoting Vinton Cerf, one of the “fathers” of the Internet who happened to be with our friends from CTIC at the end of April: there are still people who “take a great deal of pleasure in providing information to others who can use it”... We like that!

Public Sector Opportunities to tackle the crisis (I)

Over the last weeks, or even months, we have been waking up with worse and worse news about the global financial situation and the consequences of the economic turmoil. Rescue measures for some major financials institutions, emergency meetings at the highest EU level, attempts to reassure European savings, ..., are at the top of last days news. In such a situation, one can't help but rush every morning to read the news at Euroalert.net, to check whether the storm calmed down, or if we should still be worrying about any new financial disaster.

In such circumstances it seems that a new scenario has been installed, to which we should better be familiar as soon as possible... So, the time has come to take action and apply imaginative solutions, such as turning to Public Sector and find ways to get the most of all the opportunities it is offering to us.

How many times have you realized, once it was too late, that you could have submitted a proposal for a European project? This happens too often ... Or even worse, what happens when one is not aware of the opportunities he's missing to finance projects, just because he doesn't even know about them?! That's too bad...

Don't let this happen to you again ... in Euroalert.net you will find updated information about the calls for proposals published in the OJEU. Also, if you have a website or intranet in which you could publish those informations (i.e., if you are a sectoral organization, a public institution or if you have a company intranet), you can include those Calls for EU Projects among your contents using our Calls widget. Thus, your users will not pass by potential opportunities to get public funding.

These widgets will help you to display in your web sites updated and timely information about the Calls for Proposals to finance projects, and your users will have easy access to all the details concerning them: deadlines and submission procedures, funded actions, budget .... and no need for you to track the Official Journal.

In our last post we already spoke about the new 2008 CPV Codes which apply to EU Calls for Tenders. Those are also good opportunities offered by public procurement on services, supplies or even for the execution of construction works; but this is something we will talk about in a future post.

See... crisis times can also be an opportunity to build up new skills, such as making good use of all the funding instruments the EU is offering us.

New Tender's CPV codes already in Euroalert.net

Those of you who are already subscribers of the Euroalert.net weekly Newsletter, will be aware of the changes that the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities has made on the CPV codes which describe the content of contracts in public procurement. For those who haven't subscribed to the Newsletter yet, here are some tips.

Every day, the OJEU publishes in the S Series, more than one thousand calls for tenders for works, services or supplies contracts in public procurement: the same you can find every morning in Euroalert.net Calls for Tenders section.

In order to allow economic operators to have free and easy access to these contracts, CPV codes (whose 2008 version has been adopted September 17th), provide a unique classification vocabulary. This system is made up of a main vocabulary of eight digits which give a detailed description of the product or service the contract is related to, followed by a check digit which verifies the code. The more you go down in this tree structure, the more accurate the description is. Simple, isn't it?

There is also a supplementary vocabulary which, although it is not always used, helps to complete even more the description giving some additional details for one specific call. This is the short version of the full description of the new CPV codes for Public Procurement Announcements which we provide you in Euroalert.net. In this section you will also find some documents you can download, which will certainly be useful.

In essence, this coding system aims to provide the highest transparency and accessibility to information, contributing to the fulfilment of the Four Freedoms within the EU Single Market.

In fact, Euroalert.net widgets also provides some tools which can help to improve access to calls for tenders and commercial opportunities in public procurement within the EU, as it allows not only to automatically display them in any website, intranet or blog, but also to filter the results and display only those which really meet the needs of the subscribers. In order to make you as easy as possible to access EU contents, in Euroalert.net we have introduced those changes over the CPV codes from the very first day, adapting the publication and filters to these news.

In future posts we will be spending some time explaining how you can get the most from Euroalert.net Calls for Tenders widgets in public procurement, using the CPV codes, as well as some other features.

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.

Free EU Calls for Proposals Widget for your website

We are posting today on something we wanted to share with the international Euroalert.net community for quite some time. As some of you already know, we have been working on a widget that allows you to display updated EU Calls for Proposals automatically on your Website for free. You can see the first example of this kind, in the sidebar of this blog, where you will find the last 10 Calls for Proposals published in the Official Journal of the EU.

Some of you are already in “the know” either via email conversations we have had or through your direct involvement with the dozens of tests we have made into the last few months. During this precious time, we have been dealing with all the little things that appear when you think everything is fixed and, of course, improving all the aspects of the project to release a reliable service even in beta. A special thanks to all those that collaborated with us and those who we asked for help because without you, nothing that we have achieved would have been possible.


To get a widget for your website all you need to do is register with Condelway, the platform through which Euroalert.net distributes all of its contents. Once you have signed up, you can manage your subscriptions through the Condelway dashboard. The wizard will help you to customize the code for your website or blog if you do not have programming skills. For advanced users the complete API documentation is published in the Euroalert.net website as well as some examples on how this widget has been installed by some other Euroalert subscribers.

We are continually developing new features for our services to extend and improve them. As we always do, we will keep you informed about any new version we may release, announcing it in this blog and updating all the documentation.

Hot off the press are our EU News widget and the EU Programmes and Initiatives widget, which have been developed so that you can provide information from these areas to your users on your website! We will be posting on it very soon.

More EuroalertSearch Gadgets and Widgets

Recently we have seen some important improvements to the Euroalert search engine euroalertSearch. Making the most of your suggestions (which we have not been short of) and some of our own ideas, that until now we had not be able to implement, we believe that we have significantly improved the quality of our search results. In any case, we are continually updating and making improvements on a weekly basis whether or not they appear in our blog. If you find an area of information for which EuroalertSearch does not provide sufficient quality of contents or, you think does not highlight the relevance of a particular website, do not hesitate to contact us so that we may analyse and resolve the issue.

Along with this update, we have taken the opportunity to release the EuroalertSearch search engine widget code so that you may install it on your websites or blogs as we said in our previous post about the installing euroalertSearch in the search bar of your browser.

Those of you that use iGoogle can also install euroalertSearch with the gadgets of your profile page. The point of this gadget is similar to the euroalertSearch plug-in for the search bar of browser which we released recently. We created it so that you can perform optimum searches on European topics easily without having to go to Euroalert.net website.

So, we hope that the users of distinct services and programmes will be able to reap the benefits of euroalertSearch's capabilities. You can install the euroalertSearch gadget to your iGoogle profile by clicking on the link or review the more detailed information available at Euroalert.net. As always, if you have any doubts or need support with any of our tools you can contact us by email at issues@euroalert.net.

All the information about our euroalertSearch gadgets and widgets is in the section Widgets and tools for the Euroalert.net community. This is where all future tools will be published for the Euroalert.net community.

euroalertSearch in the search bar of your browser

Despite being nearly in Easter, and we would all rather be on another Easter bunny's treasure hunt and eating chocolate eggs, we have managed in the last week to include a few more novelties to the euroalert.net international edition. Cast your eyes to the left hand side of the page. We have published an opensearch plugin with which you can add euroalertSearch to your own browser's Search Bar. Installing it means that you can use our specially configured search engine, without having to visit the euroalert.net website every time you want to find European Union information.

It is fully compatible with Mozilla Firefox as well as Internet Explorer 7. To install and try it, you simply have to click on this link (or on the image at the beginning of the article) and accept the dialogue box. If you are not convinced after having tried it, to remove it is very simple through the preferences menu of your navigator search bar. We have published more information in the Euroalert.net widgets section and if you have any doubts email us at issues@euroalert.net and we will try and help.

We have also published a larger variety of euroalert.net icons and buttons for making links to the m information sections, as we said we would last week. For each section we have used icons with the regular size of height 17 pixels. The width of each icon varies slightly according to the text it holds. However, none exceeded 104 pixels so that you may use them in lateral columns (1 o 2) of websites on the right or left of the main text.



We intend to release very soon the widget code for the euroalertSearch search engine, which can be used to include euroalertSearch on your website or blog. We hope you like and in the mean time we will continue working on euroalert.net to make its services even more efficient and useful for you all.

Icons, buttons and linking euroalert.net

When it comes to making links to other websites, one thing that I have always liked is that we are offered a small set of buttons to make the process fast and simple. It is not that they are essential but always welcome. We have all been down this boring and unproductive path before, in which to create a link we have to start by editing the logo of the host organisation and for some strange reason they always seem to insist on making it as difficult as possible by covering the site with animated logos in inaccessible places, or worse still animated.

To avoid these sorts of problems when linking to the Euroalert.net international edition, either from a blog or another website, we have included in the widgets section the page Euroalert.net icons & buttons. There we have published some icons and buttons of various sizes and colors for you selection. Together with the icon or logo, we have included an example code so that making the link is as easy as possible.

At the moment every example code makes a link to our home page, but in the next series you will have specific icons available (Calls for proposals, Calls for Tenders, etc.) for those of you only interested in linking a particular section of euroalert.net.

However, if you still haven't found the right button or icon to suit your website, do not hesitate to contact us at support@euroalert.net. We will be delighted to send you a new one.