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!

The “most aware” Europe's Ear

A complete success, that's what's making Macarena Rodríguez with her blog La Oreja de Europa (Europe's Ear). Just a couple of days ago, we knew about La Oreja de Europa being elected as the Spanish representative in the Internet category for the 2009 European Parliament Prize for Journalism.

The European Parliament Prize for Journalism, which the EP awards for the second time in 2009, is a public reward for all those journalists who cover EU issues and contribute to a better understanding and image of Europe among its citizens. It is in the first phase of the EP Prize of Journalism, where La Oreja de Europa has been shortlisted as the Spanish representative in its category.

Euroalert.net has been in luck having Macarena as a contributor sending us some articles from the very heart of Brussels for the current news from the European Union section, and we are, of course, very happy for her nomination. Congratulations Macarena!, you are The most aware Europe's Ear ;-) All Euroalert.net Team wishes you the best for the finals!!!

Gateway S.C.S. will be one of the first 9 authorised consultants for the ILI Programme

It seems that Euroalert.net Official blog has lately become specialised in making important announcements... If last week we were posting on Euroalert.net as a case study for a book about Web 2.0 business models, what we have for you today are more good news: The company owner of Euroalert.net, Gateway S.C.S. has been qualified by the Spanish National Council of Chambers of Commerce to provide services within the Introductory Programme to International Competitive Bidding, the so-called "ILI Programme".

By the end of last year we talked about the the need to find new and imaginative solutions to tackle the crisis situation we are facing, and international public procurement and competitive bidding seems to be one of the most outstanding business opportunities, both for big or small companies, in the current uncertain scenario. It is within this same context, that the European Commission has decided to promote best practices to facilitate access of SMEs to public procurement contracts. This strategy involves, among other things, to provide companies with access to information about tender opportunities and offering them the tools they require in order to succeed in a highly competitive market.

Following this approach, the ILI Programme comes up as a means to bring Spanish companies, especially SMEs, closer to the business opportunities international competitive bidding market can offer them. Companies taking part in the ILI Programme will get familiar with the procedures and mechanisms for international competitive bidding. For that purpose, they will count on the advice from an authorised specialist appointed by the Spanish National Council of Chambers of Commerce, who will guide their first steps. Therefore, a consultant from Gateway S.C.S. has been one of the first nine authorised consultants to be appointed within the ILI Programme.

This will be one more good opportunity to share the knowledge Euroalert.net has gained in public procurement issues with its service of daily publication of Calls for Tenders from the European Union and some International Multilateral Organizations.

The experience you all, our subscribers, provide us with your suggestions, allowing us to improve our technology to automatically display and distribute these business opportunities using Euroalert.net widgets and web services, have with no doubt contributed to the appointment of Gateway S.C.S. to the ILI Programme.

We are now looking forward to getting started and transform all the knowledge that our participation in this new initiative will bring us, into new services and improvements for Euroalert.net, so all the community can benefit from them.

Euroalert.net as a case study

We want all of you to be part of a small but significant achievement for Euroalert.net, which is also due to its community, in other words, to all of you.

A few months ago, the particular and innovative features held by Euroalert.net, made us being invited to describe them and contribute a chapter for a book about Web 2.0 business models. The book has now been published by US publisher Springer under the title Web 2.0: The Business Model, which has been made up with different contributions from prestigious researchers from universities and companies worldwide.

Euroalert.net is the case study for chapter 6 entitled "Doing business by selling free services", where some of the business models which have emerged in the Internet's Web 2.0 era are characterized. Euroalert.net mixes their characteristics in order to offer you every day free and updated contents about the European Union, namely, Calls for proposals to fund projects, EU Programmes and initiatives, EU News and Public Procurement opportunities. If you can read in Spanish you will also find out a little bit more about the book in the blog Open Economy.

This a shared success from all Euroalert.net community, so... many thanks to all of you for making it possible!!!

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!!

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.