Passing Comments

Kosmopolit is “a blog about politics and culture from a European perspective.” Last week the website posted the trailer for a new TV documentary about the Balkans. (”Return to Europe - A journey of discovery” May 5, 2008).

The documentary takes a look at how the Balkan people are recovering from the recent wars there, and how this European area is becoming a “region of hope.”

Read more about the documentary here.

The missing ingredient in European culture is risk-taking, according to a post yesterday in the InformationWeek blog (”Where Is Europe’s Google?” by Andrew Conry-Murray, May 8, 2008).

The post focuses on a recently published book by Hervé Lebret, “Start-Up: What We Can Learn from Silicon Valley” (Nov 2007).

Summarizing the issue, Conry-Murray writes:

London may be eclipsing Wall Street as the world financial capital, and the euro is trouncing the dollar, but Europe has yet to prove the equal of the United States in technological innovation.

Author and engineer Hervé Lebret thinks he knows why. “There is a risk culture that’s missing. We don’t have an environment to be more ambitious and risk-taking.”

Another place where you can read a discussion with Lebret about his ideas on innovation, and about his book and its primary purpose, is a recent Q&A interview, “Entrepreneurship in Europe: Alumnus brings Silicon Valley culture across the Atlantic,” on Stanford University’s School of Engineering website (April 24, 2008).

EIAA (European Interactive Advertising Association) reported this month that adults living with children spend more time online than adults in households without minors. The findings about online trends in Europe are from EIAA’s first ever “Digital Families” report, according to the media trade organization.

“Almost three-quarters (73%) of people living with children are logging on to the internet each week, compared with only half (52%) of those without,” the EIAA report reveals.

Overall, digital parents are ramping up their web time, spending 11.6 hours online each week (up 36% since 2004) and over a quarter are heavy users of the internet (27%). Digital families are also more likely than those households without children to use the internet at the weekends (58% vs. 40%).

This online activity has meant that digital families are consuming other media less as a result of the internet – 44% of digital parents are watching less TV, almost a third read fewer magazines and newspapers (31% and 30% respectively) and almost a quarter (24%) listen to the radio less.

Read more about the study here.

Interesting short video interview here with Italy’s Minister for Economics and Finance (”TOMMASO PADOA-SCHIOPPA talks to Martin Wolf — The Italian Finance Minister discusses market turmoil”, Financial Times, Dec 20, 2007). Padoa-Schioppa talks about the Euro-zone, various key issues at present, and how Europe is being affected by what’s happening in world market conditions.

Toward the end of the nine-minute talk, interviewer Martin Wolf complimented Padoa-Schioppa on recent improvement in Italy’s economy, describing it as “remarkably successful on the fiscal side.” In response, the Italian minister agreed that he is “much more comfortable” with Italy’s situation now than a year and a half ago, saying that Italy is “out of the financial emergency.”

Answering Wolf’s question about Italy’s situation at present in “what may be a very turbulent world economy,” Padoa Schioppa said that the “recent turbulence doesn’t seem to hit Italy in any significant sense.”