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The "Measuring
progress of eAccessibility in Europe" (MeAC) study was launched as part of the
follow-up to the European Commission’s Communication on eAccessibility of 2005.
Overall, the results show that there is only limited progress towards
eAccessibility detected in Europe, and further EU-level measures need to be
considered to stimulate progress in eAccessibility.
Three key findings underpin
this conclusion: The eAccessibility ‘deficit’. People with disabilities in
Europe continue to be confronted with many barriers to usage of the everyday ICT
products and services that are now essential elements of social and economic
life. Such eAccessibility deficits can be found across the spectrum of ICT
products and services, for example telephony, TV, web and self-service terminals.
The eAccessibility 'gap'. From a comparative perspective, the eAccessibility
situation for people with disabilities across Europe as a whole, in terms of
both eAccessibility status and eAccessibility policy, compares very unfavourably
with that comparison countries examined in the MeAC study (AU, CA and US). The
eAccessibility ‘patchwork’. Finally, the situation across Europe for both
eAccessibility status and eAccessibility policy is very much a patchwork at
present. The overall picture shows many important gaps, uneven attention across
the spectrum of eAccessibility themes, and wide disparities across the Member
States.
Related Information:
See also:
MeAC study
2 October
2008, Vienna, Austria
"e-Inclusion" is the leading
theme of the conference, which will be a meeting of minds of the leading
thinkers and major architects of the internet and the digital society today.
Their range of experience will cover all aspects of e-Inclusion like
e-Accessibility, Ageing, e-Competences, Socio-Cultural e-Inclusion, Spatial
e-Inclusion, Inclusive e-government and broadband for all. This event takes
place in preparation for the European e-Inclusion Ministerial Conference 2008 in
Vienna and is supported by the Federal Chancellery of Austria. The audience will
consist of the top 300 CEOs, academics, administration and politicians of
Austria and some European countries. ISPA (Internet Service Providers Austria)
is a non-profit organisation dedicated to advance the usage of the Internet in
Austria.
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EU Consumer Commissioner
Meglena Kuneva today announced the results of an EU-wide investigation into
websites offering mobile phone services such as ring-tones and wallpapers. The
enquiry found that 80% of the sites checked need to be further investigated for
suspected breaches of EU consumer rules. Many of the websites target children
and young people. Problems found included: unclear price information where
prices are incomplete did not include taxes or customers are unaware that they
are signing up to a subscription. Other problems relate to misleading
information where key information is hidden in very small print or hard to find
on a website or the word "free" is used to mislead consumers into a long-term
contracts.
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Related Information:
Commission Press Room:
IP/08/1169
The European Commission today
proposed a legal framework that will make it easier to set up European Research
Infrastructures, such as observatories for environmental sciences, data banks in
genomics or state of the art large super computers. The proposal was made in
response to requests from Member States, who wish to jointly develop world-class
research facilities in Europe.
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Related Information:
Commission Press Room:
IP/08/1142
The European Commission has
adopted an antitrust decision prohibiting 24 European collecting societies from
restricting competition by limiting their ability to offer their services to
authors and commercial users outside their domestic territory. However, the
decision allows collecting societies to maintain their current system of
bi-lateral agreements and to keep their right to set levels of royalty payments
due within their domestic territory.
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Related Information:
Commission Press Room:
IP/08/1165
The European Commission today
adopted two initiatives in the area of copyright. First, the Commission proposes
to align the copyright term for performers with that applicable to authors, in
this way bridging the income gap that performers face toward the end of their
lives. Secondly, the Commission proposes to fully harmonise the copyright term
that applies to co-written musical compositions. In parallel, the Commission
also adopted a Green Paper on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy. The
consultation document focuses on topics that appear relevant for the development
of a modern economy, driven by the rapid dissemination of knowledge and
information. Both of these initiatives comprise a unique mix of social, economic
and cultural measures aimed at maintaining Europe as a prime location for
cultural creators in the entertainment and knowledge sectors.
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Related Information:
Commission Press Room:
IP/08/1156
On 2 July 2008 the European
Commission launched a public consultation to gather opinions on a common
European approach for web accessibility and other aspects of eAccessibility, as
well as possible action at European level. We invite you to reply to the public
consultation at http://ec.europa.eu/einclusion and to send contributions to:
einclusion@ec.europa.eu - before 27 August 2008.
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Related Information:
See also:
"Your Voice in Europe" site
Contact:
einclusion@ec.europa.eu
22 July 2008,
Brussels, Belgium
The objective
of the event is to discuss the findings from the first round of national data
gathering within the context of the ICT & Ageing study.
The workshop is to bring
together around 20 experts and representatives of key stakeholder groups,
including user organisations, reimbursers, service providers, technology
providers, policy makers and the research community, as well as the
representatives from Commission Services.
Participation is by
invitation only and the entrance is free of charge.
Related Information:
Contact:
karsten.gareis@empirica.com
Web 2.0 Acquires Genuine
Business Credentials
By Deborah Asbrand
Until now, Web 2.0 technologies
were little more than a curiosity for enterprises. Popular, yes, but there was
no clear business use. Today, more companies use blogs, Wikis, video, instant
messaging,
TelePresence, Web conferencing, and other Web 2.0 technologies to keep pace
with rapid market changes.
Companies want easy and
real-time connections to supply partners, consultants, design specialists,
and-of course-customers. The new technologies have found a natural place amid
that drive for collaboration.
Yet how to best determine the
new tools' return on investment remains one of the frequently asked questions
from business executives about Web 2.0 technologies, says Jeremiah Owyang of
Forrester Research. To demystify Web 2.0's value, Owyang advocates a return to
business basics. That is, do not try out the new technologies just because
everyone else is, and because they seem relatively simple and inexpensive to
implement. Have a plan.
"To a degree, pretty much every
enterprise can leverage conferencing and collaboration."
— Ira Weinstein, Wainhouse
Research
First, Know Your Objectives
"The first question is, what is
your objective?" advises Owyang, a senior analyst at the Cambridge, Mass.-based
company, in a
recent video interview. "What are you trying to accomplish by launching the
blog or the social network? Are you trying to connect with customers, reduce
your sales cycle, or reduce your support costs?"
With specific goals in mind,
companies can measure the tools' results against them. "If you're trying to
reduce your support costs by letting your customers self-support each other, how
many calls did not go into the call center because of this tool?" Owyang asks. "How
much information was put in there by customers? How did they rate it?"
Taking a page from one of the
Internet's most popular consumer sites can also help companies evaluate the new
tools' value. "The 'most viewed' tab on YouTube can be applied to the enterprise,
too," says Cisco Vice-President of Corporate Communications Architecture, Jim
Grubb. "You can make assumptions about how valuable information is by how often
it's accessed." A product brief that becomes the most read among employees, for
example, can pinpoint where a company needs to deploy additional internal
documentation or ease-of-use resources.
"When people join groups, it
says something about the person and about the group," he says. "Groups have a
tendency to maintain information because they're passionate about it." Grubb
points to an enterprise Wiki created by Cisco employees who use Macintosh
computers. "It's only 80 to 90 pages, but it tells you everything you need to
know" about connecting a Mac to the Cisco internal network, he says. "Six
thousand Macs on the Cisco network, and we're spending zero on IT to support it."
Such economics are convincing
companies to expand their Web 2.0 investments. A 2007 survey conducted by New
York-based consulting firm McKinsey & Company found that more than three-fourths
of those executives plan to maintain or increase their investments in technology
trends that encourage user collaboration, such as peer-to-peer networking,
social networks, and Web services. The global survey, published in The McKinsey
Quarterly, polled 2,847 executives, 44 percent of whom hold C-level positions.
Seventy percent of these execs
reported using a combination of the technologies to communicate with their
customers. Just over half of respondents use one or more Web 2.0 technologies to
help manage knowledge internally. Just under half use the tools to design and
develop new products, for example, setting up systems to gather and share ideas
(see chart, "Collaboration Is Key".
Collaboration Is Key
Web 2.0 technologies help
companies with communication, knowledge management, and product design and
development.
| Use a combination of Web
2.0 technologies to communicate with customers |
70% |
| Use one or more Web 2.0
technologies to communicate with suppliers and partners |
51% |
| Use Web 2.0 technologies
to manage collaboration internally, including knowledge management and
product design and development |
75% |
Source: The McKinsey
Quarterly
Start
Small
Partsearch Technologies is an
example of a company that started small with Web 2.0 and is now an enthusiastic
convert. The Manhattan-based inventory broker's successes with a
customer-service chat room and a Wiki, as well as a forthcoming Web-services
project, show off the new technologies at their best: harnessing the company's
talents to forge tighter bonds with the service representatives and consumers
who are its customers.
Through its online catalog,
Partsearch tracks eight million spare parts for everything from kitchen
appliances to pocket-sized MP3 players. In 2007, it had $60 million in revenues.
Customer-service reps who have mastered the enormous system, recalling parts
numbers and other details with ease, are invaluable to the company. They are
also crucial resources to call-center operations.
An appreciation of that
expertise led to a clever blend of human know-how and technology, and to
Partsearch's Web 2.0 foray. To make the best use of their co-workers' experience,
the call-center staff tweaked job descriptions to create "parts experts,"
representatives who, rather than handle incoming customer phone calls, instead
receive instant-message inquiries from other call reps on obscure parts, tricky
features, and any other challenging questions that customers dial in with.
Old-Fashioned Business Results
The new collaboration helped
Partsearch leverage the knowledge it had developed among employees and disperse
it throughout the call center. The form of collaboration may be modern, but the
effect is old-fashioned business results: The increased efficiency earned
Partsearch a five-percentage point increase in sales.
Glenn Laumeister, chief
executive of the seven-year-old company, is the first to credit his staff for
devising the grassroots solution. "I had no idea that it had started," he says.
"It was an incremental evolution driven by the people who were using it."
With the newly refined
call-center data in hand, employees continued to innovate. They created a
homegrown knowledge base, or Wiki, tailored to Partsearch's business. Now, for
example, when a customer inquires about the safety of a lithium ion laptop
battery, the call-center rep can turn for answers to the knowledge database's
section on battery chemistry.
Laumeister estimates that
knowledge-management software would have cost $100,000. "We did this without
having to buy any software," he says. "What's great about it is that it was the
employees' idea. They built it." That makes it the antidote to a common
enterprise problem. "Too often," says Laumeister, "someone in corporate gets an
idea for someone in the call center to use a new technology. They buy and deploy
it-and no one uses it."
Next, the company expects to
deploy an integrated Web-services system that Laumeister says will allow repair
companies to connect directly with Partsearch's inventory database.
TelePresence and Web Conferencing
Customer demand for innovative
products and services is fueling the investment in the new Web 2.0 technologies,
including high-definition TelePresence and Web conferencing. Nearly 30 percent
of companies polled in a 2008 survey by Cisco point to buyer demand as their
motivation for exploring video and other Web 2.0 tools.
Visual collaboration tools like
TelePresence are helping companies save millions of dollars in travel costs,
claim the new productivity that results from reduced travel, and boost their
business performance with such advantages as getting new hires up to speed more
quickly.
"To a degree, pretty much every
enterprise can leverage conferencing and collaboration," Ira Weinstein, a senior
analyst at Wainhouse Research in Duxbury, Mass., said in a
video interview. He says one consulting client reports that
videoconferencing allows it to interview five times more candidates while
slashing interviewing costs by 70 percent.
Weinstein says most large
companies have enough bandwidth to run videoconferencing, TelePresence, and Web
2.0 tools. They are also adapting video delivery based on network capabilities
and embracing high-performance videoconferencing among branch offices, a lower
level of performance among smaller offices, and desktop conferencing to home
users.
"The realization is that they're
going to expand the network and strengthen the infrastructure over time to
enable this," says Weinstein, "but they don't want to miss out on the benefits
today."
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