eco at the German Valley Week: Day Two
Harald A. Summa, CEO of eco, reports from Silicon Valley
We had a full program ahead of us today, 21st May, the second day of our German Valley Week with Dr. Philipp Rösler. That made it an early start to the morning! Overall, the schedule is very well planned, and there has even been time to network. At breakfast we were able to share our experiences and insights from yesterday.
As the first port of call today we had Facebook, Menlo Park – a visit eagerly awaited by many. My personal impression: Facebook looks like a mall from the outside, and from the inside like a kindergarten in a factory building: Everything is colorful, and it doesn’t look anything like headquarters. Continue reading
eco at the German Valley Week: Day One
Harald A. Summa, CEO of eco, reports on his impressions of the first day
Building bridges between Germany and the Bay Area of the USA – that’s what the delegation under the leadership of the German Federal Minister of Economics and Technology, Dr. Philipp Rössler, wants to achieve. At the German Valley Week this week, representatives of German companies, financiers, venture capitalists, young start-ups and representatives of the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, are exploring Silicon Valley and visiting well-known American Internet companies like Google and Facebook, German companies based there, like SAP, and universities. The goal is to stimulate business relationships; Dr. Rössler wants to convince venture capitalists to invest their capital in young German start-ups. The objective is to double the number of companies founded per year in the German Internet industry, up from 9,000 to 18,000. Continue reading
eco Demands Legal Certainty for the Hospitality Industry
WLAN Hearing in the Subcommittee for New Media
Whoever in Germany makes public WLAN Internet access available offers an important service – and risks making themselves liable for the misdemeanors of others. A legal exception from this Breach of Duty of Care for so-called mini-providers was discussed on the 13th May in the Subcommittee for New Media. eco’s Chairman of the Board Prof. Michael Rotert welcomed the endeavor to finally create some certainty for the providers of public WLAN. “The greatest fear of the mini-provider is to be punished as the WLAN provider for the legal violations of guests. After all, we are talking here about cafes, hotels and bookshops – for many of them, with the current fines this would mean a threat to their professional existence.” In his view, this concern has slowed the spread of public WLAN. Continue reading
eco on Net Neutrality and Broadband Expansion
Germany’s Internet conference re:publica 13 took place on 6-8 May 2013 in Berlin, giving bloggers, activists, researchers and everybody interested in the development of the Internet the chance to discuss politics, the media, technology and Internet-related issues such as privacy, censorship and copyright. eco joined the discussion started by Deutsche Telekom. The country’s largest Internet provider had announced earlier that its ‘flat rate’ plans would no longer be true flat rates. Users would be granted significantly lower Internet speeds after they had used up their monthly quotas.
Continue reading
The Squirrel Principle leads to Data Fantastillions
‘Big Data’ creates mountains so high there’s no word to describe it
Humanity started 2013 with a global data volume of over 2 zettabytes (a 2 followed by 21 zeroes, or 2 billion trillion bytes) –and it’s just the beginning of collecting unimaginably large amounts of data, explained eco, the Association of the German Internet Industry, at their Annual Congress 2013, in Cologne. “Through the squirrel-like collecting mania of people, given potential through the ever-present digitalization of life, the data mass will double every two years, leading to data mountains running into the fantastillions,” said Dr. Béla Waldhauser, Leader of the competence group Datacenter Infrastructure in the eco Association, on the theme of ‘Big Data’.
Our Members
