Tag: Europe

Lately, France and Luxembourg pegged the Value-Added Tax (same as the GST in Australia, New Zealand and Canada and similar to the sales tax levied by US states) for e-books at the lower rate used for printed books.
Just lately the European Commission rapped them over the knuckles for daring to do this because they think that the “electronic hard copy” is a luxury and should be taxed the higher rate compared to the printed hard copy. I support France and Luxembourg for valuing the idea that the electronic hard copy of a book is as of the same value as the printed hard copy.  As well it is considered to be an important distribution channel for the book or magazine. For example, a lot of women like the strong romance novels in this format because others don’t notice they are reading these steamy stories on the train or bus – they just notice the Kindle, iPad or Nexus 7. Similarly this format suits serialised content more than the printed book. As well, the NAS could work as the electronic library on the home network.
Personally, I would like to see a situation where copyright and tax issues for artistic and similar works are treated the same no matter the publishing format or the distribution channel.

Most computer and video games are written in USA or Japan, mainly through larger studios like EA, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and others.

This is typically because of the common platforms such as the main console platforms where the barriers of entry to the platform are very significant. The regular-computer (PC / Mac) and mobile platforms aren’t as exacting as the main console platforms and are in a better position to nurture more games developers. This is although Microsoft was running the XNA game-development program for their XBox 360 console which opened up game development for this platform.

The regular-computer and mobile platforms are opening up the “indie” game-development community which is independent of the main US and Japanese studios. A key example of this is Rovio, a Dutch games studio who built up the successful “Angry Birds” game franchise for the mobile platforms.

Europe has had a chance at the development of computer games through the 1980s while computing platforms like the Commodore Amiga which had an open-access software development environment existed. Similarly, when the Philips CD-I format gained a bit of a foothold in the European market in the mid 1990s, a few European games studios developed games like Burn Cycle for that format. But these were systems that had some level of popularity primarily in Europe.

Typically most of these efforts see their results achieve some sort of “domestic” popularity where the game is popular in its home market. But Rovio, a Finnish independent games studio, had cut through this barrier by releasing the popular “Angry Birds” game franchise, initially to the iOS and Android mobile platforms. But this was so popular worldwide that they ported it out to other non-mobile platforms like the PlayStation Portable and the two main regular-computing platforms, Windows and MacOS X.

The Android-driven OUYA games console is in a position to allow the independent games studios to write for the large-screen console market because it has access to the Google Play app store and the Android knowhow. This could open up paths for games studios in the under-represented areas like Europe and Oceania to cut in to the gaming mainstream. Similarly, there were a few other games consoles such as the “Steam Box” being premiered at the Consumer Electronics Show early this year. These console platforms, along with the Android and iOS mobile platforms, could light up the independent gaming scene and encourage the development of games titles in these areas.

As well, governments and local industry associations could establish incubation programs for the computer and video games industry in these areas. This could come in the form of, per se, a culture ministry treating gaming / interactive-entertainment development in a similar manner to other arts and culture endowment programs. On the other hand, an entertainment-content district like India’s “Bollywood” extending their brand and concept to interactive entertainment like what has happened with Hollywood.

Once you have other countries and areas having interactive-entertainment studios and engaged in computer and video games, it can allow a lot more to occur. For example, games can be reflective of different cultures rather than a Hollywood-led “aggressive” culture. Similarly, a game that is set in the modern era like some adventure and strategy games can be set up to reflect a locale other than the suburbia of USA.

Article – French language

L’UE appelle à la création d’un « Airbus des puces » | Le Monde Informatique (France)

My Comments

The European Union does play host to some electro-technical activity, whether in the form of research or design and manufacture of finished product. Think of names like Philips, Pace (set-top box applications), Loewe, B&O, Nokia and Siemens amongst many others when it comes to finished applications. Or you may think of Acorn who has built up the ARM microarchitecture used in most smartphones and tablets or B&O who have built up the ICEPower reference design for high-quality Class-D switching power amplifiers. As far as semiconductors and microelectronics are concerned, STMicroelectronics is the only European representative in the 10 main semiconductor companies.

But there has been a call for the European Union to strengthen a European-grown microelectronics industry. They effectively want to see a “digital Airbus” or “Airbus for semiconductors”. This is where Airbus, the France-based European aerospace name, has become associated with building the impressive airliners like the A380 superjumbo and been in a position to challenge established players like he US-based Boeing.

Here, the European Commission wants to launch an industrial plan to seed the European semiconductor industry by making Europe financially attractive to invest in for this industry. This encompasses the research and development aspect; as well as production of the components; and they want the European Union and its constituent Member States to work together on this.

What I see of this is that the European “finished-products” names could move towards the local “Airbus for semiconductors” once they see that the products can work well with their finished-product designs. Similarly, if this company can answer established firms like Intel, AMD and NVIDIA for CPU or graphics-processor designs, this could be a chance for Europe to facilitate a lively competitive microprocessor market.

Article

Internet-Telefonie in Europa auf dem Vormarsch – Telekom – derStandard.at (Austria – German language)

My comments

From this German-language article published in Austria, I had read that Internet-based telephony was gaining traction in Europe. The article was based on Bitkom’s information which they sourced from Eurostat which is the European Union’s statistics department.

IP telephony was found to be popular in the Baltic states like Lithuania but Germany was third behind the UK and France. Personally, I wouldn’t put it past France to take this technology up due to the VoIP services being part of their “n-box” triple-play Internet

Most setups were based around an existing handset that was connected to an analogue-telephony-adaptor or router with integrated IP telephony gateway. As well certain call classes such as international calls and calls to mobile phones do attract the VoIP users most likely due to cost savings.

But I notice a gap in the information about whether the customers use VoIP at home or at work. This includes whether multi-site workplaces implement VoIP for tie-lines and whether users are using VoIP without knowing it due to dial-plans that are set up for particular call classes.

It is also worth knowing whether most European users really make use of the PABX-style features like call transfer on their home VoIP setups. This is more so as manufacturers implement these features in ATAs, Internet telephones and similar devices.