Small U.S. Companies Take Europe By Storm
U.S. companies, small and large, are earning more money from European customers than from the rest of the world combined. Have you considered taking advantage of resources in the East?
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DiggCarla:
Your article about Budapest is right on. I’m an American in the small city
of Brno in the Czech Republic and it’s really fascinating here in Eastern
Europe. But the trick lies in working with the culture. For example,
Eastern European’s are traditionally very shy – this stems from the
unilateral primary school’s where teachers taught to them and never allowed
for questions. This learning appears in the workplace, where employees
still feel uncomfortable to ask questions in meetings. To get around this
IBM is using Web 2.0 technologies, like virtual worlds and social networks,
to respect that employees are shy and to give them a virtual identity to
hide behind to contribute – because at the end of the day, we are here for
their talent and ideas.
It’s been a great experiment and I’d be happy to share with you some of the
results.
I work for a company that provides a similar resource except it is free to both patients and doctors (medimundi.com). The goal is to connect patients and doctors worldwide so that patients can find affordable care. As travel increases so are these markets!
True, true.
I do similar business in Budapest, Hungary. State of the art dentist services for less than 20% of the price in the US or UK.
My clients are happy because (as one of them said) a trip to Budapest is good for their denture, good for their wallet and good for their soul. The view on bank of the Danube is probably the most beutiful in the world.
Great article on Tea and Technology in Paris! I used to be in Paris myself a couple of months ago and it is a very dynamic place. If this is an area you continue to look into, there is another great technology company taking on Silicon Valley – that is Talend. The company was founded just 2 years ago and already has some great American customers, such as United Airlines, Sony, Mastercard, Accenture, Nortel, Kompass, Bloomberg. Bertrand Diard, one of the co-founders, is based in Silicon Valley now and one of his quips is that most Silicon valley tech co’s want to have French engineers on their team.
In fact Europe as a whole is becoming increasingly important in the software industry. And open source is helping us to do that. Not only are analysts from Gartner, IDC and Pierre Audoin Conseil forecasting that open source software adoption rates will continue to increase dramatically across Europe – open source is being adopted by companies, governments and public organisations at an incredibly fast rate – but many open source companies originated from Europe. Several successful Linux distributions and a large number of global open source players, such as Onepoint (Austrian), Openbravo (Spanish), MuleSource (project started in UK) and Talend (French) have European roots. Furthermore Europe is a hotbed for open source developers ˆ it is rumoured that 60% of open source code is generated here.
The article was very informative. Many business people were now thinking of expansion of their business, so this will be a great opportunity. From the article we understood that Marketing and Sales is better in US than in France, so Business people from US can take this advantage to sell their products in France. Another great thing is the Government of France is helping people financially for starting business. So this opportunity should be utilized.
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The key to all of this outsourcing, offshoring, remoting, etc. is the differential in wages. Once wages equalize companies will realize the physical distancing, time zone differences, language and cultural differences become obstacles to business.
Did the author bother to look at the US/Hungarian exchange rate over the past year? And Hungary is not part of the Euro zone, yet. Once Hungary joins the Euro, you’ll see the advantage of “low wages” evaporate.