I wrote this article in 2005 (for the original click here, then scroll five stories down). Today, it’s as relevant as all hell. So, I thought I’d “re-publish” it. Back then I mentioned the Italians by name and not the Greeks, or Portuguese, but in the context they were included. [Read on]

I wrote this article for an American client, who published it on 19 June 2009.

Private “sales” of houses and apartments by way of online lotteries (or raffles) continue to hit the headlines in Europe. This week the Financial Times Deutschland (FTD) reported about the 38-year old London sharetrader Andrew Paul, who is raffling “his whole life” on the site Winanewlife.com, including a villa, sports car and luxury motor boat. He hopes to sell 200,000 tickets at £20 each before 19 August, when the winning ticket will be drawn and the winner will walk away with all. [Read on]

Thanks to a flood of innovative smart phones and declining costs for mobile Internet use (minus 24 percent in 2009, as measured by the Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschaft), the much-hyped medium mobile Internet finally sprang to life in Germany in the second half of 2009.

“The number of mobile Internet users is doubling every month,” dr. Hagen Sexauer, principal of Bad Homburg-based strategy consultant Sempora, told the iPhone Developers Conference in Cologne on 2 December. [Read on]

Tencent, the Chinese social media group in which Cape Town-based media group Naspers holds a roughly 33% stake, and two Russian media companies, are competing for control of ICQ, the chat service AOL put on the market in November last year. The Russian companies are Profmedia and Digital Sky Technologies (DST), reported Financial Times Deutschland (FTD). [Read on]

Swiss-based luxury goods firm Richemont wants control of UK-based fashion portal Net-a-porter.com. It already owns roughly 33% of the portal and offered to buy the rest of the business last week, Financial Times Deutschland (FTD) reported. According to FTD, Richemont valued Net-a-porter at €393 million. [Read on]