just 4 business (EN)

As is revealed by the latest patent statistics of the EU commission, with a total of 23.789 patent applications for patentable inventions, Germany was the front-runner in the EU in 2005. In the same year in the United States there were 32.738 patent applications and 21.461 in Japan. Second in Europe came France with 8.034 […]

Innovative small and medium-sized companies may breathe a sigh of relief: The EU-commission is set to take severe measures against counterfeiting. The unauthorized copying of proprietary articles within the EU will be fined with amounts ranging from 100.000 to 300.000 Euro or imprisonment of up to 4 years. According to a verdict of the European […]

Joaquin Almunia, EU commissioner of Commerce and Finance, presented a report in Brussels suggesting that the extension of the European Union from 15 to 25 member states 2 years ago has proved to be an advantage to everyone. The report also shows that fears of job cuts and relocation were exaggerated. It furthermore states that […]

According to the National Archives & Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, USA, 93 percent of companies the server of which has been out of order for more than ten days go bankrupt within the following year. Charred interfaces, crushed read heads and destroyed drive cases represent the daily routine in the laboratory of Kroll Ontrack […]

Crashes of major commercial banks in the 1970s led to the setting up of a committee for the supervision of banking in Basel, Switzerland, at the Bank for International Settlement (BIZ). This committee is made up of representatives from central banks or supervisory institutions of Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Canada, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden, […]

Small and medium-sized German entities (SME ⇒ Wikipedia) are calling for their own special version of the so-called International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS ⇒ Wikipedia ). This is the unanimous opinion voiced at last Wednesday´s “Internationale Rechnungslegung” conference, according to the organiser of the event, the accountancy and consultancy enterprise PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

One out of five companies, according to estimates by the association Bundesverband Informationswirtschaft, Telekommunikation und neue Medien (Bitkom), violates the rules of the Federal Data Protection Act (⇒ Wikipedia). The association therefore cautions against careless handling of customer data. Although the processing of these data has become a matter of daily routine in virtually any […]

Mrs Patrizia Ribaudo, journalist with the newspaper „Die Welt�? and stock exchange expert, strongly advocates to invest in small and medium-sized companies which want to go public. Going public has become the rage and while the attention of investors is mainly drawn to the most recent protagonists of Air Berlin or Catoil, a growing number […]

Focussing on the core business is a necessary step for many small and medium-sized companies in order to consolidate business activities, if financial recources and executive capacity are running short. Thus, many promising and sound products and services from the past are abandoned, which is a huge pitty considering the many efforts and development costs […]

For small and medium-sized companies offering innovative high tech solutions ranging from electronics to genetic engineering products it is very difficult to keep constantly updated on the latest changes in research and development, even though the Internet often provides quite comprehensive information in particular at the initial stages of new developments.