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Monday, January 09, 2006

Europe and the Internet

From the inventors of the ball-point pen, Rubik's Cube and fundamental properties of computers comes the most innovative creation of all - a 21st century tech-savvy European. While that might be a bit harsh I'll never forget visiting a German relative in 2001 who was head of IT for a major European manufacturing firm but didn't have a PC in the home (the US enjoys more than 70 computers per 100 people - more than twice the rate of EU country averages). While regulatory bodies in the old world have consistently bemoaned the fact that so much of global Internet interests reside in Silicon Valley, it has always been a frustration of North American visitors that Europeans have been so slow to embrace home computing and related tech gadgetry. Enter Hungary.

According to a Nielson/Net Ratings survey of European Internet use, people who log on in Hungary are 10 times more likely than those in Britain to delete web-monitoring files known as "cookies". This surfing awareness tells you a lot about the level of media literacy in a country that has always been technologically optimistic. It also heralds an emerging shift in the technology landscape of Europe, from west to east.

"The assumption that Western Europeans are more technologically savvy than their neighbors to the east was demolished last week with a survey on Internet attitudes in central and eastern Europe," writes Matt Keating in the Media Guardian.

It is a classic case of emerging economies skipping generations of technology and catching up in hyperdrive to more established markets. See China or Africa for non-European examples of this trend now reflected by eastern Europe.

"Although the use of internet cafes is still important, these nations are more willing to adopt mobile technology since fixed-line connections are not as well established," says Alex Burmaster, a European internet analyst at Nielson/Net Ratings.

So this places Lithuania as the most advanced wireless data country in Europe by being most likely to access the web from mobile phones (42%) and PDAs (12%). And more than three quarters of internet users in Ukraine, Hungary, Poland and Latvia read online newspapers. Almost one in three buy less printed newspapers because of online versions but in a warning to overly ambitious Internet revenue models, 77% would prefer to buy a printed newspaper than pay for an online subscription.

Some further country by country highlights:

  • Swiss are most likely to search for a job online
  • Bulgarians are most likely to read news online
  • Italians are most likely to use a mapping service
  • Ukrainian surfers are most likely to research family history online
  • Less than one third of Poland's population uses the Internet but over the past five years the number has risen almost twice as fast as in Britain

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