A critical article on FAZ.NET (Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung) deals with the pros and cons facing investors in shares of small and medium-sized companies listed on the Entry Standard market segment of the Frankfurt stock exchange. more…

Small and medium-sized entities (SME) are said to particularly benefit from shifting from Windows XP to its successor Vista, if they cannot rely upon a fully-grown server structure and if they have many notebooks in use. According to the expert magazine „Computer im Mittelstand” a new tool, the so-called Windows Collaboration, co-ordinates the virtual teamwork of up to ten people without a server. The tool provides a joint desk top featuring a list of participants and indicating the documents handed out. more…

On Wednesday and Thursday the second General Standard conference of the German Stock Exchange took place in Frankfurt. About 40 companies listed in the Entry Standard and General Standard met with investors and analysts. For the first time this provided companies quoted in the Entry Standard with the opportunity to present themselves to investors and analysts as well as to come up with latest business figures and business models. more…

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 applications followed by the Netherlands with 7.800, whereas in Great Britain 4.649 applications were submitted. more…

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 Court of Justice the Union has the right to take an active part in the determination of the degree of penalty, if European law is violated. Some background information on this more severe legislation: Each year pirate copying causes damage of more than 300 billion Euro. Approximately ten percent of the products traded on the world market are counterfeits. more…

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 in future only Germany and Austria will maintain a formal protectionism to their labour markets granting work permits solely in individual cases. Seven old members are ready to lift restrictions completely, whereas six countries plan to facilitate access to their labour markets. more…

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 in the German town of Böblingen. Approximately 1000 requests for help arrive here each month by the owners of damaged hard drives. However, it might not be all that hopeless: more…

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, Switzerland, Spain, the United States and Great Britain. The committee had identified the commercial banks´credit risk as an important factor to deal with, particularly in times of a bank crisis. The result of this awareness was the agreement on equity capital reached in 1988, better known under „Basel I”. more…

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). more…

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 company, data protection imposed by law is not ensured adequately according to the association. more…