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As a european, i still think those kind of measures are trying to cure the symptoms by throwing huge pile of cash, rather that fix the core issue : that the pri

by bsaul 6y ago

As a european, i still think those kind of measures are trying to cure the symptoms by throwing huge pile of cash, rather that fix the core issue : that the private sector in europe is currently unable to produce GAFA-sized companies in the IT sector. My intuition is that once again the money will be grabbed by existing big companies that proved unable to innovate, but are the best at capturing public fundings. EDIT : and i should add, helping politicians look good. All in all it will only help everybody pretend they're doing something, while letting the ship sink even more.

jbverschoor 6y ago
100%
throwaway7281 6y ago
The recent COVID-App is a prime example of that. SAP plus German Telekom, neither of which is known for innovation, grab a 60M plus deal to develop a single app. In Italy a startup took over the job for 1/50 of the price and with at least as good or better job. Is the above play a problem for Germany? No. Do you they even understand an problem? I don't think so.
- 88840-8855 6y ago
  Excellent example with the app. It's an app that could have been designed and made with 100k, less people and better quality. And quicker. The current app is a nightmare. It shows that i had already 2 low risk encounters - but it doesn't show me when and where! I NEED this info to adapt my behavior! very bad app.
  - justoreply 6y ago
    the app doesn't store location information by design for privacy reasons
    - 88840-8855 6y ago
      if you ask normal people, they will hate this - only some data fanatics want this feature. people die. the economy is suffering. millions lose jobs. still, some guys making 140k in their it engineering jobs working from home and relaxing are telling me sth about "data privacy as priority". i disagree. people disagree. Taiwan did a FANTASTIC job leveraging data. we are either not capable of that or just fanatic.... maybe both.
      - justoreply 6y ago
        several people still remember the Stasi and they don't want a state controlled app to monitor their movement. If you want your app to have the biggest installation base (without asking for a mandatory installation) you can't ask for user location, with it enabled fewer people will install it
        88840-8855 6y ago
        ... the same people that shop on amazon, use "payback" (a shopping monitoring system), post crap on facebook and enjoy google's personalisation. Please, mate, this is just populism what you are doing there.
        adriancr 6y ago
        I take it you haven't lived under a communist regime? There's a difference between what you share willingly and stuff being collected on you, especially in private matters.
        neuronic 6y ago
        My family was directly affected by Stasi. I care about what the government knows and what it can do to you. I constantly have 2-3 low risk exposure notifications. But it doesn't matter where they happened since I already know that I am carefully avoiding risky areas. I am sitting next to my window when working and people walk past that window within 2 meters. That alone could set off exposure notifications. Or maybe someone across the aisle in the supermarket? Would I not go to the supermarket if I know it happened there? Would I not go for a walk if I knew someone 8 meters away from me on some bench was later diagnosed with COVID? It barely serves any purpose at all outside of curiosity. The app already tells you everything you need to know.
  - brazzy 6y ago
    You're talking out of your ass. Literally everyone who knows anything calls the German app a huge success, especially compared with similar efforts.
    - tupputuppu 6y ago
      In Finland, the authorities reserved 6M to create a contact tracing app and all support systems. They ended up building it for 150k, with 250k more to operate it until the end of next year. Half the population downloaded it in the first days and it works great. It's completely privacy-focused and the UX is great for both individuals as well as the government. Is the German tracking solution really 400 times as complex? Based on either citizens' adoption or UX, is it anywhere near as successful? Built by a small, Agile company, although not by a startup by any classification.
      - brazzy 6y ago
        > They ended up building it for 150k, with 250k more to operate it until the end of next year. Do you have any source for that? If true that is indeed impressive, but I am sceptical, given that your claim that "Half the population downloaded it" seems to be extremely exaggerated (https://qz.com/1898960/whats-behind-finlands-contact-tracing-app-success-user-privacy/ https://qz.com/1898960/whats-behind-finlands-contact-tracing...) One way in which the German app was clearly superior is that it was released a full month and a half earlier.
        tupputuppu 6y ago
        Costs, use Google Translate: https://www.mtvuutiset.fi/artikkeli/koronavilkkuun-on-varattu-6-miljoona-euroa-kehitys-maksoi-147-000-minne-loput-rahat-menevat/7915338 https://www.mtvuutiset.fi/artikkeli/koronavilkkuun-on-varatt... Share of population that downloaded it - Your article only talk about the first 24 hours. See for instance this article that says 1.8 milloin a month and a half ago: https://mobiili.fi/2020/09/08/koronavilkun-lataukset-yli-18-miljoonan-nain-moni-on-poistanut-sovelluksen/ https://mobiili.fi/2020/09/08/koronavilkun-lataukset-yli-18-... That's beginning to be half of the relevant population in a country of 6 million, when you take out kids and people in old folks' homes.
- justoreply 6y ago
  With just the difference that in Germany that app works, in Italy the correct infrastructure/process was not built, sick data information was never uploaded so the app is useless
  - 88840-8855 6y ago
    how do you know the app is working? because we value privacy SO much, we don't even know if the app has ANY effect - taking all the anecdotes aside.
    - justoreply 6y ago
      I had several notifications of low risk exposures, so the app is fed with some data. This doesn't happen in the Italian version of the app if you are living in some regions, for example. If the app is useful, this is another topic, but it was not the point of this thread.
    - tastroder 6y ago
      There were plenty of cases where in app notifications lead to people getting tested and in touch with their local tracing efforts. You don't need privacy invading levels of analytics to measure that. With the low numbers we had over the past months exactly what else do you expect?
- WanderPanda 6y ago
  What afraids me is, that here in Germany nobody seems to care anymore. The big numbers are just thrown around and everyone (especially the younger generation) has lost any sense as the media is just cheering along.
  - tiaxxl 6y ago
    As long as the boomers get their retirement payments, who cares about future generations?
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    I wish I could upvote you more. This is what I noticed in Germany as well. The government keeps tooting their own horn on how in every statistic they're the best in Europe and the media parrots that while the younger generations just takes it for granted and doesn't bother questioning the poor decisions the government makes while they spend the public tax money like drunken sailors because hey, "we're Europe's no. 1, what could our government ever do wrong?"
    - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
      I agree that the waste of taxpayer money in Germany is beyond comprehension (while they do take utmost care when it comes to taxing you) and as a young German myself I also agree that many young people just don't question the media, if they get involved in politics at all. But I also know many who do and they've mostly just given up on the country. Because emigration aside, what are you going to do?
      - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
        >Because emigration aside, what are you going to do? Maybe vote the corrupt leeches out?
        andi999 6y ago
        I had a discussion recently, and I think generally in Germany politicians are considered incompetent instead of corrupt. Like in cross border leasing/ public private partnership etc.
- est31 6y ago
  The German federal government had past bad experiences with the company contracted to collect car/truck tolls on federal roadways. The product launch was delayed due to the contractor and thus the government lost lots of revenue from tolls. A 15 year long fight with the owners of the company ensued. Maybe they wanted to avoid that by just putting a large pile of cash onto the table, ensuring that SAP+DTG put their best people behind it. Delays in COVID-App deployment cost real lives instead of just revenue. It's great that it worked nice in Italy, but giving the contract to a random startup is more of a gamble I think.
  - siscia 6y ago
    I am not a big fan of bending spoon, but calling them a random startup is quite misslleading. They are a rather small company by headcount but with great success in the app consumer market and with a lot of experience in the sector. Not everything need to be huge to be good and successfully, especially in technology.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ivan_gammel 6y ago
  You are comparing costs of bakery which made an apple pie with the price of apple. 60M budget included much more than just an app, which is basically a frontend to a sophisticated government operation. If you want to make a point about inefficiency of German corporations, find the right figures first. Upd: I previously wrote, that Italian app shares the source code with German one, which was probably not correct. In fact, Italy collaborated with Germany on developing a contact tracing solution before, but the apps were developed independently with different requirements. I’m sorry.
  - siscia 6y ago
    In my understanding the Italian app was developed from scratch, definitely no idea why you think that the two app share code. Can you share your source?
    - ivan_gammel 6y ago
      You are right, thank you! I have updated my comment.
  - jolux 6y ago
    60mm is a preposterous amount of money for building almost any application. That’s like 600 engineer years of time in the US.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > That’s like 600 engineer years of time in the US. It's a lot less than that in terms of total personnel costs ($100K is a modest salary-only for a software engineer, it's extremely low as a full cost of employment.)
      - okl 6y ago
        As an average, I guess it's about right for Germany.
      - jolux 6y ago
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  If the app was developed on time and works, thats fine. 60 million isn't that much in the grand scheme of government contracts. In a situation like this i would want a proven vendor, and pay premium over startups. UK has spent 11 billion on a healthcare IT system and got nothing to show for it. https://independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/nhs-pulls-the-plug-on-its-11bn-it-system-2330906.html https://independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/hea...
  - robertlagrant 6y ago
    It doesn't have nothing to show - lots of stuff did get usefully upgraded (thankfully) although of course nowhere near 11 billion's worth. It's the public sector commissioning the private sector in matters that it often doesn't understand. This will fail far more often than it will succeed.
    - joejerryronnie 6y ago
      It’s also the byzantine vendor sourcing process that many gov agencies use. They end up hiring companies who are experts in navigating that process vs companies who are experts in the actual competency required by the project.
- throw0101a 6y ago
  > The recent COVID-App is a prime example of that. SAP plus German Telekom, neither of which is known for innovation, grab a 60M plus deal to develop a single app. Meanwhile in Canada Shopify and Blackberry got together and helped the federal Canadian Digital Service in coding up an app, with the code available on GitHub: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID_Alert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID_Alert * https://www.covidshield.app https://www.covidshield.app * https://github.com/CovidShield https://github.com/CovidShield No money exchanged hands AFAICT.
  - throwaway7281 6y ago
    Yes, imagine SAP and Telekom would have said: see, we are so profitable and rich beyond our means by extracting value from our economy each and every day, we want to give something back and build this app for free. What kind of ad this would have been. So they just come across as greedy, corrupt bastard - which probably has the positive side of being very much closer to the truth.
    - durnygbur 6y ago
      They like money, what you're going to do? BTW Enjoy your 50Mbs copper DSL connection.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    It's mostly a fork of Google's contact tracing app, with some regionalization added.
- oezi 6y ago
  That's a really bad example, because the cost of the pandemic alone for the German government was forecasted as 1500 billion EUR [1]. Any spending that would make the pandemic become a fraction less severe is probably a net win. So if you have to chose between 60m EUR offer and a 95% chance of success of all features and in time delivery and another offer of 10m EUR and 90%, what should you choose? Why be thrifty at this point? My question is rather why didn't they went out to spend more? So many more things that could have been added: public places check-ins (e.g. When visiting restaurants), more interfaces for laboratory to upload data, manual meeting log, collaborations with other countries... [1] https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2020-10/coronavirus-krise-kosten-gesundheitssystem-konjunkturprogramme-wirtschaft-wiederaufbau https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2020-10/coronavirus-...
tachyonbeam 6y ago
I agree and IMO a project like this would probably work better if the rules stipulated that it can only be used to fund startups. Eg: only companies younger than 3-5 years old, with fewer than 200 employees, and less than 100M in market cap. Such rules could help prevent established players from grabbing all the money.
- rapsey 6y ago
  So existing companies well versed in getting EU funds will make new companies and move some people over. They always have a way around and have enough influence to make sure there is anway around it. EU investments like these always go to the same pockets. It is a broken system but it makes the insiders lots of money. Lots of companies exist for the sole reason to get EU money and have absolutely zero interest in making any real products.
  - tachyonbeam 6y ago
    There must be ways to specify that the companies cannot be subsidiaries, and that creating spinoffs for the purpose of collecting money will result in massive fines (eg. 100x what was collected). From what you're saying, the problem is not the fundamental idea of having the government fund tech companies, its political corruption inevitably preventing a sound execution of said idea.
    - rapsey 6y ago
      Political corruption is everywhere. A good idea in theory that is unimplementable in reality is not a good idea.
- AdrianB1 6y ago
  Tax system does not allow for that; employees need to be paid at least minimum wage per sector, not equity, otherwise tax people will shut them down and health insurance will not exist (it is paid as percentage of salary). Every year if you have equity you need to pay taxes on the appreciation of what you own, so if you have a small salary and some equity you have no money to pay the taxes on equity. Good developers will not work for small salaries and the startup will have no money to pay. And not the least, startups are shots to the Moon with the expectation that most will fail; you cannot do that in this case, if you guarantee the money there will be no motivation, if you don't guarantee any money there will be no funding. Investing is different in Europe, that's why there is no SV here.
christophilus 6y ago
The same thing happens in the US when we have cash giveaways. See the recent stimulus. It’s pretty difficult to avoid.
NeoFeznet 6y ago
Apologies for the stupid question, as I feel like I’m missing something obvious: why is that? Is it the regulatory environment?
- worldofmatthew 6y ago
  Would investors want to risk investing in a anti-tech part of the world who will blame them for everything? The EU is populist in trying to blame tech companies for all of society's ills.
  - gspr 6y ago
    Now this is a claim you'll need to substantiate!
    - worldofmatthew 6y ago
      Do I need to going into the whole blameing tech for "fake news" while the media spreads it themselves? Who wants to invest in what will be scapegoat for law makers to cry at?
      - jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
        Social media did kind of spawn a new wave of christian terrorism in the U.S. in the form of Qanon.. so... the concern is not entirely unfounded. We cannot blame the userbase entirely, because the platforms themselves are designed to funnel people into thought bubbles where they can have access to as much batshit nonsense as they can fit into their eye and earholes. Plus even Homeland Security acknowledges that social media is a threat to national security, having recently published a report detailing how popular platforms could be used to create chaos through misinformation in the midst of our next election... So there are definitely some valid concerns... Actually, I forgot that christian terrorism is actually global now, with the Christchurch (N.Z.) mosque shooter having inspired multiple copycat terrorist attacks in California (U.S.), Texas (U.S.) and Norway. Of course these massacres are in addition to the other, white-supremacist christian terror attacks that had already been widespread in the United States before COVID took us all out of public places.
dalbasal 6y ago
Is this even supposed to produce large companies? With the language used here, it could be anything.
- Vespasian 6y ago
  If I understand it correctly this project aims to build common standards / data exchange methods between different providers all on a foundation that follows European privacy principles.
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    I mean in practical terms. Are they paying someone(s) to build something. Who? What specifically.
pydry 6y ago
Europe doesn't need to create these companies. If Europe used this money to create the infrastructure for smaller companies to work together horizontally and vertically to form similar offerings they could end up with something better, at lower cost. This is a model that worked extremely well in Japan in the latter half of the 20ths century, and was mostly responsible for its economic miracle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu In the cloud sector this would mean small companies that did everything from running electrical transformers in Berlin to data center management to running blob storage (on S3 protocol) to running machine learning SAASes or elastic compute services. All companies would work together to form a cohesive whole. Each company would own shares in related companies to insulate each other from stock market fluctuations and takeover attempts. The hard part is building something resembling a cohesive service out of all of this where smaller companies can plug in to the network easily and end customers can use every service they want and still have one bill to pay. If they can use the 10 billion euros for that - to minimize fragmentation - then the market will take care of the rest. Of course, it could just be handed over to SAP to build "SAP cloud" as a direct competitor to Amazon. In which case, yeah, we'll get a pile of shit.
- ivan_gammel 6y ago
  TB approach with „national champions“ can work too and may work better in a situation where there’s competitive market with few dominant players with unlimited resources. Look at Russia: they have achieved very high digitalization of government and society on locally built infrastructure. There are some state actors involved, e.g. Rostech, but large private companies did the majority of work, quite often not being directly affiliated with oligarchs or officials. The only thing they needed was to direct SOE to buy from local players and close the market for services hosted abroad. Technologically and CX-wise local platforms are strong enough now to expand abroad, but due to political climate this won’t happen soon. Europe can learn some lessons from this and try to do better.
  - pydry 6y ago
    I don't think I would ever point to Russian markets as an example of how well things can work.
Vinnl 6y ago
I guess whether you consider them symptoms depends on what you think the problem is. Is the problem that we don't have GAFA-sized companies, or is the problem that data is not stored under EU jurisdiction? That question is particularly pertinent if you consider that GAFA-sized can mean "big enough to influence legislation".
amelius 6y ago
The EU just needs an investor climate similar to the US. The only problem is that investors like the idea of cornering markets, which, due to regulation, is harder in the EU.
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  Another problem is that the needed investments are about similar, but the expected market is much smaller. For to language barriers we are really talking over a dozen separate markets. All these languages are killing the EU as a market. I'm German, but would always start a company in the US and not even consider starting in the EU for this reason even if everything else was equal.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    I feel it's never been cheaper to operate in several languages. Isn't it harder to deal with the tax rules and laws of individual countries?
- barumi 6y ago
  > The EU just needs an investor climate similar to the US. What leads you to believe that europe's problem is the investor climate? I mean, this policy is clearly devoted to ensure that europe is able to control and manage critical cloud infrastructure, instead of handing everything in a silver platter to the US or, even worse, China. What leads you cto believe that a change in europe's investor climate would have an impact on this?
- dzonga 6y ago
  you mean channel military funds into civilian companies for nefarious purposes. google received CIA funding. easy tracking for the NSA n CIA. the fairchilds or other chip companies all military money. so yeah if the EU becomes war hungry definitely they will catch up with the US. but remember world wars have started in Europe.
ThinkBeat 6y ago
I wonder if the existence of such giant monopolies is more of a symptom or result of a non-functioning capitalist system. The world, at least the western world, desperately needs viable mature competition not based in the US. I would go so far as to say not having it is a real problem for democracy and maybe even go as far as it being an issue of national security. With the close ties between intelligence services and social media in the US, it is a problem for the US, but certaily more outside. However it is a challenge to avoid 5 eyes. Less conspiracies, two rich and powerful persons in the US can decide what information is permissible in an election and what is not. This would not matter much, if there were at least 10 different healthy competitors with at least a few million users. Hopefully being more distributed also internationally, it would be unlikely that each leader would make the same decisions. Like newspapers, they can suppress a story, but another newspaper might go with it. Sadly in the US, the mass death of newspapers often means that a region / city /state might only have one newspaper in a monopoly situation. I do not know if the state injecting billions can get to where we need to be.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  > I wonder if the existence of such giant monopolies is more of a symptom or result of a non-functioning capitalist system. I think it’s a simple confluence of the US having many English speaking people with lots of money, plus English is spoken worldwide, plus labor is readily available in the US. There exists buyers, labor supply, and the inherent ability for software to scale with very low marginal costs means targeting the US market results in a higher probability of success. Once you can grab the rich US market, you now have the momentum to grab other markets, and being first is more important than being better where network effects are in play.
krsdcbl 6y ago
As a european as well, I'm well afraid you're being absolutely right on this.
zuppy 6y ago
how can companies grow without ending up being aquired by large US companies? it’s a very hard to solve this problem, considering the current climate when there are a lot of multi billion (and trillion) dollars companies.
xxpor 6y ago
Even referring to them as "IT companies" shows how out of touch Europe is.
- kazen44 6y ago
  this might just be a language thing to be honest. ICT/IT is a very broad term, and usually used for anything technological in my experience.
  - xxpor 6y ago
    But if you're using English, it's important to use the term that's widely understood. I don't really care how French/Italian/Romanian/Albanian use it. If I hear you work in IT, it makes it sound like you work in corporate IT, e.g. the help desk, corporate networking, etc.
brnt 6y ago
Why on Earth would we want to create GAFA sized, privacy violating, information power concentrating and privatizing molochs? The current pluralist landscape suits me and demicracy just fine!
pianoboard 6y ago
If you're trying to talk about size, MAGA would work much better. Facebook is puny in comparison to Microsoft
tiaxxl 6y ago
The Europeans often say about new technologies: "We have never done this in the past, we are not doing this now, we won't do it." I just send a pitch to a European VC fund with a new, totally disruptive technology. Their answer: "This is a crowded, very competitive market, hence we are not interested." I mean, really? First, this shows that the market is there. Second, such a device does not exists in the market and would disrupt the market. I don't get it. I am a dual citizen so if we don't find money in the EU we just go to the US.
bserge 6y ago
Pretty much. Just like the funding for Covid recovery and green projects. All taken up by big companies, zero chance for a small business to get a grant. Which is simply stupid. Throw more money at the current system, which has gotten bloated and complacent and clearly doesn't really work. The taxpayers pay for it.
fogihujy 6y ago
I don't think the point is to create new giants, but rather to coordinate smaller players' efforts against the old giants. Obviously, there would have to be innovation taking place for that to happen, but it doesn't seem to be a goal on it's own. Does anyone know much are European businesses paying for US and Chinese cloud services per year? If we can pay 10B€ in order to move 20B€ of spending back into the EU then I'm all for it, no matter if we innovate or just subsidize existing providers.
908B64B197 6y ago
I'm not certain it's the way forward. I've never raised capital or founded a startup in Europe, but from what I've been told by Europeans there are several challenges that the continent should try tackling - Talent and Pay gap with the US - Risk averse investors - Over-regulated markets I don't see how this plan will solve any of the above.

by bsaul 6y ago

jbverschoor 6y ago

100%

throwaway7281 6y ago

The recent COVID-App is a prime example of that. SAP plus German Telekom, neither of which is known for innovation, grab a 60M plus deal to develop a single app. In Italy a startup took over the job for 1/50 of the price and with at least as good or better job. Is the above play a problem for Germany? No. Do you they even understand an problem? I don't think so.

88840-8855 6y ago
Excellent example with the app. It's an app that could have been designed and made with 100k, less people and better quality. And quicker. The current app is a nightmare. It shows that i had already 2 low risk encounters - but it doesn't show me when and where! I NEED this info to adapt my behavior! very bad app.
- justoreply 6y ago
  the app doesn't store location information by design for privacy reasons
  - 88840-8855 6y ago
    if you ask normal people, they will hate this - only some data fanatics want this feature. people die. the economy is suffering. millions lose jobs. still, some guys making 140k in their it engineering jobs working from home and relaxing are telling me sth about "data privacy as priority". i disagree. people disagree. Taiwan did a FANTASTIC job leveraging data. we are either not capable of that or just fanatic.... maybe both.
    - justoreply 6y ago
      several people still remember the Stasi and they don't want a state controlled app to monitor their movement. If you want your app to have the biggest installation base (without asking for a mandatory installation) you can't ask for user location, with it enabled fewer people will install it
      - 88840-8855 6y ago
        ... the same people that shop on amazon, use "payback" (a shopping monitoring system), post crap on facebook and enjoy google's personalisation. Please, mate, this is just populism what you are doing there.
        adriancr 6y ago
        I take it you haven't lived under a communist regime? There's a difference between what you share willingly and stuff being collected on you, especially in private matters.
        neuronic 6y ago
        My family was directly affected by Stasi. I care about what the government knows and what it can do to you. I constantly have 2-3 low risk exposure notifications. But it doesn't matter where they happened since I already know that I am carefully avoiding risky areas. I am sitting next to my window when working and people walk past that window within 2 meters. That alone could set off exposure notifications. Or maybe someone across the aisle in the supermarket? Would I not go to the supermarket if I know it happened there? Would I not go for a walk if I knew someone 8 meters away from me on some bench was later diagnosed with COVID? It barely serves any purpose at all outside of curiosity. The app already tells you everything you need to know.
- brazzy 6y ago
  You're talking out of your ass. Literally everyone who knows anything calls the German app a huge success, especially compared with similar efforts.
  - tupputuppu 6y ago
    In Finland, the authorities reserved 6M to create a contact tracing app and all support systems. They ended up building it for 150k, with 250k more to operate it until the end of next year. Half the population downloaded it in the first days and it works great. It's completely privacy-focused and the UX is great for both individuals as well as the government. Is the German tracking solution really 400 times as complex? Based on either citizens' adoption or UX, is it anywhere near as successful? Built by a small, Agile company, although not by a startup by any classification.
    - brazzy 6y ago
      > They ended up building it for 150k, with 250k more to operate it until the end of next year. Do you have any source for that? If true that is indeed impressive, but I am sceptical, given that your claim that "Half the population downloaded it" seems to be extremely exaggerated (https://qz.com/1898960/whats-behind-finlands-contact-tracing-app-success-user-privacy/ https://qz.com/1898960/whats-behind-finlands-contact-tracing...) One way in which the German app was clearly superior is that it was released a full month and a half earlier.
      - tupputuppu 6y ago
        Costs, use Google Translate: https://www.mtvuutiset.fi/artikkeli/koronavilkkuun-on-varattu-6-miljoona-euroa-kehitys-maksoi-147-000-minne-loput-rahat-menevat/7915338 https://www.mtvuutiset.fi/artikkeli/koronavilkkuun-on-varatt... Share of population that downloaded it - Your article only talk about the first 24 hours. See for instance this article that says 1.8 milloin a month and a half ago: https://mobiili.fi/2020/09/08/koronavilkun-lataukset-yli-18-miljoonan-nain-moni-on-poistanut-sovelluksen/ https://mobiili.fi/2020/09/08/koronavilkun-lataukset-yli-18-... That's beginning to be half of the relevant population in a country of 6 million, when you take out kids and people in old folks' homes.
justoreply 6y ago
With just the difference that in Germany that app works, in Italy the correct infrastructure/process was not built, sick data information was never uploaded so the app is useless
- 88840-8855 6y ago
  how do you know the app is working? because we value privacy SO much, we don't even know if the app has ANY effect - taking all the anecdotes aside.
  - justoreply 6y ago
    I had several notifications of low risk exposures, so the app is fed with some data. This doesn't happen in the Italian version of the app if you are living in some regions, for example. If the app is useful, this is another topic, but it was not the point of this thread.
  - tastroder 6y ago
    There were plenty of cases where in app notifications lead to people getting tested and in touch with their local tracing efforts. You don't need privacy invading levels of analytics to measure that. With the low numbers we had over the past months exactly what else do you expect?
WanderPanda 6y ago
What afraids me is, that here in Germany nobody seems to care anymore. The big numbers are just thrown around and everyone (especially the younger generation) has lost any sense as the media is just cheering along.
- tiaxxl 6y ago
  As long as the boomers get their retirement payments, who cares about future generations?
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  I wish I could upvote you more. This is what I noticed in Germany as well. The government keeps tooting their own horn on how in every statistic they're the best in Europe and the media parrots that while the younger generations just takes it for granted and doesn't bother questioning the poor decisions the government makes while they spend the public tax money like drunken sailors because hey, "we're Europe's no. 1, what could our government ever do wrong?"
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    I agree that the waste of taxpayer money in Germany is beyond comprehension (while they do take utmost care when it comes to taxing you) and as a young German myself I also agree that many young people just don't question the media, if they get involved in politics at all. But I also know many who do and they've mostly just given up on the country. Because emigration aside, what are you going to do?
    - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
      >Because emigration aside, what are you going to do? Maybe vote the corrupt leeches out?
      - andi999 6y ago
        I had a discussion recently, and I think generally in Germany politicians are considered incompetent instead of corrupt. Like in cross border leasing/ public private partnership etc.
est31 6y ago
The German federal government had past bad experiences with the company contracted to collect car/truck tolls on federal roadways. The product launch was delayed due to the contractor and thus the government lost lots of revenue from tolls. A 15 year long fight with the owners of the company ensued. Maybe they wanted to avoid that by just putting a large pile of cash onto the table, ensuring that SAP+DTG put their best people behind it. Delays in COVID-App deployment cost real lives instead of just revenue. It's great that it worked nice in Italy, but giving the contract to a random startup is more of a gamble I think.
- siscia 6y ago
  I am not a big fan of bending spoon, but calling them a random startup is quite misslleading. They are a rather small company by headcount but with great success in the app consumer market and with a lot of experience in the sector. Not everything need to be huge to be good and successfully, especially in technology.
deleted 6y ago
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ivan_gammel 6y ago
You are comparing costs of bakery which made an apple pie with the price of apple. 60M budget included much more than just an app, which is basically a frontend to a sophisticated government operation. If you want to make a point about inefficiency of German corporations, find the right figures first. Upd: I previously wrote, that Italian app shares the source code with German one, which was probably not correct. In fact, Italy collaborated with Germany on developing a contact tracing solution before, but the apps were developed independently with different requirements. I’m sorry.
- siscia 6y ago
  In my understanding the Italian app was developed from scratch, definitely no idea why you think that the two app share code. Can you share your source?
  - ivan_gammel 6y ago
    You are right, thank you! I have updated my comment.
- jolux 6y ago
  60mm is a preposterous amount of money for building almost any application. That’s like 600 engineer years of time in the US.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > That’s like 600 engineer years of time in the US. It's a lot less than that in terms of total personnel costs ($100K is a modest salary-only for a software engineer, it's extremely low as a full cost of employment.)
    - okl 6y ago
      As an average, I guess it's about right for Germany.
    - jolux 6y ago
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
If the app was developed on time and works, thats fine. 60 million isn't that much in the grand scheme of government contracts. In a situation like this i would want a proven vendor, and pay premium over startups. UK has spent 11 billion on a healthcare IT system and got nothing to show for it. https://independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/nhs-pulls-the-plug-on-its-11bn-it-system-2330906.html https://independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/hea...
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  It doesn't have nothing to show - lots of stuff did get usefully upgraded (thankfully) although of course nowhere near 11 billion's worth. It's the public sector commissioning the private sector in matters that it often doesn't understand. This will fail far more often than it will succeed.
  - joejerryronnie 6y ago
    It’s also the byzantine vendor sourcing process that many gov agencies use. They end up hiring companies who are experts in navigating that process vs companies who are experts in the actual competency required by the project.
throw0101a 6y ago
> The recent COVID-App is a prime example of that. SAP plus German Telekom, neither of which is known for innovation, grab a 60M plus deal to develop a single app. Meanwhile in Canada Shopify and Blackberry got together and helped the federal Canadian Digital Service in coding up an app, with the code available on GitHub: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID_Alert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID_Alert * https://www.covidshield.app https://www.covidshield.app * https://github.com/CovidShield https://github.com/CovidShield No money exchanged hands AFAICT.
- throwaway7281 6y ago
  Yes, imagine SAP and Telekom would have said: see, we are so profitable and rich beyond our means by extracting value from our economy each and every day, we want to give something back and build this app for free. What kind of ad this would have been. So they just come across as greedy, corrupt bastard - which probably has the positive side of being very much closer to the truth.
  - durnygbur 6y ago
    They like money, what you're going to do? BTW Enjoy your 50Mbs copper DSL connection.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  It's mostly a fork of Google's contact tracing app, with some regionalization added.
oezi 6y ago
That's a really bad example, because the cost of the pandemic alone for the German government was forecasted as 1500 billion EUR [1]. Any spending that would make the pandemic become a fraction less severe is probably a net win. So if you have to chose between 60m EUR offer and a 95% chance of success of all features and in time delivery and another offer of 10m EUR and 90%, what should you choose? Why be thrifty at this point? My question is rather why didn't they went out to spend more? So many more things that could have been added: public places check-ins (e.g. When visiting restaurants), more interfaces for laboratory to upload data, manual meeting log, collaborations with other countries... [1] https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2020-10/coronavirus-krise-kosten-gesundheitssystem-konjunkturprogramme-wirtschaft-wiederaufbau https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2020-10/coronavirus-...

tachyonbeam 6y ago

I agree and IMO a project like this would probably work better if the rules stipulated that it can only be used to fund startups. Eg: only companies younger than 3-5 years old, with fewer than 200 employees, and less than 100M in market cap. Such rules could help prevent established players from grabbing all the money.

rapsey 6y ago
So existing companies well versed in getting EU funds will make new companies and move some people over. They always have a way around and have enough influence to make sure there is anway around it. EU investments like these always go to the same pockets. It is a broken system but it makes the insiders lots of money. Lots of companies exist for the sole reason to get EU money and have absolutely zero interest in making any real products.
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  There must be ways to specify that the companies cannot be subsidiaries, and that creating spinoffs for the purpose of collecting money will result in massive fines (eg. 100x what was collected). From what you're saying, the problem is not the fundamental idea of having the government fund tech companies, its political corruption inevitably preventing a sound execution of said idea.
  - rapsey 6y ago
    Political corruption is everywhere. A good idea in theory that is unimplementable in reality is not a good idea.
AdrianB1 6y ago
Tax system does not allow for that; employees need to be paid at least minimum wage per sector, not equity, otherwise tax people will shut them down and health insurance will not exist (it is paid as percentage of salary). Every year if you have equity you need to pay taxes on the appreciation of what you own, so if you have a small salary and some equity you have no money to pay the taxes on equity. Good developers will not work for small salaries and the startup will have no money to pay. And not the least, startups are shots to the Moon with the expectation that most will fail; you cannot do that in this case, if you guarantee the money there will be no motivation, if you don't guarantee any money there will be no funding. Investing is different in Europe, that's why there is no SV here.

christophilus 6y ago

The same thing happens in the US when we have cash giveaways. See the recent stimulus. It’s pretty difficult to avoid.

NeoFeznet 6y ago

Apologies for the stupid question, as I feel like I’m missing something obvious: why is that? Is it the regulatory environment?

worldofmatthew 6y ago
Would investors want to risk investing in a anti-tech part of the world who will blame them for everything? The EU is populist in trying to blame tech companies for all of society's ills.
- gspr 6y ago
  Now this is a claim you'll need to substantiate!
  - worldofmatthew 6y ago
    Do I need to going into the whole blameing tech for "fake news" while the media spreads it themselves? Who wants to invest in what will be scapegoat for law makers to cry at?
    - jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
      Social media did kind of spawn a new wave of christian terrorism in the U.S. in the form of Qanon.. so... the concern is not entirely unfounded. We cannot blame the userbase entirely, because the platforms themselves are designed to funnel people into thought bubbles where they can have access to as much batshit nonsense as they can fit into their eye and earholes. Plus even Homeland Security acknowledges that social media is a threat to national security, having recently published a report detailing how popular platforms could be used to create chaos through misinformation in the midst of our next election... So there are definitely some valid concerns... Actually, I forgot that christian terrorism is actually global now, with the Christchurch (N.Z.) mosque shooter having inspired multiple copycat terrorist attacks in California (U.S.), Texas (U.S.) and Norway. Of course these massacres are in addition to the other, white-supremacist christian terror attacks that had already been widespread in the United States before COVID took us all out of public places.

dalbasal 6y ago

Is this even supposed to produce large companies? With the language used here, it could be anything.

Vespasian 6y ago
If I understand it correctly this project aims to build common standards / data exchange methods between different providers all on a foundation that follows European privacy principles.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  I mean in practical terms. Are they paying someone(s) to build something. Who? What specifically.

pydry 6y ago

Europe doesn't need to create these companies. If Europe used this money to create the infrastructure for smaller companies to work together horizontally and vertically to form similar offerings they could end up with something better, at lower cost. This is a model that worked extremely well in Japan in the latter half of the 20ths century, and was mostly responsible for its economic miracle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu In the cloud sector this would mean small companies that did everything from running electrical transformers in Berlin to data center management to running blob storage (on S3 protocol) to running machine learning SAASes or elastic compute services. All companies would work together to form a cohesive whole. Each company would own shares in related companies to insulate each other from stock market fluctuations and takeover attempts. The hard part is building something resembling a cohesive service out of all of this where smaller companies can plug in to the network easily and end customers can use every service they want and still have one bill to pay. If they can use the 10 billion euros for that - to minimize fragmentation - then the market will take care of the rest. Of course, it could just be handed over to SAP to build "SAP cloud" as a direct competitor to Amazon. In which case, yeah, we'll get a pile of shit.

ivan_gammel 6y ago
TB approach with „national champions“ can work too and may work better in a situation where there’s competitive market with few dominant players with unlimited resources. Look at Russia: they have achieved very high digitalization of government and society on locally built infrastructure. There are some state actors involved, e.g. Rostech, but large private companies did the majority of work, quite often not being directly affiliated with oligarchs or officials. The only thing they needed was to direct SOE to buy from local players and close the market for services hosted abroad. Technologically and CX-wise local platforms are strong enough now to expand abroad, but due to political climate this won’t happen soon. Europe can learn some lessons from this and try to do better.
- pydry 6y ago
  I don't think I would ever point to Russian markets as an example of how well things can work.

Vinnl 6y ago

I guess whether you consider them symptoms depends on what you think the problem is. Is the problem that we don't have GAFA-sized companies, or is the problem that data is not stored under EU jurisdiction? That question is particularly pertinent if you consider that GAFA-sized can mean "big enough to influence legislation".

amelius 6y ago

The EU just needs an investor climate similar to the US. The only problem is that investors like the idea of cornering markets, which, due to regulation, is harder in the EU.

ajmurmann 6y ago
Another problem is that the needed investments are about similar, but the expected market is much smaller. For to language barriers we are really talking over a dozen separate markets. All these languages are killing the EU as a market. I'm German, but would always start a company in the US and not even consider starting in the EU for this reason even if everything else was equal.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  I feel it's never been cheaper to operate in several languages. Isn't it harder to deal with the tax rules and laws of individual countries?
barumi 6y ago
> The EU just needs an investor climate similar to the US. What leads you to believe that europe's problem is the investor climate? I mean, this policy is clearly devoted to ensure that europe is able to control and manage critical cloud infrastructure, instead of handing everything in a silver platter to the US or, even worse, China. What leads you cto believe that a change in europe's investor climate would have an impact on this?
dzonga 6y ago
you mean channel military funds into civilian companies for nefarious purposes. google received CIA funding. easy tracking for the NSA n CIA. the fairchilds or other chip companies all military money. so yeah if the EU becomes war hungry definitely they will catch up with the US. but remember world wars have started in Europe.

ThinkBeat 6y ago

I wonder if the existence of such giant monopolies is more of a symptom or result of a non-functioning capitalist system. The world, at least the western world, desperately needs viable mature competition not based in the US. I would go so far as to say not having it is a real problem for democracy and maybe even go as far as it being an issue of national security. With the close ties between intelligence services and social media in the US, it is a problem for the US, but certaily more outside. However it is a challenge to avoid 5 eyes. Less conspiracies, two rich and powerful persons in the US can decide what information is permissible in an election and what is not. This would not matter much, if there were at least 10 different healthy competitors with at least a few million users. Hopefully being more distributed also internationally, it would be unlikely that each leader would make the same decisions. Like newspapers, they can suppress a story, but another newspaper might go with it. Sadly in the US, the mass death of newspapers often means that a region / city /state might only have one newspaper in a monopoly situation. I do not know if the state injecting billions can get to where we need to be.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
> I wonder if the existence of such giant monopolies is more of a symptom or result of a non-functioning capitalist system. I think it’s a simple confluence of the US having many English speaking people with lots of money, plus English is spoken worldwide, plus labor is readily available in the US. There exists buyers, labor supply, and the inherent ability for software to scale with very low marginal costs means targeting the US market results in a higher probability of success. Once you can grab the rich US market, you now have the momentum to grab other markets, and being first is more important than being better where network effects are in play.

krsdcbl 6y ago

As a european as well, I'm well afraid you're being absolutely right on this.

zuppy 6y ago

how can companies grow without ending up being aquired by large US companies? it’s a very hard to solve this problem, considering the current climate when there are a lot of multi billion (and trillion) dollars companies.

xxpor 6y ago

Even referring to them as "IT companies" shows how out of touch Europe is.

kazen44 6y ago
this might just be a language thing to be honest. ICT/IT is a very broad term, and usually used for anything technological in my experience.
- xxpor 6y ago
  But if you're using English, it's important to use the term that's widely understood. I don't really care how French/Italian/Romanian/Albanian use it. If I hear you work in IT, it makes it sound like you work in corporate IT, e.g. the help desk, corporate networking, etc.

brnt 6y ago

Why on Earth would we want to create GAFA sized, privacy violating, information power concentrating and privatizing molochs? The current pluralist landscape suits me and demicracy just fine!

pianoboard 6y ago

If you're trying to talk about size, MAGA would work much better. Facebook is puny in comparison to Microsoft

tiaxxl 6y ago

The Europeans often say about new technologies: "We have never done this in the past, we are not doing this now, we won't do it." I just send a pitch to a European VC fund with a new, totally disruptive technology. Their answer: "This is a crowded, very competitive market, hence we are not interested." I mean, really? First, this shows that the market is there. Second, such a device does not exists in the market and would disrupt the market. I don't get it. I am a dual citizen so if we don't find money in the EU we just go to the US.

bserge 6y ago

Pretty much. Just like the funding for Covid recovery and green projects. All taken up by big companies, zero chance for a small business to get a grant. Which is simply stupid. Throw more money at the current system, which has gotten bloated and complacent and clearly doesn't really work. The taxpayers pay for it.

fogihujy 6y ago

I don't think the point is to create new giants, but rather to coordinate smaller players' efforts against the old giants. Obviously, there would have to be innovation taking place for that to happen, but it doesn't seem to be a goal on it's own. Does anyone know much are European businesses paying for US and Chinese cloud services per year? If we can pay 10B€ in order to move 20B€ of spending back into the EU then I'm all for it, no matter if we innovate or just subsidize existing providers.

908B64B197 6y ago

I'm not certain it's the way forward. I've never raised capital or founded a startup in Europe, but from what I've been told by Europeans there are several challenges that the continent should try tackling - Talent and Pay gap with the US - Risk averse investors - Over-regulated markets I don't see how this plan will solve any of the above.