The news of the new EU industrial strategy came just a couple of days after the Geneva-headquartered, French-Italian manufacturer STMicroelectronics launched its own three-year project, worth €360 million ($463 million), aimed at creating a European microelectronics design ecosystem based around its fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) manufacturing process.

Some in the industry, such as chipmaker GlobalFoundries, have previously urged European authorities to back electronics manufacturing on the continent in order to counteract the vast influence of Asia and (to a lesser extent) the U.S. in this field.

Cheaper, faster, smarter

The European Commission’s strategy, announced on Thursday, is intended to make chips cheaper, faster and smarter. It will concentrate on shoring up three existing electronics clusters, namely those in Dresden (Germany), Eindhoven (Netherlands) and Leuven (Belgium), and Grenoble (France). Connections will also be made with other clusters such as that in Cambridge (UK), which is big in the wireless sector.

“I want to double our chip production to around 20 percent of global production,” Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in a statement. “I want Europe to produce more chips in Europe than the United States produces domestically. It’s a realistic goal if we channel our investments properly.”

As per usual, this isn’t a simple public cash splurge. €5 billion in public funds – 30 percent from the EU with the rest coming from national and regional funds – will go to R&D, in order to help stimulate the sector. Overall, the Commission says, industry has indicated it will stump up €100 billion over the seven years: €15 billion in capital expenditure and €85 billion in operational costs.

The kind of electronics we’re talking about could be used in desktop and handheld computers, but the main thrust is for embedded systems and “internet of things” devices, from sensors and smart grids to new healthcare technologies. As Kroes said in a speech, “this isn’t about computers.”

Targeting these areas plays to Europe’s strengths. According to the Commission, Europe already pumps out half of global automotive electronics, 40 percent of electronics used in energy applications, and 35 percent of those used for industrial automation – this will be a reference to the output of companies such as Bosch, which are hugely active despite often being somewhat under-the-radar. Then we also have smaller manufacturers working in high-growth niches, such as health implants and sensors.

And jobs?

The purpose of all this is to make Europe less reliant on manufacturers outside the continent, but job creation is also a major factor. The Commission reckons the European electronics industry already employs 200,000 people directly and supports a further million jobs indirectly.

That said, the Commission also pointed out in its statement that demand for skilled workers in these fields is higher than supply – if this whole strategy is to work, the implication runs, Europe will need to attract more skilled workers. The statement talks of coordinating public efforts across Europe. Perhaps that will mean tweaking immigration rules: something the U.S. tech sector is also heavily vocal about these days.

Meanwhile, STMicro’s push – called, incredibly, “Pilot Lines for Advanced CMOS Enhanced by SOI in 2x nodes, Built in Europe” (Places2Be) – also takes place in the context of a wider European project, the nanoelectronics-focused ENIAC. In a briefing note accompanying Thursday’s announcement, the Commission insisted that ENIAC and ARTEMIS (another project focusing on embedded computing) had been a success, and that the new drive did not denote failure of those two schemes.

The Commission said the new joint undertaking would build on “lessons learnt” from ENIAC and ARTEMIS while providing a “simplified funding structure”.

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The company has come under criticism for not having a European data center in the past, largely due to compliance issues – Salesforce is part of the EU-U.S. Safe Harbor framework, which means it’s allowed to handle European citizens’ personal data, but many customers would prefer the certainty that a locally sited data center allows. (We will be discussing such issues at our Structure:Europe conference in London on 18-19 September, by the way.)

Salesforce said last year that it hoped to open a data center in the UK in 2013, but this appears to have been pushed back a little now. According to a statement today, the new data center – the firm’s sixth — will be completed in 2014 in partnership with NTT Communications’ local arm, NTT Europe.

In a statement, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Europe had provided the greatest revenue growth – 38 percent — for the company in the 2013 fiscal year:

“We are doubling down on Europe with the announcement of our new data centre in the UK, which will support continued customer success in EMEA.”

Robin Balen, NTT Europe’s wholesale data center business chief, added that the new facility would be “powered 100 percent by renewable energy sources.”

Innovation Challenge

Meanwhile, Salesforce has also teamed up with a group of European venture capital firms – Notion capital, Octopus Investment and MMC Ventures – to launch a €5 million ($6.6 million) Innovation Challenge for startups.

Startups are invited to pitch their enterprise cloud apps that could run (surprise!) on Salesforce’s platform. There will be pitching events through Europe between September and November, and the winners will get seed funding. Apps will need to be at least in the beta stage, with demonstrable “traction, customer success and user adoption.”

“This is a unique opportunity for innovative start-ups in the enterprise app market here in Europe to receive commercial support to allow them to compete on a global stage,” Octopus principal Luke Hakes said in a statement.

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Some of these ideas were on display this week at the Printed Electronics Europe 2013 event in Berlin, which took in a variety of sub-events including the Energy Harvesting & Storage Europe show. The concepts ranged from the practical to the experimental, so let’s start with the practical.

Here’s Perpetuum‘s Vibration Energy Harvester (VEH), being carried around (appropriately) on a model train.

The VEH is a wireless sensor that gets attached to rotating components, such as wheel bearings, on trains. Cleverly, the device both measures and is powered by mechanical vibration. It also measures temperature, and it wirelessly transmits the results to the train’s operator so they can immediately spot a failure in its early stages.

It’s a simple, low-maintenance idea (there’s no battery that needs replacing) that promises big savings, as Perpetuum CEO Roy Freeland told me, referring to an unnamed operator:

“The user has achieved a very fast payback because the system has enabled him to delay maintenance on the bearings until the fleet was due for a major train overhaul.”

Perpetuum is part of an EU-funded consortium called Wibrate, which aims to introduce this kind of self-powered vibration monitoring technology into a variety of industrial systems.

Meanwhile, a similar principle was at play in Cherry’s energy-harvesting switch.

The light you see in that picture can be wirelessly turned on and off by a switch that does not itself require any external powering: the act of pressing the switch creates enough mechanical energy to briefly power its wireless transmission capabilities. This is somewhat preferable to wiring up switches, in terms of both effort and flexibility, and who knows? Perhaps the principle could be employed in certain internet-of-things scenarios, too.

Then there’s good old photovoltaic technology, which may soon find itself woven into a new generation of smart fabrics. Another EU-funded project called Powerweave aims to create two kinds of fiber – one for harvesting solar energy and the other for storing it – that can be woven together into one self-contained system. This could theoretically be used to power soft sensors in clothing, but there are far more large-scale applications in store.

According to Christian Dalsgaard, founder of consortium member Ohmatex, the goal is to create a fabric that can generate 10W per square meter. Once that is achieved, he noted, there are “no limits how big such a fabric can be made”, and a 100m2 piece of fabric would in theory be able to generate a kilowatt of power. Commercial applications could range from flexible roofing, tents and sun awnings to a new generation of autonomous airship (balloon manufacturer Lindstrand is also in the consortium). The fabric could even be a valuable part of aid packages, Dalsgaard noted:

“The end fabric should be foldable, so you can fold a large fabric – 100m2 – into a package. It’s not enough to roll it up… The requirement is to fold it, put it in a package and drop it from an airplane.”

Powerweave isn’t quite there yet, though. While a lot of progress has been made on the solar cell and storage fibers, “the challenge is to ensure the solar fibers are on top of the fabric and battery fibers are beneath, and that there is a supporting layer to provide strength,” Dalsgaard added.

But what about fabrics that can harvest energy from movement, rather than light? Yep, people are working on that idea too, although problems remain. As Steve Beeby of the University of Southhampton said at the conference: “Textiles offer a good opportunity for energy harvesting… but clothes are designed for [comfort], not to resist your movement.” And don’t forget, any flexible electronics built into the fabric of clothes need to be machine-washable, too, connectors and all.

And finally, a less technically interesting but nonetheless worthwhile little gadget that was on show: the Clicc.

These dinky little solar panels can be clipped into tiny units that store the captured energy for charging mobile devices — I wouldn’t expect vast amounts of charge, but it’s handy in a pinch — or they can be chained as the picture shows, to increase the total amount of energy captured. Unfortunately the firm behind them, Sonnenrepublik, hasn’t yet come up with a unit to store and output that aggregated power, but it’s a nice thought nonetheless.

In the end, all ideas that take us closer to sustainable energy use are welcome.

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The 27 countries agreed on the rule change on Wednesday, according to the European Commission, which is behind the proposed revision of a 2003 directive on public sector information. If the European Parliament adds its stamp of approval, national governments will then transpose the changes into their laws sometime in the next 18 months or so.

According to Neelie Kroes, the digital agenda commissioner, the European Parliament will sign off on the change soon:

Breaking … #EU member states have agreed to updated #OpenData rules. Big culture change coming, #EP to sign off in coming weeks.

— Neelie Kroes (@NeelieKroesEU) April 10, 2013

The change will give developers, businesses and citizens the right to get their hands on public data at low cost or for free. They will also be able to use data from museums, libraries and archives for the first time. Public sector bodies will only be able to charge marginal costs for sharing their data, and will also have to be more transparent about their charges. They will also be encouraged to make their data available in machine-readable formats.

According to a webpage setting out the Commission’s hopes on the matter, the data in question will cover digital maps, weather data and road congestion data, as well as information on companies and court proceedings:

“Most of Public Sector Information raw data could be re-used or integrated into new products and services, which we use on a daily basis, such as car navigation systems, smartphone apps with weather forecasts, information services for companies integrating information from various sources, such as statistical data with economic forecasts, company register data and other publicly available information.”

Some European countries, such as the UK, already have established open data initiatives (and so, of course, does the U.S.).

Sources close to the negotiations tell me that agreement was reached on the basis that cultural institutions in particular could charge a bit more than originally planned for handing out their data. Some governments had apparently been hoping to be able to charge a lot more for their institutions’ data, but were convinced that they would get more money in the form of taxation from the businesses that would spring up around open data, the sources noted.

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Google did not implement the recommendations within the allotted four months, even after a meeting in March with CNIL and data protection authorities (DPAs) from Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy. And now we see the result. According to a CNIL statement on Tuesday:

“It is now up to each national data protection authority to carry out further investigations according to the provisions of its national law transposing European legislation. Consequently, all the authorities composing the taskforce have launched actions on 2 April 2013 on the basis of the provisions laid down in their respective national legislation (investigations, inspections, etc.)

“In particular, the CNIL notified Google of the initiation of an inspection procedure and that it had set up an international administrative cooperation procedure with its counterparts in the taskforce.”

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) also confirmed that it had opened an investigation to check whether the privacy policy complies with that country’s Data Protection Act (each EU member state transposes EU law into its own version, and there are sometimes variations in interpretation).

Google, meanwhile, said in a statement that its privacy policy “respects European law and allows us to create simpler, more effective services”. “We have engaged fully with the DPAs involved throughout this process, and we’ll continue to do so going forward,” the company added.

What did Google do wrong?

The main problems with the privacy policy, according to the regulators, are that Google doesn’t provide clear and comprehensive information about the data it collects and what it uses the data for, and that it also doesn’t give users control over the way data is mixed and matched across different services.

The DPAs want Google to give its users “the opportunity to choose when their data are combined, for instance with dedicated buttons in the services”, as well as a centralized opt-out for data collection. They also want Google to be much clearer with its users about the way it gathers and exploits their data, ideally “with three levels of detail to ensure that information complies with the requirements laid down in the [Data Protection] Directive and does not degrade the users’ experience”.

So what happens if Google fails to satisfy the DPAs? As this is now being dealt with on a national basis, that depends on the DPA. In the case of the UK ICO, Google could in theory be hit with a monetary penalty of up to £500,000 ($758,000), but it could also be forced to change its processes and practices.

It’s not hard to see the benefit of Google unifying its services, but the DPAs do have a point about the levels of information and control afforded to Google’s customers. It must surely be possible for both Google and the regulators to get their way, although the variable there is the ability of the users to understand and act on the information and controls they are given.

In the new realpolitik required by the collision of big data and privacy, perhaps people will need to start getting used to this kind of granularity.

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The European Commission reckons  that 80 percent of high-speed network deployment costs relate to civil engineering, mostly digging up roads. For example, it may be that a road is being dug up anyway for the laying of new waterworks or electric cables, and it would be a no-brainer to lay some fiber in there at the same time – however, in many European countries that kind of coordination is not in place, and that’s what Kroes wants to fix.

Kroes maintains that this could take €40-60 billion ($51-77 billion) off the overall cost of deploying fiber-based broadband in Europe. She also wants rules that would ensure that newly-built or renovated buildings are equipped to receive fiber directly to the premises, and to mandate reasonably-priced open access conditions on infrastructure such as ducts and poles.

On the mobile front, Kroes says permits for new masts and antennas should be granted or refused within six months. Her office is painting all of these changes as cuts to red tape. While this interpretation may be debatable, as some of the changes would actually involve new rules, the overall result would at least be one of more efficient bureaucracy.

“Everyone deserves fast broadband. I want to burn the red tape that is stopping us for getting there,” Kroes said in a statement. “The European Commission wants to make it quicker and cheaper to get that broadband.”

Kroes’s Digital Agenda office intends to see, by 2020, that everyone in Europe has access to at least 30Mbps broadband, and that half the EU is able to surf at 100Mbps or more. She recently threw €50 million in the direction of “5G” research, so that mobile can carry more of the load in meeting those goals.

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According to Dow Jones Business News, Reding said:

“This case and the responses I received since I sent my letter have highlighted rather clearly just why the Commission cannot sit on the side-lines on enforcement issues,” she said. “The approaches to enforcement in these types of cases turn out to be very diversified and inconsistent at a national level. In at least 21 EU Member States Apple is not informing consumers correctly about the legal warranty rights they have. This is simply not good enough.”

Reding’s remarks echo comments she made in October 2012, in which she called Apple’s standard free offering of one year of warranty protection to its customers ”unacceptable marketing practices” according to EU laws. The EU requires that companies not only offer a two-year warranty for free, but companies also need to inform their customers of this right.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Italy has been the most aggressive EU member state in enforcing this law against Apple: It has fined the company for only advertising a free one-year warranty when selling iPhones, iPads and other electronics to customers, while selling AppleCare, a paid extended warranty option.

But Italy isn’t the only country Apple has run afoul of in this respect: earlier this week Apple informed its retail staff in Australia to start honoring free two-year warranties for its customers in the country to bring its practices in line with local consumer protection law.

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After all, Windows 7 Service Pack 1 came out in February 2011 and it was only in mid-2012 that the Commission woke up and realized the fact that it was missing the screen in question. Microsoft claimed it was itself unaware of the omission until the Commission brought it up.

Well, we’re still fuzzy on how both Microsoft and the Commission stayed oblivious for so long, but we do now have a better idea of how the company got busted: according to anonymous sources quoted in a Financial Times piece (registration required) that went up a few hours ago, the tip-off came from Google and Opera.

Opera is certainly no surprise – the Norwegian browser vendor was after all the original complainant that led the Commission to wring promises of good behavior from Microsoft back in 2009. But Google’s involvement, if the report is correct, shows this to be just one stage in an increasingly bitter war.

Remember that Chrome vendor Google is also embroiled in an EU antitrust investigation, in this case regarding allegations of search result manipulation and various other anticompetitive practices. And who kicked off that investigation? Why, Microsoft of course, along with various others subsequently involved in its faux-grassroots “Fair Search” organization.

Then we have Microsoft’s recent Scroogled anti-Google smear campaign, and Google’s decision to suddenly yank Exchange ActiveSync support for Windows Phone owners who use Gmail services, which threatened a serious hit on that smartphone platform’s usability.

In isolation, each one of these moves can be explained and perhaps justified on its own merits. Together, though, they paint a picture of escalating nastiness. Sure, companies fight all the time — it’s part of healthy competition. But right now the goings-on between Google and Microsoft risk appearing as petty and destructive as those between Apple and Samsung.

This article was updated at 5:45am PT to make it more explicit that Google makes the Chrome browser and therefore has an interest in browser choice.

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Kroes has a 2020 goal for the “delivery” of 5G. That seems like a tall order, although the proliferation of IP-connected sensors in the internet of things may well necessitate a shift to even more efficient technologies than 4G.

“Rolling out today’s networks is important,” she said. “But what comes after? For the next global standard, and the next generation of technology, will Europe lead the world, or merely follow?”

The €50 million for 5G research includes €16 million for the METIS project we reported on in December. The goal here is to research faster, more spectrally efficient and more power-efficient mobile broadband than 4G – which in itself seeks to tick all those boxes, but which is not as Europe-led as 2G and even 3G were.

The EU’s investment is for the public part of an industry-wide public-private partnership – the companies involved, including some of the continent’s big carriers (Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Telefonica, Telecom Italia, Portugal Telecom) and infrastructure players (Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, NSN), will have to stump up more, although they would be doing that anyway.

“Europe used to lead the world on wireless… European 5G is an unmissable opportunity to recapture the global technological lead,” Kroes said.

Of course, coming up with the technology is one thing, and deploying it is another. That’s where those complaints over EU spectrum harmonization come in – as Kroes puts it, the continent’s spectrum allocation map currently resembles “a bowl of spaghetti”, which is one reason why South Korea (population 50 million) has more 4G subscriptions than the whole of the EU (population 500 million). Kroes is really not happy that 17 of the 27 EU member states still don’t have 4G at all:

“We’ve already fixed a target to find a total of 1200MHz of spectrum for wireless broadband. But on average national governments have only awarded 65 percent of the spectrum we have already harmonised in the EU. So when Member States aren’t implementing legal commitments, we will use our full… powers.”

This should come as music to the carriers’ ears, as will her promise to cut down on the bureaucracy around infrastructure planning permits and inter-operator network sharing. Kroes has traditionally used her MWC speeches to lambast the carriers over issues such as roaming charges – this time she’s on their side:

“I am still determined to deliver broadband for all: and for that we must improve the market. So that it works for you in the industry, works for consumers, works for the economy. A European telecoms market more coherent, more integrated, more efficient; with lower investor risks and higher investor rewards.”

Spectrum allocations are a pain to fix, but they are fixable. As for 5G, €50 million isn’t a game-changing amount but it may be enough to stimulate research at this very early stage of the technology’s development. It’s true that Europe let itself fall behind on 4G, and that has real knock-on effects in terms of competitiveness. The EU would be smart to avoid making that mistake again.

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ENISA is the agency charged with co-ordinating the fight across Europe, against various worrisome things prefixed with “cyber-”: “cybercrime”, “cyber attacks” and so on. Europe’s new cybersecurity strategy would make ENISA what security expert Ross Anderson recently called “a classified network of military and intelligence agencies”, but the fact remains that the agency is a relatively impartial observer of the security landscape.

When it comes to the cloud, ENISA sees the new approach to computing infrastructure as a “double-edged sword.”  Its report, entitled Critical Cloud Computing, notes as Arbor Networks did, that the concentration of many organizations’ resources in data centers can multiply “the impact of cyber attacks” – effectively, that an attack against one can be an attack against all. It also points to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) as particularly hot targets:

“The most critical services are large IaaS and PaaS services which deliver services to other IT vendors who service in turn millions of users and organisations.”

There’s also the issue of critical sectors such as finance, transport and energy increasingly putting their crown jewels into the cloud. However, that’s only one side of the coin. ENISA also sees cloud computing as a pretty good defense against, say, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on specific services:

“Elasticity is a key benefit of cloud computing and this elasticity helps to cope with load and mitigates the risk of overload or DDoS attacks. It is difficult to mitigate the impact of peak usage or a DDoS attack with limited computing resources.”

With regional power cuts and natural disasters, the agency claimed cloud computing can also provide “resilience.” That depends on how resources are distributed of course – just ask customers using Amazon’s problem-prone Northern Virginia data center. Nonetheless, ENISA pointed to the 2011 Japanese earthquake as an example of a disaster taking out “traditional IT deployments” but failing to down certain cloud services.

As for conclusions, ENISA has a series of recommendations for national cybersecurity agencies that includes a focus on making sure IaaS and PaaS providers stay safe, and figuring out just which public services depend on which cloud services. The agency also sings the praises of standardization in the cloud sector:

“Standardization, especially for IaaS and PaaS services, would allow customers to move workload to other providers in case one provider has suffers a large outages caused by system failures or even administrative or legal disputes.”

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