Jan Figel, a leading Slovak politician, should be a conservative and outwardly acts that way. He is chairman of the Christian Democratic Party and deputy chairman of the Slovak parliament. But perhaps because he was a European commissioner and picked up something in Europe, he let himself become, on 16 June, the first Central European politician to publicly try out Google Glass, a revolutionary toy in the history of the Internet and mobile technologies. Read More »

Over at TOL, we’ve been following developments rather closely of the Slovakia-born online paywall system known as Piano. This is a highly unusual story of a media-related innovation originating in our coverage region, but generating a lot of press in Western Europe and the United States (almost always, it’s the other way around). Read More »

In more depressing news for the Internet’s civic activism potential, online voters in a Slovak poll lost their effort to give a possibly tongue-in-cheek name to a new pedestrian bridge over the Morava River into Austria, according to The Guardian. Read More »

In September, 42 Polish news websites will begin charging for their best online content in an attempt to gain revenue despite decreases in readership, according to The Associated Press. Read More »

Last week, we ran a post on Piano Media’s recent success in Slovenia and future plans to expand to new markets. Now it seems the company, which specializes in providing media companies with nation-wide paywalls for content, has found the resources to speed up that expansion.  Piano announced 17 April that it has secured $2.6 million in new funding from the 3TS Cisco Growth Fund. Read More »

The TAG Challenge, a social media competition simulating an international manhunt, has finished in less than a day with three out of the five suspects found. Read More »

Piano Media’s national paywall, active for a year in Slovakia, has released their first month’s figures from the recent expansion into Slovenia. The paywall exceeded its goal of signing up 20,000 Slovenians, or 1 percent of the country, gaining 25,000 members and raising €26,000 in revenue. Read More »

The Czech and Slovak governments announced on 6 February that they are halting the ratification process for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, an international anti-piracy pact that has attracted increasing controversy over the past few weeks. Read More »

Nine months after Slovakia’s major online media outlets put much of their content behind a paywall, Piano Media, the system operator, will launch the scheme in Slovenia. Read More »

Politicians have a way with words.  Sometimes they also have a way with facts.  That is to say, they have their way with the facts.  That’s why new sites are popping up around the world to keep politicians honest and hold them to their promises. A website in Slovakia, Demagog.sk, is doing just that. Read More »

It’s an uncommon headline, but an online news source is boasting promising financial prospects. Read More »