New app warns Romanian drivers of upcoming potholes

Although a solution to Romania’s endemic road problems is still nowhere in sight, a team of Romanian IT specialists has come up with an app for mobile phones that allows drivers to avoid potholes. Read More »

Social Media in the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict

Fearing good fortune, Estonia crowd-sources ideas

Worried that success might spoil Estonia, its leader has reached out to citizens to tell the government what it should do to satisfy their fast-evolving desires, Estonian Public Broadcasting reports. Read More »

Bridging the digital divide (one Central Asian language at a time)

The localization of Skype into the Kyrgyz language in 2011 has been the first step to opening the world’s most popular messenger to the people who do not – surprise, surprise – speak Russian or English. Read More »

That startup fever

Vladimir Funtikov, a 26-year-old Estonian businessman, already has behind him successful studies at university and the launch of several small technology companies, including Creative Mobile, which produces games for smart phones. Now he’s come up with a crazy idea: playing on cell phones should be taught as a subject at university because, among other reasons, his company – with offices in Tallinn, St. Petersburg, New York, and London employing 60 people – can’t find enough skilled developers and programmers.  Read More »

Looking East: The Russian example of volunteerism for Belarus

Mapping Czech open data (and dangerous food)

One of the biggest topics we cover at Net Prophet is the growing acceptance of open government data. At least in some sectors, many countries are beginning to see the benefits of opening up their wealth of information to their citizens and journalists. Some interesting platforms have been developed in the process, but we have noticed that even the best examples really only go so far in truly opening up their data. Yes, a ministry may make a document or database available online, but often they are too difficult for average citizens – and even journalists – to use.
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Interactive map charts Russia’s environmental problem areas

Bulgarian Facebook group helps police the police

A new Facebook group, called “Photograph a Policeman”  is making waves in the Bulgarian media. Read More »

Hooked on a feeling: The strange marriage of human rights and CAPTCHAs

About a month ago, the Swedish non-profit Civil Rights Defenders (CDR) released their version of CAPTCHA, the system that is used to verify that the user of the web site is a human (as opposed to a programmed robot). Read More »

Connecting the dots in new media and social innovation

Sometimes here at NetProphet it can be a little too easy to get caught up in all the things happening every day in our coverage region. Whether it’s a new crowdmapping platform or an increase in Net Freedom crackdowns, there’s always something interesting to report on.  This is why it’s important to step back and get to know some of the people involved in leading the forward march of social media across the region. Read More »

Russia: Crowdmapping Corruption with Bribr Mobile App

Bribr [ru; App Store, Facebook] is a newly-launched iPhone/iPad app that allows anonymous users in Russia to submit the locations and the amounts of the bribes they pay. Later, it will be possible to report on the bribes taken as well. Read More »

Helpful resource: The Data Journalism Handbook (now in Russian)

The folks over at Data Driven Journalism have announced the release of the first translation of their Data Journalism Handbook – and it’s in Russian! Read More »

Piano Player

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 »