European parliamentary elections are now a mere 5 days away, but a lot of EU citizens seem to be completely uninterested in voting.  According to an FT.com article, “

[t]urnout in France, as elsewhere, looks likely to continue its steady decline after dropping to 43 per cent in 2004.”  The FT writes that many EU citizens now blame European integration for depressing wages and lowering social standards.  This can be partly explained by the EU’s hard-to-define nature (it is neither a nation state nor does it fit the mold of a mainly economic alliance of neighboring countries such as ASEAN), which, according to Science Po professor Pascal Perrineau, allows its citizens to see the EU as a “blank screen on which to project their social, economic and identity concerns.”  In addition, the EU’s power structures are complex and responsibility is divided among many different entities, meaning that decisions made in Brussels seem opaque and of only tangential importance to many citizens of the 27-nation bloc.  However, as the FT article points out, the economic crisis has shown the benefits of a monetary union – and, I would add, the importance of having structures in place that prevent countries from acting on short-sighted protectionist impulses brought on by the downturn.  Even for those who disagree, voting seems to me to be the better option than simply sitting at home on Election Day and then lamenting the direction the EU is taking. 

     
Have you ever noticed that a lot of Facebook updates are about your female (rather than male) Facebook friends?  Especially wall posts and photo comments tend to be written by women gushing about how cute their girlfriends’ new dresses/ babies / dogs are.  This impression is confirmed by a recent Harvard Business School (HBS) study, which found that most of the activity on a typical online social network is focused around women – “men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know.”  The same is not true for Twitter, however.  According to a brand-new HBS study, men who use Twitter have 15% more followers than women (even though there is no gender gap when it comes to following other Twitter users).   Men also have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users follow each other.  According to HBS, these differences may stem from women having more stringent standards for reciprocating relationships or from males being comparatively more driven by followers than females.   Another interesting tidbit is the rates at which users tweet:  According to the study, just over 50% tweet just once in 74 days – but 10% of users create more than 90% of all tweets.  Silicon Valley Watcher’s Tom Foremski speculates that this might be due to the relative novelty of the medium, which has led to insecurity among some users about what constitutes an appropriate Twitter topic.  For example, it is okay to tweet inane stuff such as “eating a cheese burger at McDonald’s?”  The read the rest of Foremski’s thoughts, go here.   The HBS study can be found here. 

As we’ve pointed out before, a downturn can actually be a good time to start, or make additional investments in, your business.  Startups and VCs build businesses that will only be viable in three, four, or even five years from now, meaning that the VC and entrepreneurial communities have to be focused on what will be in the future, not on what the economic situation is like right now.  This view is confirmed by Inc.com, which recently published a ranking of “the best industries for starting a business” during an economic downturn.  The list includes a host of IT-related industries, such as iPhone apps, health care technology, SaaS, and education technology.  And, for those of you who are dreaming of changing your profession, candy, beer, wine and liquor wholesale, and yoga products and services are also among the recession-resilient industries identified by Inc.com.  To see the full list, go here. 

According to the Register, a Dutch website has been sued – and sued successfully – for the way Google summarized one of its pages.  As reported by De Telegraaf [in Dutch] and the Dutch blog 24 Oranges, a judge has ruled that the website Miljoenhuizen.nl is liable for a Google-generated page description, or "snippet," that may or may not give the false impression that a local BMW dealer named Zwartepoorte has gone bankrupt.  Apparently, Miljoenhuizen.nl had both the word “Zwartepoorte” and “bankrupt” on its page, but not side-by-side.  Still, Google results for the two keywords resulted in a snippet from the Miljoenhuizen.nl website that led some users to believe that Zwartepoorts had declared bankruptcy.  The court therefore found in favor of the BMW dealer.  According to an interpretation of the ruling by Joris van Hoboken, a PhD candidate at the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam, "[t]he Court argues that it might be true that the website [Miljoenhuizen.nl] had no control over the functioning of Google but suggests that these questions about the opacity of Google’s functioning should be addressed in a broader context… then concludes that defendant had its own responsibility.”

Can a method for buying or selling energy at a fixed price based on the expected weather for a season be patented?  Or are the only business methods that are patentable those that are connected to a machine or “transform” an item from one state to another?  That is the question the Supreme Court is currently considering.  The justices will review an earlier decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit which narrowed the class of patentable inventions, excluding innovations without a physical component.  The Washington Post reports that issue is dividing companies, with Microsoft and IBM on one side and Accenture and Philips on the other side.  Whereas Microsoft and IBM want limits on business method patents, Philips has claimed that “the [appeals court] decision is overreaching.”  What do you think about the issue?  Let me know!