The Paris region Chambers of Commerce launched a web platform last summer and other services to help small and very small businesses accomplish their “digital transformation”.

US-based marketing advisory firm Consilium Global Business Advisors published a White Paper on marketing overseas in January 2012 which contains useful advice for American firms seeking to improve their sales abroad.

Recent times have seen a culmination of European union fiscal attention on corporate giants in the digital sales industry, and measures to harmonize or impose VAT (sales tax) on on-line vendors in the EU and US.

Recent news of research and discoveries in the field of mental and physical health in high-tech companies have shown the disadvantages of open-plan offices for IT developer and programmer staff, the advantages of good health insurance plans including well-being programmes, in high tech companies, and the benefits of working on professional premises instead of at home.

eBay UK, the British branch of global online sales giant eBay, published a study last June which showed that marketing would be the main spending priority for 45% of digital small businesses, with 66% of them set to increase general investment.

In today’s environment where online searches are increasingly performed using mobile devices, EUROPAGES has developed a mobile version of all the content of the businesses listed on its site: there is now a mobile-friendly version of the E*Pages and Product Pages in 26 languages. Read on.

For first time in Lisbon 6-9 November the 2016 Web Summit was held in the Portuguese capital instead of Dublin, Ireland. “Europe’s largest technology marketplace” claims to have attracted more than 53 000 attendees, 7000 CEOs, 15 000 companies from 166 countries. Amazon, Cisco, Facebook, General Electric, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Samsung, Twitter, were all major participants.

« E-export » was one of the two main topics of the 2nd International SME Forum in France, organized from 14 June by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and attended by some 400 small and medium-sized businesses. The event highlighted the strengths and weaknesses in France in terms of e-export. In October, another series of events was organized to introduce a group of digital technology start-ups to potential clients in China.

Engineering360 has published its 2016 edition of “The Industrial Buy Cycle” this October. It looks extensively at how engineers buy goods and services worldwide, including from business to business on the internet. The study is concise (19p.), well written, clear and matter of fact, well illustrated with apposite understandable graphed data.