Tag Archives: Poland

Campus for entrepreneurs opens in Warsaw

Campus is coming to Warsaw! Across Poland and Central Eastern Europe, innovators and entrepreneurs are building exciting new businesses, making the Polish capital a natural choice to launch our next Campus. We currently operate Campuses in London and Tel Aviv.



Campuses are Google's spaces for entrepreneurs to learn, connect, and build companies that will change the world. In them, entrepreneurs get unparalleled access to mentorship and training from their local startup community, experienced entrepreneurs, and Google teams. Campus Warsaw will join the Google for Entrepreneurs network.

Our Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt met with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk for today's inauguration. “Google started as a startup in garage, so supporting startups is part of our DNA," Eric said. "Our hope is that Campus Warsaw will supercharge tech entrepreneurs, strengthen the startup ecosystem and encourage even more innovation in Poland.”

The new Campus represents only part of our ongoing investment throughout the region. In Krakow, we have opened the Google for Entrepreneurs Krakow program. Along with Warsaw University, we have launched the Digital Economy Lab, with the goal of spreading knowledge about the crucial role digital technology plays in powering the economy and about what policies are required to generate maximum digital acceleration. Along with the Visegrad Fund, ResPublica and the Financial Times, we have started New Europe Challengers campaign to identify the next generation of innovators.

We’ll have more news about the details of Campus Warsaw soon, and look forward to filling it with startups in 2015!

Posted by Eze Vidra, Head of Google for Entrepreneurs Europe

Promoting transparency around Europe

When eight technology companies presented a plan this month to reform government surveillance, a key request concerned transparency. At Google, we were the first company to publish a transparency report detailing the requests we receive from governments around the world to bring down content or hand over information on users.

But Google’s report represents only a narrow snapshot. It is limited to a single company. Imagine instead if all the requests for information on Internet users and for takedowns of web content in a country could be published. This would give a much more effective picture of the state of Internet freedom. As the year draws to a close, we’re happy to report that Panoptykon, a Polish NGO, published this month a preliminary Internet transparency report for Poland and Fores, a Stockholm-based think tank, issued a study in Sweden.

In Poland and Sweden, we helped initiate these transparency efforts and supported them financially. NGOs in six other European countries are working on national transparency reports. Our Estonian-supported transparency coalition already published a report last spring. In addition, university researchers in Hong Kong moved ahead over the summer with their own report. In Strasbourg, the Council of Europe recently held an important conference on the subject and hopefully will move ahead to present a series of recommendations on transparency for its 47 members.

Each transparency campaign takes a different approach - we hope this process of experimentation will help all of us learn. The Estonian effort, titled Project 451, focuses on content removals, not government surveillance, because the authors believe this is the most important issue in their country. The name of Project “451″ refers to HTTP Status Code 451, defined as “unavailable for legal reasons” and the report found that many web platforms were taking legal content down due to fears of legal liability.

The new Polish and Swedish reports attempt to shed light on government requests for information on users. Fores contacted 339 Swedish authorities and found that more than a third had requested data about users or takedowns of user-uploaded content. Panoptykon uncovered that Polish telcos received 1.76 million requests for user information in 2012, while Internet companies polled received approximately 7,500. In addition, Panoptykon discovered that many Polish government requests for information on users were based on a flawed or unclear legal basis.

Admittedly, both the Swedish and Polish reports remain incomplete. Not all Internet companies participated. Much relevant data must be missing. Like with our own Google report, we hope to continue filling in the holes in the future. Our aim is to see this campaign gather momentum because the bottom line is transparency is essential to a debate over government surveillance powers.

Posted by William Echikson, Head of Free Expression, Europe, Middle East and Africa

Inspiring students about Poland’s great computing heritage

Behind every computing breakthrough, there’s a story of the people who made it happen. Earlier this month, the spotlight shone on Poland’s computer pioneers with the launch of the educational project “XYZ — The history of computing in Poland”.

Led by the Center for Citizenship Education in collaboration with Google, the project seeks to raise awareness of Poland’s computing heroes among young people, as well as use them to illustrate the value of virtues such as ingenuity, curiosity and cooperation.

Materials produced so far include a timline, online videos, and posters highlighting key Poles and their achievements — from Abraham Stern’s mechanical calculators in the early 19th century, to Leon Lukaszewicz’s XYZ computer in 1958, to the team who built the K-202, Poland’s first computer with integrated circuits, in the 1970s. Coming soon are lesson plans and contests to make it easier for Polish educators to use these stories of local innovators to inspire their students.




The project was launched in fitting style at the University of Warsaw, where young innovators showcased their own work surrounded by posters of Polish computing heroes to dignitaries including Vint Cerf, one of the “fathers” of the Internet.

Students meet "Father of the Internet" Vint Cerf
We’re proud to support this initiative and hope it helps inspire the next generation of Polish computer scientists to similarly great heights.

Posted by Marta Poslad, Senior Policy Analyst, Central and Eastern Europe