By Orsolya Szijjártó, Ambassador of Hungary to the Netherlands.
What do Barack Obama, the Dalai Lama and NASA have in common? They have all distributed videos on Ustream, a broadcasting application tool and one of the many Hungarian startups.
Since the establishment of startups as LogMeIn in 2003, Ustream in 2007 and Prezi in 2009, Hungary, and especially the city of Budapest, is growing into one of the most important and vibrant startup centres of Europe. Prezi, an online presentation programme, has over 50 million users worldwide and still attracts 55.000 new users every day. Next to its first office in Budapest, which employs over 170 people, it also has an office in San Francisco. Ustream is a platform to share videos and is used by broadcasters all around the world.
It has 30 million active users and 80 million people who view Ustream videos worldwide. Ustream started with an office in Budapest and has expanded now to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Seoul. LogMeIn, a remote control application for accessing computers, also began its journey in Budapest and has now offices in, among others, Australia, the US, the UK and Ireland as well. These offices employ over 1000 people worldwide.
There are several reasons for the fact that Budapest has been growing substantially as a new vibrant centre for startups and creative industries. First of all, there is an abundance of qualified personnel available in Budapest and since the city is located at the heart of Europe, it also attracts foreign talent. In addition, the Hungarian government supports the startup culture in Hungary and has allocated 450 million euros to back these startup companies over the next six years. It is estimated that the share of the creative industry in Hungary’s GDP equals five to seven percent.
A vibrant and innovative startup culture is not only of importance for Hungary, but also for Europe in general; innovation is a great incentive for economic growth. The Netherlands has also recognized this and has recently launched the StartUp Delta programme, led by former European Commissioner Neelie Kroes. The aim of this programme is to connect the startup culture in Amsterdam with the rest of the Netherlands and with Europe in order to create a strong and innovative European startup system. Here there lies a lot of potential for close European cooperation and the Embassy of Hungary in The Hague is looking forward to contributing to this.
