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| 在欧洲谁做的巧克力最好吃？是比利时的皮埃尔·马尔科利尼还是戈黛娃？ Everyone has a list of what Europeans do better than anyone else. These days it goes far beyond the charming or traditional to the genuinely avant-garde1). Europe is rediscovering the core of its enduring dynamism2), best summed up, perhaps, as the strength of place. In a globalized world, where everything is the same, you sometimes want a particular thing, the genuine article, rooted in its milieu3). That no longer means old, traditional or charming. Today, it’s more often something that has evolved, winning in global competition through sheer quality and distinctiveness. Here Newsweek Internationaloffers a handful of uniquely European successes. Best Place to Grow Old Birgitta Rembe, minus a third of her right lung, arrived back home a couple of weeks ago. Her cancer operation at Stockholm’s Karolinska University Hospital had gone well. It cost her nothing. The 77-year-old retired Swedish journalist then spent two weeks at a rehabilitation clinic—free of charge. She did group calisthenics4) every day for two weeks and worked her way up to a 1.5-kilometer walk on her last day. After she returned to her apartment, she continued to get a helping hand. “Home helpers” do her grocery shopping, laundry and housecleaning. Because Rembe has a decent pension5) from 40 years in journalism, these services don誸 come free. They’ll cost her—hang on—72 a month. Sweden might just be the best place in Europe to grow old. The Finns or the Danes might quarrel with that. So would some Swedes, who complain that services have declined since the glory days of the 1970s. But Rembe and her husband, Rolf, are living testimony6) to a system that is generous but sensible—and that works. Now 81, Rolf had heart-bypass surgery in January 2002; nine months later he ran a 10K race. “We’ve paid our taxes for all these years,” says Birgitta, “Now we誶e getting our money back.” by Stryker McGuire The Best Euro Start-Ups Too often, the phrase “pan-European enterprise” conjures up visions of disasters like the Airbus A380. In the right hands—small entrepreneurs as opposed to state-run mega-projects—the Pan-European approach has produced a string of high-profile media and telecom successes that includes the most buzzed-about start-up on the planet. It’s called Joost, and the hands belong to Janus Friis, a Dane, and his Swedish partner Niklas Zennstrom—tech rock stars of the first order, and Europe’s answer to Google’s Larry Paige and Sergey Brin. The pair gained fame as the creators of the megahit music-sharing site Kazaa, whose popularity with users was rivaled only by the enmity it earned from music companies. Then came Skype, which rocked Big Telecom by offering cheap phone calls via the Internet. Now the duo7) are turning their talents to new media and entertainment. With Joost, a video sharing website, they’ll offer the Web generation a new way to watch favorite TV shows—when and where they want, with picture quality worthy of a plasma8) screen. And while digital cable and satellite operators charge ever-rising monthly fees for the same thing, Joost will offer them for free, with a lot of social-networking features like comment posting and instant messaging. Also free. With its professionally produced content and slick9) controls, it makes Google’s YouTube look like last year’s disruptive technology. |
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