So-called “teardown” analyses of the new Samsung Galaxy S 4 smartphone by TechInsights and Chipworks this week confirmed that the chip known as “Octa” has arrived in handsets aimed at Europe and Latin America. But in a model for the high-profile U.S. market, iFixit found a popular chip from Qualcomm in the new flagship phone.

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Basically, this covers search labeling and scraping, as expected. It’s trying to set a more level playing ground for how Google treats its competitors, and to address some of the ways it may have abused its power in the past — like by including Yelp reviews in its own local search in a way that discouraged people from ever visiting Yelp.

You can see in the illustrations here that Google will include a little lowercase “i” with a circle around it next to results from its own properties, and will also sometimes encase them in a “sponsored” box:

As part of the agreement, Google also conceded some limitations it had put on its advertisers, similar to the deal it made in the U.S. The commitments don’t include anything related to concerns about use of patents.

Competitors now have a month-long “market test” to comment, then Google has to implement the changes for five years throughout Europe.

So why is this different and stronger than the mild hand-slap that Google received in the U.S.? Well, first of all, European laws are stricter, and Google is much more dominant than it is in Europe, with search market shares above 90 percent.

But, second, competitors are already saying that this won’t go far enough.

ICOMP, an organization representing Google’s competitors, immediately fired off a round of comments today about how labeling something as wrong doesn’t fix the fact that it’s wrong.

“If the proposals don’t clearly set out non-discrimination principles and the means to deal with the restoration of effective competition, plus effective enforcement and compliance, it’s very difficult to see how they can be satisfactory,” ICOMP said in a blog post. “[I]t is clear that mere labelling is not any kind of solution to the competition concerns that have been identified. Google should implement the same ranking policy to all websites.”

Said a Google spokesperson, as usual, “We continue to work cooperatively with the European Commission.”

Embedded below is the text document of Google’s commitments, which contains a bunch of images showing how the proposed labeling will look:

Google’s EU commitments for competition market test

palpitation/Shutterstock

What happened since then? A task force meeting with Google in March, and not much else.

“No change has been seen,” the French CNIL said in a press release today. “After this period has expired, Google has not implemented any significant compliance measures.”

So, what now? Additional investigations and inspections by the Europeans, but this time they’re being called “enforcement actions,” and they’re being conducted by each country individually.

Six countries — France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom — launched actions today based on their own laws. The investigations and inspections could result in fines and restrictions, but it’s not yet clear that those would be significant.

Google sent a statement, “Our privacy policy respects European law and allows us to create simpler, more effective services. We have engaged fully with the DPAs involved throughout this process, and we’ll continue to do so going forward.”

Coincidentally, Google’s director of privacy for product and engineering, Alma Whitten, just retired. She’ll be replaced by another longtime Google engineer, Lawrence You.

Apple, which in 2011 was fined $1.2 million for allegedly upselling its Italian customers into AppleCare extended warranties despite their overlap with the standard two-year product warranty required by European law, on Tuesday was singled out by EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding as evidence of the need for better cooperation on consumer protection issues across the EU. Last fall, Reding sent letters to the EU’s 27 member states asking them to review Apple’s warranty practices. She wasn’t at all pleased with the result.

“This case and the responses I received since I sent my letter have highlighted rather clearly just why the commission cannot sit on the side-lines on enforcement issues,” Reding said. “The approaches to enforcement in these types of cases turn out to be very diversified and inconsistent at a national level. In at least 21 EU member states Apple is not informing consumers correctly about the legal warranty rights they have. This is simply not good enough.”

In other words, there’s no coordinated enforcement of EU consumer rules. Different EU countries have different practices and sanctions for violations of consumer protection law. The problem here, of course, is that most consumer protection powers in the EU are held at the national level. The EC can’t come after Apple for its warranty practices. It can only take legal action against countries that fail to enforce EU rules.

But it’s also a warning to other companies with which the agency has regulatory issues — one in particular.

Google.

The EC has been investigating the search behemoth over its alleged dominance of the search market since 2010 and earlier this year squeezed a settlement proposal out of it. That proposal is said to be largely similar in content to the one Google agreed to with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, though with a few more teeth. The EC hasn’t yet commented on the proposal, other than to confirm that it has received it, and it’s unclear whether it will demand more concessions still from the company.

What is clear, however, following the fines levied against Microsoft today, is that the EC is quite serious about demanding significant changes from companies that violate its antitrust laws and is entirely willing to drop the hammer on those that fail to follow through on them.

As EU competition commissioner Joaquín Almunia said today, “Legally binding commitments reached in antitrust decisions play a very important role in our enforcement policy because they allow for rapid solutions to competition problems. Such decisions require strict compliance. A failure to comply is a very serious infringement that must be sanctioned accordingly.”

A pat explanation for the EC’s sanctions against Microsoft, but also a clear “feeling lucky, punk?” warning to Google: Don’t make empty promises. Because the financial implications can be staggering: Fines of up to 10 percent of the company’s annual global sales. In Google’s case that’s potentially billions of dollars.

Reuters reports that the European Commission plans to sanction Microsoft for failing to comply with a mandate to offer Windows users in Europe a choice of Web browsers beyond its own Internet Explorer. And sources familiar with the matter have confirmed to AllThingsD that this is indeed the case at this time. No word yet on the size of the fine, but given EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia’s public threats over the misstep, penalties could be severe. Whatever they are, sources say the EC will likely announce them sometime in March.

Under the terms of Microsoft’s 2009 antitrust settlement with the European Commission, the company was to present Windows users with a ballot screen offering them an opportunity to swap out Internet Explorer for one of 11 other browsers. And Microsoft did do that — at first, anyway. But when an update to Windows 7 rolled out in February of 2011, the company unwittingly eliminated the ballot screen, and didn’t realize it had done so until last summer.

In July of 2012, the commission opened an investigation into the matter, despite Microsoft’s apologies for what it claimed was a “technical error.” And by fall it had filed formal charges against Microsoft. “If companies enter into commitments, they must do what they have committed to do or face the consequences,” Almunia said during an October news conference. ” [They] should be deterred from any temptation to renege on their promises or even to neglect their duties. This is why, when this happens, the commission has the power to impose fines.”

And in this case it seems the agency plans to exercise it. That’s potentially bad news for Microsoft, which has already been fined about $1.28 billion by the EU. If the commission follows through on its current plan to sanction Microsoft, it could slap the company with fines equivalent to 10 percent of its fiscal 2012 revenue. That’s about $7.4 billion.

Microsoft declined comment.

“We can reach an agreement after the summer break. We can envisage this as a possible deadline,” European Commission head of competition Joaquin Almunia said today at a conference, according to Reuters.

Marilyn Volan/Shutterstock

The slow turnaround comes as a bit of a surprise after Almunia had put pressure on Google to submit its proposed remedies to concerns about anticompetitive actions in search and advertising by the end of January — which the company did.

But it’s really not that shocking after repeated lags in the European antitrust investigation of the company, which started way back in 2010.

Critics of tech industry regulation charge that the pace of government moves much slower than that of innovation. The Google case is now becoming a textbook example — especially as search transitions to mobile, which was a consideration but not the focus of the antitrust investigation.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission already settled with and declined to bring charges against Google, under the leadership of Chairman Jon Leibowitz, who is stepping down.

As we’ve reported, it’s likely that in Europe Google will agree to better labeling of its own properties in search results, as a concession to the claims of competing vertical search engines. That would make it a stricter deal than in the U.S., but it wouldn’t radically alter how Google does its business.

On March 1, an amendment to the EU’s Information Technology Equipment Safety Standard will go into effect, rendering the Mac Pro noncompliant. Evidently, the machine’s fan guards don’t meet the updated standard and, rather than redesign them, Apple has opted simply to stop shipping the Mac Pro to EU member states.

“Apple resellers can continue to sell any remaining inventory of Mac Pro after March 1,” the company said in a message to resellers first published by 9to5Mac. “Apple will take final orders for Mac Pro from resellers up until February 18th for shipment before March 1 2013. Countries outside of the EU are not impacted and Mac Pro will continue to be available in those areas.”

The Mac Pro has long been a niche product for Apple, so pulling it off the market in the EU will have minimal impact on the company’s bottom line. And the company has been working on its successor — “something really great,” in the words of CEO Tim Cook — with an eye toward launching it sometime this year. With that machine in the pipeline, it likely made far more sense to halt sales of the current Mac Pro than scramble to retrofit them into compliance.

A new filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission appears to show that the round has swelled to $150 million. I’ve reached out to Box CEO Aaron Levie for a comment, but haven’t heard back yet.

The upward tick in funding is especially interesting now that Levie has publicly put a firm target on 2014 for Box’s inevitable IPO, an event that would follow its global expansion, which began in earnest in June with the opening of an office in Europe. Box needs the money mainly because securing the data center capacity it needs to keep its cloud humming isn’t cheap.

Anyway, to refresh your memory about that funding round: General Atlantic’s Gary Reiner, the former CIO of General Electric, joined Box’s board of directors. The Wall Street Journal reported prior to the funding announcement that Box was raising money at an implied valuation of $1.2 billion.

The expansion of the round would bring Box’s total capital raised to $312 million. And it hasn’t been all that long since Box took an $81 million strategic investment round from Salesforce.com and SAP Ventures with several venture capital participating, funds including New Enterprise Associates and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Also, there’s still the mystery of Box’s institutional investors. I heard from sources close to the deal last summer that Box had been courting some institutional investors and that at least two decided to take part. The new filing sheds no light on who they are as yet, but it would make sense. Taking institutional investments, as part of a late-stage investment, Box would be following a variant of the strategy that companies like Facebook and Workday have followed on the way to their own IPOs. It’s a good way to get to know the banks that will be selling your shares to their clients someday. The upshot of all this is that the pace of chatter about a Box IPO is only quickening and will do so all year.

Update: Box just confirmed this in a statement sent to me by a company spokesperson.

“After the initial announcement of our series E round in August 2012, some of our current venture and strategic investors made additional investments. Today we filed the official form D for the series E round, which is now closed at a total $150 million.”

So there you have it.

Philips said Tuesday it has sold the remnants of its once-core business to Japan’s Funai Electric Co. as the Dutch group reported a steeper net loss in the fourth quarter, weighed down by a restructuring charge and a fine for price fixing.

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The telecommunications giant is considering buying a counterpart in Europe, a bet that it can best escape constraints on growth at home by getting into a new wireless market where it can upgrade technology and roll out more lucrative pricing strategies, people familiar with the carrier’s thinking said.

The company is currently studying targets, and a deal — if one happens — could come before the end of the year, those people said.

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Much of those losses can be attributed to a combined $17 billion in write-downs taken during the second half of the year. The biggest was the $8.8 billion write-down announced on Nov. 20, of which $5.7 billion was attributed to Autonomy, the British software firm HP acquired for north of $11 billion in 2011. Another $8 billion was the result of an impairment charge related to EDS, the IT services concern HP acquired in 2008 for $14 billion.

If 2012 was the year that HP sought to package up all the toxic accounting and financial disclosures it could find, then 2013 either will or won’t be the year where it starts down the path toward recovery and turnaround. While HP is technically shut down now for the holidays, people I’ve talked to there in recent days tell me that the internal message being broadcast to employees at all levels is consistent: This year, everyone has to deliver.

Investors frustrated by the decline in value in HP’s shares in 2012 — at $13.68, as of Friday’s close, the shares are down nearly 49 percent this year — have largely come to terms with the notion that HP had to suffer through a horrible year in order to begin the arduous process of rebuilding its business and balance sheet, though the company and its CEO, Meg Whitman, have essentially exhausted their indulgences.

At a meeting of financial analysts in October, Whitman portrayed 2013 as a “fix and rebuild” year, and so the fixing and rebuilding will, a year from now, have to be apparent. The problem with that is that in the very same speech, Whitman projected profit declines in 2013.

The difficulty is clear in nearly every single line of HP’s business. While each line of business remains profitable — take out the combined $20.3 billion in impairment and restructuring charges on HP’s financial statements, and you see a $7.7 billion operating profit — sales in practically all of them declined by a range of 2 percent (services) to 10 percent (PCs). That’s unlikely to change in the face of an uncertain global economy. HP makes about 65 percent of its sales outside the U.S., and has historically had the widest exposure to Europe of all the major tech companies.

So, if 2013 goes according to Whitman’s recovery plan, what does it look like? For one thing, expect a boost in research-and-development spending. Whitman has made it clear that she thinks that R&D spending as a percentage of sales has been trimmed further in recent years than it should have been. In 2004, R&D spending at HP amounted 4.5 percent of sales. By fiscal 2010, it was 2.3 percent. In 2012, it was 2.8 percent. CFO Cathie Lesjak has said spending will be boosted in 2013, along with increased spending on internal IT infrastructure.

Also, expect more restructuring. The bulk of the 29,000 jobs cut at HP will take place during 2013, which will incur about $1.5 billion worth of restructuring charges.

All in all, it’s going to make 2013 a tough year for HP, though if it has any good luck at all, it will be less difficult and drama-filled than 2012. Analysts expect HP’s sales in its 2013 fiscal year (ending in October) to decline again to just north of $112 billion and, on average, they expect per-share profits on a non-GAAP basis to be $3.31.

By October it should be clear if the repair work undertaken is having any effect. Costs will be decreased. Most of the restructuring will be complete and, with luck, the global economic picture will have improved, if only slightly. If HP’s official guidance for fiscal 2014 doesn’t begin to look optimistic, that’s when talk of an endgame — really only speculative now — will begin in earnest.

So far, Whitman’s argument has been that HP is stronger as a combined unit than it could ever be if split into two or more pieces. If results and guidance aren’t looking up by late 2013, shareholders will start looking for alternatives, and a breakup will be at the top of their list.

One person who might lead that discussion is director Ralph Whitworth. An activist investor with a history of pushing companies into breakup strategies, Whitworth’s Relational Investors LLC owns about 34.5 million HP shares. That investment is about $318 million under water as of Friday’s closing price. Late in 2013, a two-year agreement he has with HP not to seek a breakup or sale of any significant assets will expire. If his patience with HP’s management and strategy wavers at all, expect the breakup conversation to get serious quickly, and to dominate media coverage about it into 2014.

Expedia buys German-based Trivago.

“The trivago team built one of the largest, fastest growing and most well known travel sites in Europe conducting more than 100 million hotel searches annually,” said Dara Khosrowshahi, Expedia’s President and CEO, in a release.

Investors have been eager for Expedia to expand internationally, especially since the strategy has worked so well for Priceline, which owns Booking.com in Europe and Agoda.com in Asia. This acquisition could help check that box; however, this morning, Expedia’s shares are trading lower, falling two percent to $59.44 a share.

Trivago is a search company, like Kayak in the U.S. (recently purchased by Priceline). It compares more than 600,000 hotels across 140 booking sites in more than 30 countries and 23 languages. Expedia said it expects Trivago, which is on track to record close to $132 million in revenue this year, to be accretive to adjusted earnings per share in 2013.

Pending regulatory approvala, the acquisition is expected to close in the first half of next year. Expedia said Trivago’s co-founders and its management team will operate independently at its headquarters in Dusseldorf, Germany.

The South Korean company will drop injunction applications in Germany, France, the U.K., Italy and the Netherlands, a senior executive told The Wall Street Journal. But it will continue to pursue lawsuits in Europe, where it alleges infringements on its products, it said.

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Today at a local mobile conference in San Francisco, Groupon CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason appeared for another onstage interview and was immediately asked about the various and sundry mishegas of late at the daily deals site.

And said, um, not much. It wasn’t exactly his fault — there is almost no plus to him saying much.

So Mason did not.

Not much about thinly sourced rumors of acquisition interest by Google.

Not much about the palpable tension and discussions between him and some board members about whether he should remain as Groupon’s top leader.

Not much about its lackluster stock, down more than 80 percent since its IPO just over a year ago.

Not much about its issues in Europe or about its growth prospects.

“What I have said about Groupon is everything I will say about it,” he said. “I am focused on looking forward.”

Bokay!

Actually, Mason, who is a very clever man, joked effectively, “Let’s not talk about mobile,” which was the actual focus of the Mobile-Loco conference he was appearing at.

Fair point, and he moved into explaining what Groupon was up to these days (more of the same, but more with the mobile).

About one-third of the Chicago-based company’s business is now done via mobile, by the way.

“Our mobile customers have been our best customers,” he noted, making the point that smartphones appeal to a more cutting edge consumer and also merchants.

“I think they are willing to use technology when the value proposition is clear to them,” Mason said about retailers, one of whom he worked at recently. “They do it because it is important to them.”

Mason also talked about local, payments and other generalities about the social daily deals business.

All of which he answered with a level of nice confidence that belies troubles that the novice CEO is trying to overcome. It’s a tough task for anyone, of course, and not one that many would be able to handle with as much equanimity as Mason does in public. So, on one level, you have to hand it to Mason for putting himself out there so much at a difficult time and chatting away.

But not about what the audience wanted to hear about. Which is to say: What’s really next?

According to sources close to the situation, several Groupon board members have been seriously discussing making major leadership changes at the Chicago-based daily deals company, including bringing in a more experienced CEO to take over for co-founder Andrew Mason.

The board of Groupon has a regularly scheduled meeting later this week; sources said such management issues are likely to be discussed there, due to increasing frustration by some directors about the novice CEO’s performance so far.

To be clear, a move to replace Mason is not likely to happen immediately, if at all. And, in any case, any changes are likely to be done with his involvement. In addition, Mason also has support on the eight-member board — director and former AOL exec Ted Leonsis has always been a key mentor to him, for example.

But it has become obvious over the last months that a substantive rift has been developing between Groupon’s key players.

That has centered on Mason’s co-founder and Groupon executive chairman, Eric Lefkofsky, and board member and co-founder Brad Keywell. They, as well as several other directors, have been urging Mason to be more aggressive and public about the company’s turnaround efforts, sources said.

“The question is not whether Andrew is a good guy, but whether Groupon needs an Eric Schmidt,” said one person close to the situation, referring to the former Google CEO who was brought in to work closely with the company’s two founders. “And there’s been a lot more pressure now on the board to consider this seriously.”

The thoughtful and affable Mason — who has been the heart and soul of Groupon’s quirky culture and innovative product strategy — has indeed sometimes seemed to be in over his head in terms of leadership once the stakes got higher and the pressure increased after its IPO was announced last June.

While the company’s struggles have been well known for a while now, discussions about Mason’s tenure as CEO have increased as its stock has dropped precipitously. That has prompted its directors and management to seek to find a way to get the company on more stable footing as a business and, perhaps more importantly, with investors.

That has included the promotion of former Amazon exec Kal Raman to COO recently to give Mason more support. Raman is now, in effect, in charge of many operational aspects of the company, although not product, marketing or technology.

Another bright light recently has been a major investment by Tiger Global Management, a well-regarded hedge fund and private equity firm, which bought up close to 10 percent of Groupon. The move sent its shares up 24 percent in the last week, to $3.88, with a $2.5 billion valuation.

But that’s still 85 percent below its public offering price a year ago, and a far cry from the hype around the company when it exploded on the scene several years ago. Once the darling of the start-up space, with its innovative new social e-commerce model and lightning-fast growth, Groupon attracted huge funding from a panoply of top-tier Silicon Valley investors.

With that came a stunning $6 billion acquisition offer from Google and, later, an even huger valuation of more than $10 billion.

All that goodwill changed immediately after the company announced its IPO last June, with continued controversy around everything from Groupon’s accounting to management turmoil to its business model to rocky relations with merchants.

And while Mason has labored to affect a more professional tone in his own style, and seemed to have created a more stable management team, continued issues in Europe and getting enough traction for a number of new promising product initiatives has been tougher to solve.

Therefore, Mason’s performance is naturally under increased scrutiny, said sources. He will surely get questions on his record tomorrow, when he is scheduled to appear onstage at Business Insider’s Ignition conference in New York.

Charles Sipkins, a spokesman for the board, declined to comment, as did Groupon spokesman Paul Taaffe.

Microsoft has been aggressively expanding its retail presence in support of the launch of Windows 8 and its new Surface tablet. But that expansion has been limited to the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico, and a number of the stores it has opened recently are pop-up holiday kiosks that presumably will close up shop come January.

Since Microsoft plans to sell the Surface only through its own retail stores and Microsoft.com, it’s clearly in the company’s best interests to expand its retail footprint. Right now, consumers curious about Surface have very, very few locations where they can have some hands-on time with the device. That will inevitably limit sales — not exactly a winning strategy for a new product that Microsoft has so much riding on. Hence the company’s plan to open 75 brick-and-mortar storefronts over the next two to three years. As Microsoft COO Kevin Turner said earlier this year, “We’re going to continue to build and roll out more stores. And we’re going to keep going more and more pervasive. And you’ll see the store brand continue to go out and go out into the world with the opportunity we believe we have to tell the Microsoft story.”

Microsoft declined comment.

Responding today to complaints from early adopters who, after receiving a confusion of email alerts telling them first that their Surface order had been delayed until November, and then that it would ship on time, did not receive the device on the promised date, Microsoft on Monday said not to worry. Surface preorders have not mysteriously been canceled, as some rumors suggested. And they will ship, as soon as Microsoft can resolve whatever cock-up it is that hampered them in the first place.

“We are aware of the issues related to Surface shipments, and are working hard to get them delivered to customers as quickly as possible,” a company spokesman told AllThingsD. “Customers will be notified via email as soon as their order has shipped and will be offered a €50 gift card for their inconvenience. We sincerely apologize for the delay.”

That gift card, $64.50 at current exchange rates, is good for use at Microsoft’s online store. And while it won’t completely ease the disappointment of eager early adopters affected by the delay, it’s a nice gesture.

“Our prediction that the Zynga IPO might have been the high water mark for Social Games 1.0 investment has been validated, with the VC market moving sharply away from that sector,” said Digi-Capital Managing Director Tim Merel.

A report conducted by Digi-Capital, an investment bank focused on gaming and companies in America, Europe and Asia, concluded that dollars are now being funneled toward tablet games, mobile games that are social, and cross-platform games, which work across all screens — mobile, social networks and the Web.

In December, Zynga raised $1 billion in a public offering, capping off a vibrant year of social investing that also included Nexon’s $1.2 billion public offering on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

In 2011, social gaming represented 57 percent of the dollars invested and 45 percent of all acquisitions. But ever since the two IPOs, the smaller screen dominates, Digi-Capital reports. During the first nine months of the year, mobile and tablet games were the largest transaction group, receiving 42 percent of all fundings and 32 percent of all acquisitions. However, it should be noted that valuations are much lower today for mobile than social gaming last year, given that it is a much earlier stage market.

While Digi-Capital reports that social gaming is on the way out, the good news is that the broader games sector continues to see an accelerated level of interest. So far, in 2012, 71 transactions have been completed, totaling $3.6 billion, beating last year’s record level of activity. In 2011, 113 transactions generated $3.4 billion in transaction value.

Other trends to keep an eye out for:

• In addition to mobile, massively multiplayer online games (MMO) and middleware software continue to see investments and exits.
• Chinese, Japanese and South Korean companies are still looking to buy Western game companies, but are facing cultural hurdles.
• In the first nine months of the year, free-to-play MMO exits were a surprise, representing 42 percent of all M&A, by transaction value.
• Middleware software also performed well in the first three quarters of the year, receiving 39 percent of all private investments, driven, in part, by Visa’s $190 million acquisition of PlaySpan.

The Finnish handset maker said the new Lumia 820 and 920 devices — unveiled earlier this month — go on sale in key European markets in November. Nokia didn’t reveal its plans for the crucial U.S. market, where it hopes to regain footing after losing considerable ground to Apple and other competitors.

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Women in tech had a good showing on Forbes magazine’s 2012 “The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women” list, which came out this past week.

Like the higher-profile tally from Fortune, it features the female movers and shakers from a variety of arenas.

No. 1 on the list is German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has certainly had her hands full with the economic crisis in Europe this past year.

But women related to tech also were numerous in the group, so here’s the rundown:

No. 4: Melinda Gates, co-chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

No. 10: Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook

No. 15: Virginia Rometty, president and CEO, IBM

No. 17: Ursula Burns, president and CEO, Xerox

No. 18: Meg Whitman, CEO, Hewlett-Packard

No. 21: Marissa Mayer, CEO, Yahoo

No. 25: Susan Wojcicki, SVP, Google

No. 29: Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief, Huffington Post Media Group, AOL

No. 48: Safra Katz, president and CFO, Oracle

No. 49: Laurene Powell Jobs, founder and chair, Emerson Collective

No. 58: Padmasree Warrior, CTO and chief strategy officer, Cisco

No. 70: Sue Gardner, executive director, WikiMedia Foundation

No. 84: Mary Meeker, general partner, Kleiner Perkins

Mohamed Elsayyed / Shutterstock.com

It is equally unsurprising, checking in a year later, that the momentum of entrepreneurship in Egypt, if anything, has increased amid the ups and downs of the macro economy and political uncertainty. “Generation Z” has come of age in Egypt like everywhere else, never knowing a time without access to information technology. They have at their fingertips communication and collaboration tools that allow them to innovate with friends from around the country, the region and the world. The cost of starting a business can be merely thousands of dollars in Egypt, and an ecosystem of angel and venture capital is rising in the region, as well as coming from Europe and the United States. Dozens of start-up competitions, hundreds of hackathons, thousands of new start-ups later, the entrepreneurs we have reconnected with believe there is no turning back.

No story is more encouraging than that of Amr Ramadan, whose company Vimov caught our attention last year. We were impressed that we were both users of Ramadan’s first consumer app, Weather HD, then the fastest and largest selling weather app in the Apple Store, with over 400,000 downloads at $.99 a pop — not knowing it had been built by him and three young guys in Alexandria, Egypt. Egypt-based venture capital firm Sawari Ventures — which has since launched one of the most successful incubators in the region, Flat6Labs — subsequently invested in Vimov in the midst of the turmoil of last spring without hesitation.

How are things today? “We are approaching our five millionth download,” Amr told us last week, “half of which are coming from the US. We also released Weather HD for the Mac, which stayed at the number two top-selling spot in the States during its week of launch.” They just released their most ambitious version on July 31 in the iTunes App Store, which is visually stunning and offers new features like “MultiForecast,” allowing users to see weather information from more than one weather provider. They have grown from three to 30 employees, all engineers from Amr’s home town in Alexandria, Egypt.

Navigating historic uncertainty was not easy, Ramadan notes. “We tried to take it slow in terms of growth after the protests of January 25, expecting the dust would settle in a few weeks. It quickly became apparent it wouldn’t settle down soon, and it wouldn’t be clear fast enough where the politics or economy would go.” Facing too many questions and scenarios, Vimov did what great entrepreneurs do around the globe: Hope for the best, plan for the globally competitive business they dreamed of, and execute. “Let me be clear,” he smiles, “[Revolution] causes tremendous pressure on top of that of simply being a start-up. One is always re-evaluating, guessing what could happen next, and building backup plans. But focus and execution is the only way; slow is not an option in the technology business.”

And execute they have. With growth rates that would be coveted by many in Silicon Valley, Ramadan has pushed his team to constantly redefine what a great weather application can be. Proud of their unique, graphic visual interface, they immediately improved navigation between the many cities their average viewers monitor. “We just launched Quickview, which shows weather animations of several locations all at once in a simple, elegant way,” he beams.

Weather HD’s Quickview

But can Egypt and the Middle East really play with the exciting innovation coming not only from the United States, but Europe, Israel, India, Asia and Latin America? For Ramadan, the now accepted precedent of innovation coming from all corners of the globe, even places once ignored, only suggests things could move faster in the Middle East. “Technology here is at its infancy, but that means there are opportunities around every corner,” he believes. “The reason why this huge market of some 400 million users has been under-served was that the young people were not encouraged to innovate, not from anyone around them, and they themselves had little hopes that a dream can come true.” He believes that this way of thinking has been forever shattered in the last year. “The number one motivator of great engineers is having great problems for them to solve,” he speaks as an engineer himself. “I have a world-class team at a fraction of the cost of what we could get in Silicon Valley — but we all love Alexandria, make great livings here, and are proud of building great products made in Egypt.” Thousands of other start-ups, he notes, have concluded the same all over the Middle East.

Neither Seth Goldstein nor Chris Schroeder are investors in Vimov.

Seth Goldstein @seth is a San Francisco-based angel investor and chairman of turntable.fm. Christopher M. Schroeder @cmschroed is a Washington, D.C.- and New York-based angel investor and former CEO of the online content and social platform start-up healthcentral.com, which he sold last January. He is writing a book on innovation and start-ups in the Middle East.