Joint ventures offer promise and frustration for Ukraine-EU Cooperation
Joint ventures between Ukrainian and European countries are on the uptick, but is it all roses?
Fergus O'Sullivan
Freelance tech journalist based in Prague and Kyiv
Portfolio
Thank you for checking out my portfolio, I appreciate your interest.
Latest Articles
These are some of the best articles I've published recently.
Why these Czech investors have plunged into Ukraine
Ukrainian defensetech is the first thing that springs to mind. “Europe is set to significantly increase its defense spending in the years to come, and Ukraine is taking up a huge part of that,” says Lola Onipko of Invest in Bravery, a Czechia-based organization that aims to foster investment in Ukraine.“If you’re not in Kyiv, you have no chance”Because of the increase in spending, says Onipko, the more adventurous VCs in the Czech Republic are flocking to Ukraine. One of them is Tichomír Jenkut,...
Elias Maier on whether you even want VC money
A big, if not the biggest, part of the Marc Impact Programme is its mentors. Among the most prominent is Elias Maier, who has seen all sides of the startup process, with experience as a founder, a VC, and now an operator working alongside founders every dayElias is one of Marc’s Masterminds, where the most advanced founders are coached. What makes him somebody to listen to is the combination: years of scouting startups for Hitachi Ventures, Hensoldt Ventures, StartGuide, and InsureTech Fund NY,...
How a Ukrainian and a Swiss soldier built a startup
Hamilos-Keller was different, though, says Puz: “at the Warsaw hackathon, I heard a lot of crazy ideas from different teams, and then I saw this shy guy, who was talking combat medicine.” The two spoke for a while, but Puz wasn’t really impressed until the next day, when he saw that Hamilos-Keller had incorporated much of his feedback into his presentation for the hackathon jury. When asked about any reservations he may have had about working with somebody from Western Europe, Puz is emphatic: “...
What’s brewing in Plzeň?
The organizations taking the lead in growing startups are the Plzeň Innovation Ecosystem (PINE), Business Innovation Centre (BIC), and SITMP, the city’s IT agency. In this article, we talk to several startups that are coming up under its umbrella; other articles in the series talk about its drone initiative Drony SIT, as well as an in-depth interview with its main initiator, Luděk Šantora. PINE is supported by the city and serves as a support that connects education, talent development, innovati...
“If you’re not in Ukraine, you’re not in defensetech”
That said, the flying variety was still the star of the show, with multiple companies showing off what they had come up with. These ranged from tiny drones used for reconnaissance, to ones loaded with explosives and used to hunt down enemy infantry or infiltrate bunkers and tanks. Drones’ effectiveness on the battlefield can’t be overestimated, and many of the startups I spoke to in Ukraine were focused on a specific aspect to increase it further. Some of this is simply building better drones: f...
Marek Miltner: “Stanford talent can in some ways be worse than Czech talent”
The end result, after a few more adventures in startups, was that he realized he wanted something else for a change: “ I’ve enjoyed it, but at the end of the day. I clearly am very motivated by purpose, so why not focus a couple years of my peak productive life on being impact driven and not commerce driven. Because even at startups, many people from corporations tend to think like, ‘oh, in the startup you can do whatever.’ Miltner emphasizes, though that they can actually be even more cutthroat...
Himera’s Rudominski: “You can’t come up with this stuff in a lab”
First, the tech: the idea to build handsets didn’t come out of nowhere. Rudominski and his now co-founders first had a startup that suffered from bad timing. “It was a connectivity solution for digital nomads who need to connect to the internet from any country. It would remove the need for getting local SIM cards. Exactly when we were launching that, COVID hit and the entire business model didn’t really work anymore.”Still, when two years later Moscow launched its full-scale invasion, experien...
VPNs & Cybersecurity
For most of my career I've covered consumertech, focusing on security software.
What is a VPN? Here’s how to choose the right one for you
Virtual private networks, better known as VPNs, aren’t new technology. The first VPN protocol – a set of rules that determines how programs ‘talk’ to each other – was developed in the late 1990s. Once a niche product for the privacy-conscious, VPNs are hard to ignore these days. They’re now everywhere, as many of us are spending more time working from home, and VPN companies have taken their marketing to streaming and TV. What is a VPN, though? And why would you need one? How do you determine wh...
Why You Need a Longer Password
We all know the annoyance of creating a new account online: you enter the password you want, and then the service bugs you about minimum length and using special characters. There’s a reason you’re being pushed to do this, though, and in this article I’ll go over why you need a long password.
The short answer is password entropy. That term sounds way more complicated than it really is unless you’re familiar with cryptography, so let’s take a look at what password entropy is. Password entr...
The short answer is password entropy. That term sounds way more complicated than it really is unless you’re familiar with cryptography, so let’s take a look at what password entropy is. Password entr...
What is encryption? | Proton
Encryption is a way to hide information so private data is kept that way. Without encryption, anybody could access your communications. In this article, we go over how it works and some of the different types of encryption there are.
The short explanation is that encryption is a way to scramble information so nobody except the people it’s meant for can access it. This scrambling is done by using mathematical algorithms that lock and unlock the information. There’s a lot more to it than that,...
The short explanation is that encryption is a way to scramble information so nobody except the people it’s meant for can access it. This scrambling is done by using mathematical algorithms that lock and unlock the information. There’s a lot more to it than that,...
BestVPN.com & Buffered VPN: A Match Made in Heaven
Cloudwards.net may earn a small commission from some purchases made through our site. However, any earnings do not affect how we review services. Learn more about our editorial integrity and research process.
Written by {"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@type":"Person","url":"https:\/\/www.cloudwards.net\/about\/fergus-osullivan\/","name":"Fergus O'Sullivan","givenName":"Fergus","familyName":"O'Sullivan","jobTitle":"Writer, Former Chief Editor","description":"Fergus is the former chief editor...
Written by {"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@type":"Person","url":"https:\/\/www.cloudwards.net\/about\/fergus-osullivan\/","name":"Fergus O'Sullivan","givenName":"Fergus","familyName":"O'Sullivan","jobTitle":"Writer, Former Chief Editor","description":"Fergus is the former chief editor...
History Articles
I studied history, and I still have a passion for it. Thanks to The History Guild, I have found the occasional outlet for that passion.
The Siege of Malta through Australian eyes
Reading time: 12 minutesThe Siege of Malta in the Second World War, which lasted from June 1940 until November 1942, was a linchpin of the war. Had Malta fallen to the Axis, the war may have concluded very differently. Australian soldiers, sailors, and airmen played a crucial part in defending the island, in this article we explore how they experienced it.By Fergus O’SullivanLike many of our article about Australians in the Mediterranean in World War Two, this article draws heavily on the Austra...
Can Games Teach History?
Reading time: 7 minutesVideo games love historical settings: from adventure games like the Assassin’s Creed series, to action games like Call of Duty and its sequels, to strategic sagas like Europa Universalis; there’s no shortage of examples. Can computer games be more than entertainment, though, and can they actually teach their audience about what happened in the past?By Fergus O’SullivanThat can be pretty difficult to pin down, says Pieter Van den Heede, a lecturer at the Erasmus University...
Four Video Games That Actually Teach History
Reading time: 13 minutesThere are plenty of video games that use historical backdrops for their narrative, or even entice you to recreate history in some way. As we discuss with historian Pieter van den Heede in our article on whether games can teach history, the question remains of how much you actually learn while playing these games. Thankfully, some do a much better job than others, and in this article, I will explore four of them.By Fergus O’SullivanFor this article, I’m going to focus on t...
How a Cyprus Museum Uses Tech to Make the Past Come Alive
What do you do when a building important to your city’s history is inaccessible? When you can see it, but simply cannot get anywhere near it? This is the question facing the Ledra Palace Hotel in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus and one of the last few divided cities in the world. One group of researchers seems to have found a solution, using cutting edge tech.By Fergus O’SullivanUp until the Turkish invasion in 1974, the Ledra Palace Hotel served as a social hub for the elite of Nicosia. It hoste...