BELGRADE (AFP) – An Indian company looking to cash in on eastern European “near-sourcing” signed a deal here on Tuesday to construct an IT park that Serbia hopes will become the biggest on the continent.

The deal with Bangalore-based property developer Embassy Group was potentially worth up to 600 million dollars (425 million euros) over five years, which would make it Serbia’s biggest ever greenfield investment, said Economy and Regional Development Minister Mladan Dinkic.

Greenfield projects are implemented from the ground up by an investing company on sites where there had been no previous activity.

“I’m very satisfied … that today I signed a memorandum of understanding for the construction of the first IT park in Serbia and, I’d say, the future biggest technology park in the whole of Europe,” Dinkic told a press conference.

Initially, the technology park would occupy 280 hectares (690 acres) of land in an industrial zone of the northern town of Indjija, where it would employ around 2,500 IT professionals, said Dinkic.

However, depending on client uptake, it could be expanded during the next five years to offer global IT companies 250,000 square metres (2.7 million square feet) of office space for up to 25,000 employees, he added.

Embassy Group chairman Jitu Virwani welcomed the agreement for the project, which he said had already attracted interest from some of its biggest clients, such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

“We’ve been looking for an east European country, mainly from the perspective of having some of our clients from the IT sector to be servicing the eastern European market,” Virwani said at the end of the signing ceremony.

“After a lot of research, we found Belgrade to be highly suitable for the needs of our clients, more from the perspective of costs.

“We see Serbia as the same position as Bangalore or India was, as far as the IT sector (is concerned), in 1991,” said Virwani in reference to the city seen as his country’s Silicon Valley.

Embassy Group, he added, was a company that had one of the biggest number of tenants leasing space at its IT parks around the world.

The deal aims to capitalise on the growing shift among global IT companies to “near-source” technology services closer to Western clients, rather than outsourcing them to India, where costs are rising.

It is seen as yet another win for Indjija, whose mayor Goran Jesic has already won praise for fostering an “economic miracle” in the town, halfway between Serbia’s two biggest cities of Belgrade and Novi Sad.

In an interview ahead of the announcement, Jesic told AFP he was confident the project would also boost the national economy and help to improve Serbia’s war-tarnished image.

He said he hoped it would also help to persuade young Serbs who left the country in the brain-drain that went with the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia that they have a future in their own country.

Virwani said Embassy chose Serbia ahead of other former eastern bloc countries such as the Czech Republic largely because of its potential to lure back some of these young talents.

“We are … aware that a large number of Serbians work in software companies all over the world, especially in the US,” said the Indian businessman.

“Most of these people are of intelligence and quite highly-placed within these companies … and we’re hoping that they’d want to come back to their country.”

Indians agree deal for Serbia’s first IT park – Yahoo! News UK

I share and office with someone who sits on the Serbian National Register for INternet Domain names who told me ICAN had come down fairly hard on them about the fate of the YU country code domain.

From CNN:

The Internet’s key oversight agency has approved a plan to phase out the domain name for Yugoslavia, four years after the country dissolved following civil war. It’ll take two or three more years for “.yu” users to fully transition to “.rs” for Serbia and “.me” for Montenegro.

Politics played a big part in the delay.

The federation of Serbia and Montenegro, formed from the remnants of Yugoslavia in 2003, was given “.cs.” But before anyone could use it, the country further split into Serbia and Montenegro last year.

Each time there’s a change, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers must find an organization that is representative of the country’s users and has the will and the skills to run the domain.

In unanimous votes last week, ICANN assigned “.me” to Montenegro’s government and “.rs” to a group called the Serbian National Register of Internet Domain Names, a nonprofit organization formed for the task.

The Serbian group also was appointed caretaker of “.yu” during the transition, taking over duties from volunteers at the University of Belgrade.”

YU will go the same way as SU (Soviet Union) and all existing sites will have to be migrated to the new domain (RS). This will be a huge and expensive headache for Serbian businesses.

The EU has signed visa agreements with five Balkan countries, making it cheaper and easier for their citizens to travel through much of Europe.

The deals with Albania, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia are expected to come into force in January.

The Balkan nations have complained that strict EU visa rules have confined them to a ghetto at the heart of Europe.

The five nations also agreed to take back illegal immigrants who reach the EU through the Balkans.

BBC NEWS | Europe | EU eases visa regime with Balkans

Last November Danica from Belgrade and Beyond posted that famous travel documentary maker Michael Palin was spotted in Belgrade with his crew.

Well the first episode of the resulting series – Michael Palin’s New Europe – went out on the BBC last night at apparently Belgrade comes off brilliantly. As one UK friend commented today on Facebook:

Saw Michael Palin’s new series last night, he was in Belgrade meeting a few people. I was waiting for your face to appear (he was in some club), then he was speaking to some gorgeous gals (so I’m sure you know them). If you can find it anywhere on the internet, have a look. V interesting. Made me want to visit!

That last line is significant. This “made me want to visit” is known as The Palin Effect:

Palin’s programmes on his travels through the Himalayas in 2004 led to a significant increase in trips to the region, according to the adventure operator Intrepid Travel. A spokesman said a similar effect was expected with the start of the new series.

“The great thing about the way Michael Palin travels is that he really gets under the skin of a country; travelling on local transport, staying in traditional accommodation and doing what the locals do,” said Daniel Pawlyn, Intrepid’s UK and Europe sales and marketing manager.

A spokesman for Cox & Kings, which offers tours to several countries in the region, believes the new Palin series could lead to a doubling of the number of people taking tours to destinations such as Bosnia and Romania. [Daily Telegraph]

And Serbia too! Could this be the spur that takes Serbia’s fast growing tourist appeal beyond the tipping point?

My only regret is that the coverage in the papers hardly mentions Serbs or Serbia except to peddle the old guilt inducing platitudes about Bosnia. Virtually no mention of bombing and very little about Belgrade or Serbia in general. Luckily the program speaks for itself.

For more see:

Official BBC website for the show [BBC]

Michael Palin’s New Europe: An Unofficial Fan Center [Site]

Michael Palin’s European frontier – Michael Palin relives the best of his adventures while filming his new television series in the former Eastern Bloc [The Times]

Brave new world – In his latest travel series, Michael Palin journeys to the long-neglected countries of Eastern Europe. He tells Michael Deacon what surprised him most [Daily Telegraph]

Eastern promise – Thought the world held no more surprises for Michael Palin? So did our critic, until she saw him tackle Albania [The Times]

So near and yet so far – Michael Palin has already travelled around the world, from pole to pole and across the Himalayas. Here he explains what drove him to make his latest odyssey, from Estonia to Albania – across the ‘new Europe’ [The Guardian]

Michael Palin’s Official Travel Site [Palin Travel]

The DVD of the series on Amazon.co.uk [Amazon.co.uk]