European start-ups are being created and growing at an unprecedented pace these days, attracting the attention of global investors, customers, and corporate partners alike. In the process, they are proving the conventional wisdom wrong: launching a start-up amid the continent's fragmented value pool doesn't necessarily have to be such a challenging proposition. Despite the range of systemic challenges start-ups still face, including regulatory and cultural challenges, growing numbers of dynamic new ventures are thriving. These bold players offer valuable lessons for others aspiring to similar heights--and to a European continent striving to stay economically and technologically competitive with the rest of the world. To better understand how these standouts succeed, we studied the top 1,000 European tech start-ups founded after 2000 in 33 countries, which include 21st-century companies such as Spotify, Adyen, and BioNTech.

Businesses are using voice assistants to answer rote, repetitive questions faster and cheaper so HR, IT and other departments can focus on higher value tasks. In some cases, businesses are just replacing website and internal portal Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) pages with simple, deterministically programmed chatbots. In other cases, they're replacing or supplementing what employees have traditionally done with digital counterparts that use machine learning. "Before one of our clients decided to implement a recruitment voice assistant, HR department employees had to personally process all phone calls from job seekers. They also had to create a new profile for every new candidate and fill in the information manually, which took a lot of time," said Julia Ryzh, chief marketing officer at voice experience platform provider Just AI. "It was [also] hard to tell whether the candidate had already applied for the position in question, since all the necessary pieces of information were stored in different places."

Hunger is a major problem even in developed countries like Australia. We are working with a social startup, Foodbank Local, and local charities at distributing donated food more efficiently. This food must first be allocated to these charities and then delivered to the end customers. In this abstract, we give a formulation of this real-world online fair division problem that the food banks face every day. The products arrive during the day and are indivisible. As a very first step, we focus in here on designing simple mechanisms allocating the food more efficiently. In future, we also plan on investigating more closely the frontier between the allocation and the transportation frameworks within this mixed setting. For instance, shall we dispatch the items as soon as they arrive or shall we apply a given waiting strategy?