Last year, associate editor and Company of Friends coordinator Heath Row conducted a Roadshow in which he explored the new economy in the New South. This year, during May and June, he took his show to Europe -- visiting 15 cities in 12 countries and exploring what he calls the 'Euro-conomy.' Here, adapted from Row's Roadshow Diaries, are three dispatches on the new economy in the Old World.

Oslo, Norway -- Opera Software as makes the smallest, fastest, most flexible Web browser that I've ever used. At Opera's fifth-floor offices on the edge of town, I spent an hour and a half talking to Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, 33, the company's CEO. We talked about how Opera blends a smart approach to application development with a serious concern for people with disabilities.

'Our focus is on making software as easy to use as possible,' von Tetzchner says. 'My father is a university professor who studies communication with disabled children. That interest has rubbed off on me: As far as we know, we have the only browser that supports zoom capability. People with poor vision can use our browser to make content zoom in to 1,000%. We also offer a single-key functionality that helps average users as well as users with special needs. Those special users aren't our target market. At the same time, a lot of people just don't have access to the Net, and we believe that equal access to information is very important.'

Coordinates: Opera Software as, www.opera.com

Paris -- Like businesspeople in the United States, businesspeople in Europe are going incubator-crazy. During the Roadshow, I visited lots of organizations that call themselves 'incubators,' and I saw lots of incubator models. Of those models, perhaps the most intriguing was Acute Partnership, a holding company that enables a handful of startups to share executive staff members, as well as business services. To learn more about this model, I met with Jean-Etienne Belicard, 34, CEO of linkUall.com and founder of Acute.

'In France, it can be tough for entrepreneurs,' Belicard says. 'It is difficult to do anything without the connections and support that large groups provide. In fact, the word 'entrepreneur' means less in Europe than it does in the United States. Acute connects seven startups, and every founder shares in the partnership. For European countries, catching up with the United States is not about the availability of capital or technology; it's about human resources. We're helping to build a pool of people who will eventually be able to start their own companies.'

Coordinates: Acute Partnership, www.acute-partnership.com

London -- In every country I visited, I met leaders of other organizations that focus on networking in the new economy. Here, for example, I visited Stephen Whaley, 51, development director (business and community) for the University of Westminster, who is also director of New Media Knowledge -- a business network that serves the UK new-media industry. We talked mostly about his efforts to build technology-business 'clusters.'

'There's a greater economic advantage in sharing ideas than there is in developing ideas on your own,' Whaley says. 'If senior people in your organizations don't believe that, you can't have a successful cluster. In small clusters in which companies share ideas, it's damn near impossible to steal an idea. An idea -- when it is still just an idea -- has a life cycle of about a week. And the only person who can really take an idea forward is its originator. Why do startups often bring in a new CEO? Because they need new thinking: They couldn't get far enough with their own ideas. Networks are built by the people who participate in them. Some people just want to know what's going on, and that's it. Some people are outsiders who just want some insight. Allow people to participate at different levels, and trust their decisions.'

Coordinates: New Media Knowledge, www.nmk.co.uk