seikatsu

If this looks familiar at all, click here: http://www.myjobhasexpired.com/

I spoke at OpenForum Europe conference last Friday, on the topic of open internet (aka net neutrality) and Skype's negative experiences of the lack of it, like Deutche Telekom's recent agressive blocking of our iPhone application.

The event featured an enlighting list of speakers and I truly enjoyed most of the day. However, instead of full-scale notetaking as I've sometimes done before, I decided to give live tweeting a try (as @seikatsu). From one end the 140 characters don't leave much room for analysis and force you to cut even the original thoughts. But on the other hand these notes were available to anyone in real time and even sparked some discussions right away.

Anyway, the cleaned-up full list of my tweets is below. You can see quite a bit more from other people too when you do a Twitter search for the tag #openforum. And the original presentations are online here.

• Dinner with "father of the internet" Vint Cerf and Commissioner Vivian Reading. Lots of great things said out loud.
• Ziga Turk: remember that the moon landing footage was as bad quality as youtube today
• Ziga Turk: we've shifted investments from industrial to conceptual economy (value in meaning not function)
• Vint Cerf: power corrupts. Powerpoint corrupts absolutely.
• Cerf: it is absurd how we got away with opening the tcp/ip specs completely... in the middle of the cold war.
• Cerf: proposed motto: if its not open, you can't call it internet [service]. it is against the original design.
• Cerf: cloud computing is where internet was in 1973. It does not exist in the sense of vocabulary for using it universally.
• Turk: if we didn't have the Lisbon strategy, we wouldn't even know how much Europe is lagging behind
• Structural issue in browser competition - you have to win the SAME users over and over again from recurring IE defaults.
• Mitchell Baker: 30m users today guarantee you nothing, no financial success, ipo, getting bought..
• Anthony D Williams of Wikinomics fame on stage
• Williams: blogger.com passed cnn.com traffic already in 2006
• Williams: P&G has 1.8m external researchers networked, on call (9000 full time internally)
• Williams: The Guardian DataStore - open access to the facts journalists have gathered
• Graham Taylor: a person too old to be a digital native can live happily as a digital immigrant
• People think standards are always good. They also often slow innovation and hide vested interests.
• Two Web Masters: Spiderman and Obama.
• Matt Asay/Alfresco, former student of Lessig asked "why have so many European open source projects left for USA?"
• Minueesti? RT @PaulHofheinz: If ppl dont see public institutions solving problems, they will form other orgs to seek solution.

I've found myself using Twitter more and more recently. In large part it comes on the expense of blogging here - the mental entry barrier is so much different from taking proper time out of a busy day to write a polished blog entry versus shooting away compressed 140 character thought-bits from my mobile in the middle of a meeting or in transit when travelling.

I've experimented quite a bit with what I tweet about. At some point I jotted down a few blogging principles (in Estonian here) and Twitter was initially a channel for the leftovers that didn't fit in, e.g. short messages about me, my location, my random inner thoughts - rather than something specifically designed for the reader. As my followers count has grown (getting very close to the number of RSS subscribers on this blog - interesting tipping point soon; now ranking in the top 2 of #Estonian users - hi, Cyrus), I've knowingly pulled back from more egocentric and personal stuff and craft my short messages for a broader, more anonymous audience. To a notable extent I'm also taking feedback from those near and dear to me about which content they feel could be uncomfortable or too revealing.

Either way, Twitter is a concept-stretching medium and part of the beauty of it is that though we more or less know what is the "old" stuff that it is changing we can have no clue yet to what, in which direction. Even better, it is still up to us as the users to define it - both when consuming microcontent (whom we follow, how we filter, what we re-share) and when creating it (just linking or creating new? talking about yourself or the readers? social realism or philosophical abstractionism?).

Anyway, what sparked this post was actually a funny incident today. Apple App Store opened up for Estonian users today. As we launched the Skype client for iPhone this week and it has skyrocketed to a million downloads in less than 48 hours, we are all of course very closely following this space right now. So, when I learned about Apple's Estonian expansion this morning, I of course tweeted it (at 10:58) as something my followers could care about. At 11:46 Eesti Päevaleht, one of the largest Estonian dailies, ran a news story, quoting my tweet as the original source. They had a comment from EMT (the local iPhone-exclusive mobile operator), who apologized that they still haven't heard about it from Apple and don't know what to say.

From one side I even feel a bit sorry for my friends at EMT for stealing the thunder from their official press if and when they were planning to run it. On the other hand - it is a great example of casual, yet targeted real-time content bending the borders between "mainstream" and social media.

I had an honor to speak at Stanford University on March 9th, as part of their European Entrepreneurship & Innovation Thought Leaders seminar series (see web site and Facebook group). I truly enjoyed the experience, meeting students, faculty and guests and joining a dinner in a smaller circle later for fascinating follow-up conversations around entrepreneurship.

(Photo courtesy of Steve Jürvetson, click on it for his notes from the audience)

Here are the slides I used:

As you might notice, my slides were just a light framework this time and most of content was oral and followed by interactive discussion. Unfortunately it is slightly more complicated with video this time. Please follow the instructions here, but beware that you need to create an account with the Stanford SCPD site (which you will hopefully find useful for accessing any other free seminars content they offer) and the videos are served using Silverlight, which may or may not be compatible with your choice of operating system or browsers, like Chrome.

Talked to Toivo Tänavsuu last week on what's happening at Skype, how is the labour market looking and how do we relate to the broader technology startup scene in Estonia. The video inteview was publised on TigerPrises and ArcticStartup.

Interview with Sten Tamkivi from Skype from Toivo Tänavsuu on Vimeo.

Google started this year with aggressively reviewing its product portfolio. A number of services were announced to be shut down recently. That's fine, times are tough. And even if they were not - I still admire the decisiveness of any large product company to occasionally merge similar things and kill the ones that haven't gained traction. I've had to make a few of those decisions myself and they are never easy.

So when logging in to FeedBurner a week ago they proposed they merge my feeds into my Google account, it really wasn't a surprise. After all FeedBurner had been already acquired by Google last June and something had to happen some day.

These sort of transitions are bound to introduce glitches, too. So I didn't feel like bitching at once, but give it some time. Now, a week after the transition this is becoming a textbook example of how not to merge products if you are not ready.

This is what I as a long time user am struggling with still today, 7 days after:

• I used to be a paid customer for premium stats services of FeedBurner. It seems for the part they now killed because of the overlap with Google Analytics - makes sense. However, nowhere in the process have I learned what happened to my credit relationship, will I continue to be charged or not. Not even a note in the lines of "thanks for your business, now we're free", if that is the case.
• The RSS subscribers count for this blog, for example, fell from 271 to 128. It was supposed to "get adjusted in a week", which it has not. And guess what seems to be the issue - the RSS reader type that seems to have vanished from the stats is... Google Reader...
• I have been splicing public bookmarks into my feed via del.icio.us. This does not work any more. When I go to feedburner.google.com settings, the configuration data is still there, but re-saving it displays an error message of "username stent doesn't exist on del.icio.us". Which is not true, of course.
• Splicing photos from my Flickr feed does not work either, automatically that is. I get a one time effect of images import by going to settings and re-saving the Flickr configuration. But the next time I upload something to Flickr, no automatic feedburner splicing occurs.
• I often peek at blog stats from my iPhone. iPhone does not support Flash. Thus FeedBurner used to be a well-suited alternative to full Google Analytics to understand how things are trending, which referrals actively generate traffic, etc. Now, not only is GA Flash-centric enough that you can't even select a report date without it (and I'm yet to see a decent iPhone app for this), they have moved the new FeedBurner to partial Flash too...
• Even if it was a geeky and technical service, I've always loved FeedBurner's philosophy, brand and language they talk to me in. So I sort of feel I owe them some and have spent a few evening hours trying to get the above feedback back to them. No such luck, virtually responseless Google Feedburner help group is all there is.

Apologies to all subscribers who are missing content or - I really don't know - are seeing any other technical difficulties with this feed.

As Jüri announced last week, ArcticStartup.com's ArcticEvening event is coming to Tallinn next Wednesday, Jan 28th, at Von Krahl. In cooperation with OpenCoffee Tallinn and Connect Estonia.

As the initially planned 100 seats filled up really quickly, the organizers increased it to 150. And at the time I'm writing this, there are some 28 still left. So sign up now, if you missed from the first batch.

I will be there sitting in a panel with Allan and Taneli Tikka from RunToShop. Looking forward to the pitches from two Estonian and two Finnish startups.

"Well, duh", you might say, but actually until recently it was not. GDP-wise that is. Based on 2007 numbers, the top economies in the world were:

1. the US of A, $13.8 trillion
2. Japan, $4.38 trillion
3. China, $3.38 trillion
4. Germany, $3.32 trillion

Media coverage around this change has a lot of interesting facts, worth reading Bloomberg and Washington Post for example:

China's economy is 70 times bigger than when leader Deng Xiaoping ditched hard-line Communist policies in favor of free- market reforms in 1978.

China also has a big stake in the U.S. economy, holding $652.9 billion of U.S. Treasuries.

Since introducing free-market policies, China has lifted 300 million citizens out of poverty, according to the United Nations

Global interests spanning African oilfields and South American mines are encouraging China to add to its military might.

And speaking of the future. If both China and US were both to keep their average growth rates, it would take 18 years to change the top spot. However, in the ongoing recession the curves will start changing:

China is one of the few major economies that is on track to have positive GDP growth this year. Merrill Lynch calculates that China will have a GDP growth of 8 percent as compared with a 2.8 percent decline for the United States, a 1.3 percent decline for Japan and a 0.6 percent decline for the European Union.

Under these circumstances, we're rather talking about a decade?

If you are interested in this power play, I recommend reading the ChinAfrica post from last summer. Or even just see the foreign exchange reserves graph from there.

Heard on the morning news that the German $66B economic stimulus package passed today also includes a measure to encourage people replace their cars. It is sort of understandable as a short term measure, as their economy is quite reliant on the infamous German car makers who, of course, are looking at a bleak 2009. Still if you think of, say, a few million germans rushing to buy new cars and dump their (probably well-running) existing ones -- doesn't sound that reasonable from long term environmental damage point of view.

I looked it up, and it comes out that...

Other measures include a 2,500 euro payment for drivers who buy a new low- emission car.

Now, depending on what "low emission" means in this case the measure could work either way - for German manufacturers or for the environment. For some reason I doubt that these two goals could be obviously achieved together, or at least perceptionally "green" and "german" are not the first semantic associations that pop into mind as a bundle when thinking about cars...

Toyota announced their new Prius yesterday. Looking slightly better (but not beautiful), adding a few interesting innovations (such as solar-paneled moonroof that generates power for the ventilation on hot days) and less than 5l/100km (50mpg) fuel consumption it is a worthy upgrade to what has already been a great if somewhat quirky car till now.

Toyota basically owns the hybrid car market, claiming 91% market share in Europe in 2006. So putting one and one together - to what extent will the German government be supporting the Japanese economy instead of their own with their new car purchase support measure?

Skype launched the third beta version of the new and shiny 4.0 client for Windows in December. I missed reblogging the news here, but you can read from the source what Mike said about Beta 3 on Skype Blogs. In a nutshell, the History is back, a new Bandwidth Manager improves your audio and video call quality and the look of the whole client skin has been refreshed.

If you did not get it then, then today is a great day to download, as we've followed with a beta 3 hotfix release that makes it even better quality-wise.

Read also my past posts on Beta 1 and Beta 2 on why it is worth to upgrade to Skype 4.0.

And, as always, your continued feedback is much appreciated by the 4.0 team at Skype.

Well, ever since Steve Jobs went skinny (again, that is), the global Apple community and both new and old media have been nuts about speculations around his health.

During the holidays it was quite funny to see a classic butterfly effect in action when Ross and Robert Scoble were... buying yogurt in Palo Alto. "Confirmed: Steve is healthy!" went from a casual comment of the yogurt counter employee to Chinese tech news in just a matter of hours.

Yesterday I was occasionally peeking on a real-time feed by macrumorslive.com covering the MacWorld '09 Keynote (which was not delivered by Steve any more, as you know). Less than 30 minutes into the session a screaming "STEVE JOBS JUST DIED" note was inserted into the feed - here's a screenshot:

It took the editors 3 minutes to figure out their system had been penetrated and retract the "news" (but they could not delete it). Then the hackers went over the top spamming with new messages and eventually the whole site was taken down.

As MacRumors is probably one of the most heavily used outlets for non-official Apple coverage, I can only imagine the tweets and posts on the friendfeeds and facebooks of this world that could have been triggered by the naive among readers in those brief minutes. No, I'm not even going to research for this.

I think it would have been wise for Steve had broken his typical radio silence before he finally did to avoid or just to respond early to speculations. Even though no person is really obliged to comment on the matters as private as their health, this rumor mill has become much more unhealthy than it's subject. Just a few words at the right time direct from the source could have stopped the madness before it begun. A great PR case study in the age of unstoppable instant social media.

I hope Steve has many long and fruitful years ahead of him. And so does Apple, and all the other talented people working there. And the "fanboys" let them to enjoy their ride.

Looking back at 2008 I discovered that it was a quiet one -- travel-wise that is. Mostly I have to thank Etta for her appearance in May and becoming a good excuse for some no-fly-zone right before and paternity leave after, running into the summer.

• Number of business trips: ~15
• Flight legs: ~32 (+ 3 international trains)
• Days away from home: ~67
  • London: 41 days (including one almost-a-month with whole family again)
  • Luxembourg: 11 days
  • San Jose / San Francisco: 7 days
  • Prague: 3 days
  • Brussels: 2 days
  • Paris, Athens, Helsinki: 1 day each (the latter only due to a canceled flight)

All-in-all, I was away 30% less and took almost 50% less flights than the year before. More video calls, logistical efficiency and less carbon footprint...

It was really nice to spend most of vacation time in Estonia, adding just over a week in Italy (first time there, btw) with two more flights. I am a bit sad not to make it over to Asia this year, those trips have always been a delight, especially Tokyo.

See also: 2006, 2007 travel summaries

Found a video of my five minute speech in a panel at Restart 2008 conference in November. To disrupt the overall tone of the day a bit -- focusing on tangible, measurable and often plain numeric aspects of a successful (liberal) macroeconomic environment -- I decided on spot that I will instead talk about the softer side of life, namely the role values and tolerance in particular play for creating an environment where innovation strives in Estonia (or anywhere).

The clip below also has my fellow panelist Rein Raud, Rector of Tallinn University continuing on the same topic of innovation and openness.

Back then, I did my original conference notes post) in Estonian, but now realized that we actually spoke in English there. So here you go:

For context, please also see the very entertaining and inspirational intro to our panel by Pekka Roine, entitled "The Only Obstacle to Innovation Is Wrong Policy Chosen by the State" (videos: part 1, part 2, part 3).

The rest of the presentations of the day are available in video too, of course.

Discovered that one of the CrushPad winemakers who kindly hosted us at a recent CrushCamp is also a food and wine blogger: VMac + Cheese.

She has taken the time to take a bunch of photos from my photoset and put together a storyline around it. Great reading if you're interested to understand the process better, especially as she has added keyword links to explanatory pages at CrushNet's EnoWiki too.

On a recent trip to California got a chance to visit Crushpad. They are a high-end winery... where you are the winemaker. Some of my friends invested in them last year and one of them has been pushing a group of us to make a barrel of our own wine together. So we kicked off the process and it has moved along, for some reason without much enthusiasm from my part.

Now after being there, including a half-day Crushcamp (full photoset here) of hands-on winemaking, I have gotten really excited.

As promised in June, the second iteration of Skype 4.0 client is now available for download. If you got on to beta 1 and liked it or hated it, I highly recommend the upgrade to beta 2.

The past quarter has really passed fast. I'm amazed how much the 4.0 research, design, product and project management, development and quality assurance teams got through. Especially given that you have to work under timeline pressure while at the same time being called an ignorant moron (best case) on blogs, forums and random comments across the internet for creating the radically different Skype version you just released. Fortunately we also had plenty of quantified data and user testing around the world in lab environments to separate real issues from pure blind conservatism and hateful noise. Read more about the feedback stats from the official blog post.

That's the risky transformation the software business seems to go through - applications with tens and hundreds of millions of users get launched in early beta stages, in feature incomplete iterations for feedback and mass-market testing. I am confident the better the end result will be. And if you look at beta 2, it really is powered by the feedback, (re)introducing such things as compact mode, grouping your contacts into categories, a totally revamped alerts and notifications system so you wouldn't miss any incoming events and many more of the things you asked for.

One of the interesting ones in my circle of friends and colleagues has really been the compact mode. The loudest voices demanding Skype to take up less of their screen. Many happy campers once we enabled mode switching to give the poweruser more control of the screen estate. And funnily, a number of people who have now confessed that they've "sort of learned to like" the new one-window layout and really don't want to go back...

Anyway, there is a new episode of the video series that has been taking world by the storm - Mike Explains Beta 2. In High Definition, of course:

And there is a bunch of screenshots on Flickr. But better download the real thing and give us some more feedback.

See also: Skype 4.0 Beta 1, Beta 3

Spent a day at London Seedcamp Week's Product and Marketing Day again. Hit quite a jackpot on the mentoring group selection lottery and got to spend time with four out of the total seven winners of this year:

• Kyko - online multiplayer gaming by the creators of Babuki, with a neat angle of tapping into existing social/IM networks to build their userbase.
• Stupeflix - French startup generating time-synced video clips out of static images and music. Animoto competitor with a strong technical performance edge.
• Toksta - whitelabel web based IM client for social networks from Germany.
• uberVU - my personal favourite, coming from Romania: crawler based harvesting of comments to and discussions around your content from wherever it get syndicated to. Think of seeing not only the comments to your video directly on YouTube, but also on any random blog that this video got embedded to or any twitter post referring to that video with a tinyurl.

Decisions for Heros whom I also met have found a very sharp niche of catering the dataporn needs for rescue teams, and I just loved their founder Robin´s passion. Wish them all the best even if they didn't win this event.

All-in-all and with a few exceptions, I was more impressed by the people and their passion rather than the specific business ideas. Of course, it sort of has to be very hard to differentiate a great company from an utterly silly one before it gets off the ground, otherwise we would all be angel inverstment gazillionaires in a blink. Judging people and their characters is a much more natural task - and I really did like most of whom I met.

In addition to the roster of enthusiastic startups, I am also very happy about making some new friends among fellow mentors, such as Robert Gaal, co-founder of Wakoopa (which I have been a user of for a few months) and The Next Web. Chatting with guys like him is very energizing and raises hopes about the vision of Europe as an innovation hub. Which was Saul's point of creating Seedcamp after all, wasn't it?

Last week's Baltic Dynamics 2008 conference was opened by an address by the President of Estonia Toomas Hendrik Ilves, speaking on Innovation. As the full text did not make it to the president.ee website's speeches section yet, I pinged his office and they kindly provided me a full copy in a few hours. Transparent government in action, love it.

As I think this is one of the best condensed summaries of the major issues -- such as investments, education, attracting labour -- Estonia and Europe are facing developing as technology hotbeds, I am re-publishing the whole text for your reading pleasure. Really worth your time.

Welcome address of the President of Estonia at the opening of (innovation) conference 'Baltic Dynamics' Dorpat SPA Hotel, Tartu, 4 September 2008

Ladies and Gentlemen, dear friends,

I am glad to speak here at the opening of the 13th 'Baltic Dynamics' conference, an increasingly international meeting, as it should be the case in the field of innovation.

This time the conference takes place at amidst a global economic slowdown, a situation that is frankly unfamiliar for many in Estonia. According to some (admittedly somewhat dire) predictions, this may become the most severe global downturn over the last decade. In terms of our domestic economies, all three Baltic countries stand on the threshold of a paradigm shift; the motor of rapid growth -- a competitive advantage based on cheap labor seems to be over. As indeed we have all hoped it would be, for a rise in wages and quality of life is, after all what convergence is all about. But this also creates a new challenge: further development of our economies can come only from higher value added products and services. In this sense innovation is naturally the key to shifting from slowdown to growth.

We must ourselves - how did we reach the state of affairs where we are now? Our economic development has been very rapid, but not always enough forward-looking. The recent slowdown in our economy is - at least to a certain extent - caused by overinvestment in sectors that have provided high yields in the short term (such as real estate) and which are prone to move in correlation with fluctuations of domestic demand. That said, it does not mean that some investments are less necessary than the others, but in the longer term a very small economy cannot rely solely on the domestic market. Indeed, even the second and third largest economies in the world, Japan and Germany cannot rely solely on domestic demand either.

It is obviously the back-to-school-and-work season now.

First: I'm receiving complaints that this blog has seen just 2 posts in last 2 months... In July nor August nobody cared, including myself. If you were one of those worried about silence - I now know that you have not subscribed to the feed. My Flickr feed you receive as an automagically embedded freebie when subscribing to this blog, has actually had a full trail of mobile snapshots of what has happened over the summer. And I have twittered.

Secondly, the travel season has started. Looking at the calendar, in the month of September I will drop by Tartu (spoke at Baltic Dynamics there last week), Pärnu (attending From Visions to Solutions), London (a wedding + Seedcamp), Athens (Skype Beta Days), Luxembourg, San Francisco / San Jose.

Hope this is enough chances to see you in person. And if not - I'll try to be a better boy when it comes to dropping a line here on the way. Thanks, your pings to see if I survived the slow season are heartwarming.

Just a quick reminder that this year's Seedcamp is getting close and the application deadline is already this Sunday, August the 10th.

As a reminder:

Seedcamp is where Europe's top young founders can come together in one place.

From securing funding to developing the right network, young entrepreneurs in Europe face challenges in building globally competitive technology businesses. Through the provision of seed capital and a world class network of mentors, we want to provide a catalyst for Europe's next generation of entrepreneurs.

(See also my invitation post from last year for some background and the great Seedcamp 2007 recap video)

There was just one Estonian entry - RealEyes - last year and unfortunately they did not make the shortlist. So if you've been playing with an idea to start your own company, get your act together and apply now to get a proper kickstart.

This year, there is also a potential shortcut to the shortlist. Just go and win the Video Pitch contest.

It looks like I can make it there this year again as one of the mentors. Last year was fun, hope to see you there.

I very rarely have found myself spending several hours on a single magazine article, but Richard Behar's report on China in Africa from June issue of FastCompany is very much worth you invest that time too.

This illustration probably recaps the "what" part of the story:

In a word, the chair you sit on and the computer you're using to read this post more likely than not come from China, no surprise there. What we probably have noticed less as a trend as consumers is that the basic components for making these things, from timber to cadmium, increasingly get shipped to China from Africa.

But what is much more revealing, interesting and depressing in the same time is the "how".

Post colonial times Europe and the US have kept investing in Africa attaching a lot of soft values to the cold hard cash as conditions: human rights, transparency, saving the environment, democratic values, public education, whatnot. (There is a lot of hypocrisy involved in that too - read part 5 on the US in Equatorial Guinea) Changing whole African societies towards this "western thinking" has slowed the inflow and efficiency of these investments down, feeding in many cases the NGO-s of the donor more than the target countries.

And now imagine that enters a player with a different valueset (communism!) and priorities (feed a double-digit economic growth of a billion+ citizens) and willingness to compromise (bribes, the Earth) ... and with a wallet like this:

This report on what China has done in Africa over just 5 years should give you some food for thought on how the world will look like over next 50. Read it..

Yes, it has taken something like 2 years from first conceptual ideas being bounced around. I've been involved in Skype's Desktop clients team since March and I have to tell you, approaching the first beta launch of our 4.0 client is one of the reasons for deafening silence on this blog. June especially has been very intense and I'm truly proud of what the hundreds of people involved have pulled off.

Please do read the official blog post, download the client and start giving feedback on things you like and things you don't. This multi-stage beta program of a radical redesign is very special for Skype, so I promise you - feedback will be listened to and even slicker beta 2 will follow.

The high def video clips (briefing, intro demo and advanced demo) might also be worth your time to get a quick start on what's happening. Or just think of them as your last chance to see Mike's stellar on-screen performance for free. Next time you might have to stand in line and buy a ticket for the big screen. Of course, you can share these clips in your Skype mood message, also on 4.0.

As for myself, I've been using internal versions of the next generation client primarily for almost half a year now. I could not go back to versions before even though there are still a bunch of features yet to be implemented. Unified conversations bringing chat, file transfers, SMS and calls neatly together. Conversation management with proper unread message tracking for heavy traffic multichats. Large crisp video calls. Headsets and USB speakerphones getting managed as I need.

One thing that has been really painful for last months is that I could not share all this neatness with my friends yet. So, here you are now, enjoy. Hope you like it.

See also: Skype 4.0 Beta 2, Beta 3

Just this week a new cab company launched in Tallinn. I've been quite happy with the one I (infrequently) use, but last night just thought I'd give them a try. And was in awe.

New bright yellow car, filled with shiny new gadgets, a big screen GPS, etc. Well, that's what you get when you buy a whole fleet in 2008 and everyone else on the market has been around for 10 years plus.

But what was really special was the service. How often have you heard lines like these in a cab, anywhere in the world?

• Sir, would you fancy listening to radio on the way this evening?
• What would be your radio station preference?
• How are you doing on cash? Just let me know if you need to stop by an ATM, but we do accept credit cards too, of course.
• I haven't been to your area often, so to aid my service with next customers, which would you say would be the most convenient ATM to stop by on the way there, if anyone needed to?
• Thanks for riding with me, hope to see you again soon!

It was so different, polite and genuinely caring that I'm almost a little bit afraid to call 1921 again - maybe it was just this one guy... But I sincerely hope this meant that a newcomer to what seems to be a crowded market actually nailed what will make a difference.

Had a pleasure to meet Harry Jaako, the Honorary Consul of Estonia in Vancouver, but also the Co-CEO of Discovery Capital, a venture capital firm operating in British Columbia.

He shared a very interesting and bold incentive concept that the British Columbia (not even the whole Canada) government has introduced to motivate private investments in small technology startups. Per every dollar invested, the government will pay you 30% back at once. The conditions include holding your investment(s) for five years minimum and a yearly cap of 200,000 CAD total.

So in other words, when you invest 10,000 CAD in a software startup, you get a 10,000 CAD share of equity for the price of 7,000. Or, as an alternative scenario, a private investor can keep investing their capital gained from a previous exit at a rate of 200,000 CAD per year, taking an annual cashback of 60,000 CAD out for their own living expenses as opposed to paying themselves salary.

This scheme is applicable to both direct investments and private investors participating in VC funds, such as the ones Discovery builds.

The results? The district of 4 million people that has been heavy on mining and forestry industries now hosts 70,000 people in tech sector (that's almost 10x more than Estonia, half the size; comparable to Czech Republic - but their total population is 10M), 8 locally focussed VC funds (larger ones with 500M CAD funds), 8000 mostly small and medium tech companies...

I just love the simplicity as well as braveness of this lever and can only imagine the type of political opposition introducing it could have caused.

I wish Estonian government would spend some time seeking out similar ideas from the world... and implementing the best ones fast.

This is an actual screenshot of an attempt to get a weather report for Tartu, Estonia on my iPhone, using the standard Weather app, powered by Yahoo data.

What's the joke?

Yes, the city of Tartu used to be called Yuryev at some point. Namely between 1030 and 1061 when Prince of Kiev, Yaroslav I the Wise burnt down the wooden fortification dating back to 7th century and built his own.

Just checked, Yahoo! Weather on the web has the up-to-date name. So apparently it takes a tunnel through Apple to get medieval.

Some while ago an online media outlet ran a poll, asking the readers where do they think Estonian language falls among the languages of this world by "usefulness". Many Estonian-speakers do tend to think that a million speakers means... nothing. That the language is on the verge of going distinct. About 2/3rds of answers ranked the language to the bottom third of worlds' 6000 languages.

There was a linguistics forum in April that surfaced some interesting data of the contrary, which I thought are worth sharing... in English as well:

• By the speaker count, Estonian ranks at 274th place out of 6000
• Higher education is available in just 100 languages in the world (including Estonian). 30 in Europe and just 3 out of the hundreds of African languages.
• There are about 200 countries in the world, where state language is the same as majority of population's mother tongue.
• Estonian ranks among top 30 IT-languages. For example, Microsoft products have been localized to 35 (Skype is available in 28), including Estonian.
• Human to computer speech synthesis exists for 25 languages, Estonian included.

(source: Sirje Kiin at Eesti Ekspress)

So, we're well alive and kicking in that weird and complicated tongue. Good to know, even when the reality of globalizing world has brought the dire need for becoming an English bilingual to communicate and ultimately succeed. I will keep blogging in both.

Just finished a video call with Her Majesty Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.

She was visiting Skype Tallinn office as part of her state visit to Estonia. I was babysitting at home. One of these physical location misses when Skype really becomes handy.

Also, Etta joined the ranks of the babies worldwide who have had their first video call while less than 10 days old.

Played around with some simple queries in my active Skype chats database, which weighs 215MB in plain text and has data since May 16th 2006. Probably I did a computer migration around then and earlier history (since I started using an early beta of Skype in mid-2003) is buried somewhere in backups.

Found out that I have sent 59709 and received 273715 messages during this time. And respectively 27389 outbound and 140505 inbound messages in the year of 2007. That's an average of 75 / 385 messages per calendar day. I don't even want to think if these numbers were my e-mail traffic...

I also found out that a week of vacation has a 5x lowering impact on my Skype communications - 132 messages out /1980 in last 7 days, versus a random weekly sample from a month ago 587 out / 2658 in.

And I also found out that my SQL skills have gone really, really rusty even compared to the mediocre level they used to be at.

Estonia inherited a mass of rubbish after it regained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 but it has only added to the problem since. 50,000 people, more than 3% of Estonian population of 1.3 million were out this Saturday to clean the forest, roadsides and other public areas from illegal waste. Volunteers had mapped over 10 656 garbage dumping sites all over the country by the beginning of April. This weekend 207 temporary collecting stations were put up to gather the waste collected by the volunteers.

6000 tons of illegal waste has already been registered to been collected during the initiative, more specific numbers are yet to come in the following weeks. The initiative aims to recycle up to 80% of the collected waste, making it first massive recycling project in Estonia. The usual amount of garbage recycled in Estonia is 10%, so this is eight times more than the average.

This is a quick summary of Teeme Ära 2008.

As only suitable for Skype, a number of our best brains helped the initative as volunteers to develop all geomapping and logistics software to keep the tens of thousands of moving parts under control. I am just in awe for what they did over the nights and weekends of their spare time, besides building the infamous software that lets people all over the world talk for free.

And to show that we are also not afraid to get our hands really dirty, there was an even longer list of Skypers who went into the woods. See here for the before and after pictures of the junk pile assigned to Skype.

See some more coverage in English:

• BBC reports: Spring cleanup in Estonia
• Reuters: Estonians scour country for big cleanup
• AP: IT gurus launched software cleanup of Estonia
• Bruce Sterling @ Wired.com: Estonia’s Digitized Garbage

Thank you, all friends and colleagues involved!

And congratulations, Rainer & the team for pulling this through.

Thomas L. Friedman wrote in the Herald Tribune a few years ago a column that acknowledged, and probably injected a lot of self confidence to innovators outside of the usual suspect American hightech hubs. Written from an angle of criticism towards the American high school system, I found his text much more useful read upside down - thinking about how the more remote areas previously known for their cheap labour and mass quantity low tech production are winning share on the global innovation arena. "In a flat world people can now innovate without having to emigrate," as Friedman put it in rhyme.

Now in one of the recent issues of FastCompany, Richard Florida took a look back and found that the innovation world has not gone flat afterall. Highly recommended read as a whole, but I picked out a few interesting facts for myself:

• Of the roughly 170,000 patents granted in 2003 in the United States--which gets applications for nearly all major inventions worldwide--nearly 80% went to Americans, Japanese, and Germans. The next 10 most innovative countries--the usual suspects in Europe, plus Taiwan, South Korea, Israel, and Canada--produced another 15%. The rest of the world accounted for only 5%, with India and China responsible for just 0.4%.
• Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs founded or cofounded roughly 30% of all Silicon Valley startups in the late 1990s, generating $20 billion in annual revenue and about 70,000 jobs.
• There are about 150 million (!) people in highly mobile, global creative class who migrate freely among the world's leading cities--places such as London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco

What Friedman originally called for as producing a comprehensive U.S. response - encompassing immigration, intellectual property law and educational policy - is more valid than ever in this situation... but maybe even more so for the "receding valleys between spikes" as described by Florida. Umm... like Estonia?

It used to be that you had to be lucky enough to live in one of the eight countries of Hutchinson's 3 network to use the "official" version of Skype on a 3 Skypephone handset.

That option is still there, but the world has gotten smaller again for those of us elsewhere, say in Elbonia. If you are a Skype user and have one of these 50 mobile handset models (more on the way), just go and download a client now. Presence, chat, Skype to Skype and SkypeOut calls -- the works -- land in your pocket.

I usally don't replicate the official product announcements from Skype's blog, but this specific one is definitely in the Top3 things my friends have asked for over the past years. So, please enjoy.

If you happen to be in London but feel the urge for really old-school French gourmet dining look no further than Le Gavroche. The settings resemble of an antiques store and the full two-dozen strong hierarchy of waiters (all French, bien entendu!) are so stylishly arrogant that I almost felt let down by the gray-haired gentleman who first welcomed us at the door: he was actually willing to shut an eye on my blue jeans on the condition that our whole party of three men wore the ugly blue blazers he lent us...

At least on your first visit, stick to the 8-course Menu Exceptionnel (with wine pairing). My favourites from that shockwave of tastes remain the grilled scallop and hot foie gras with cinnamon duck. And the word is that people travel from all over the world just to try Chef Michel Roux Jr's (who was also visibly present at the venue all night) cheese souffle.

Our full culinary trip is available as a photoset here.

Verdict: Le Gavroche might have lost one of their top Michelin stars since the eighties (today they have "only" two), but they are still very much worth your four hours of time and money.

I just checked, it has been 14 months since my enthusiastic post on the iPhone announcement and a liminal devices rant. Operator locking pushed me back from actually getting an iPhone for over a year. Will I get thrown out of the true gadget geek directory now?

And now there I am, the last me-too kid on the block with the cool running shoes. Can't help but share some comments. As the whole internet is full of reviews already, I'll stick to just a few personal notes.

• I was a bit afraid that the visual fancyness of the UI will get on my nerves. You know how the last thing you need is an animation when you need to place a quick call or send an SMS? iPhone is extremely well balanced between flashy effects and functionality. When a deleted e-mail folds itself into the trashcan or icons ready for rearrangement rattle on their spots, it feels very natural and intuitive. So do most of the input gestures, except for some isolated cases of double-tapping or tap-and-hold which I actually had to look up from new user guide.

• How come it takes an Apple on a tiny gadget to be the first to do the mobile network connectivity right, with all those much more powerful pieces of hardware and software we carry around calling notebooks? Getting EDGE data going on a roaming network, discovering and setting up wifi hotspots and connecting over bluetooth to my car's handsfree (with the best audio quality I've had in the car!) did not take a single setting or split second more than absolutely necessary. Instead of the half-hour efforts I'm used to from setting up any previous devices I've had.

• Safari (and the fact that Mail relies on the same rendering engine) are the best mobile internet experience I've had, period. I have moved my personal GMail box reading over from my Blackberry (which I still keep for corporate e-mail and calendaring) if not for anything else then the joy of reading the Daily Dilbert strips again, as the java-based GMail client did not support even inline images. Google Reader looks so good on an iPhone as if it were a native local app.

• That said, why on earth does iPhone Safari lack ultrabasic features like storing passwords for web pages you frequently visit or saving images from the web to the gigabytes of local storage available?

• iPhone camera is utter crap. Just see an example of the noise it can store. And don't even mention the low resolution and lack of auto-focus. This step back is truly painful after mo-blogging some 800 images from my trusty K800.

• The screen, on the other hand, with its high DPI, colour depth and contrast is a modern piece of art.

• The on-screen keyboard is no competition to physical keys, even in the most cluttered layout like on a BlackBerry. Forget one-handed usage while driving. Even when walking around the office, you have to stop and concentrate to reply a quick "ok" to an incoming SMS. Especially error-prone with my big thumbs, I terribly miss a way to jump back to any place in typed text when you see a mistake too late (there is only backspace!) and copy-paste functionality.

• iTunes syncing works like a charm for all media involved, including contacts from Outlook. (Before you get there - if connecting to iTunes causes you a blue screen like my first experience was, blame Logitech webcam drivers.)

To summarize: iPhone brings a great all-around experience with occasional saddening surprises in some very basic features. The good news is that most of the room for improvement can be filled with software updates, and Apple has already released a number of those. The only truly broken part that would make you want to rather wait for the next-gen hardware version is the camera.

In October, I had what I figured to be one the weirdest cab rides ever. Our driver in Tokyo revealed surprising knowledge of Estonia and the Baltics, which he gained through his interest in... maps. If you assumed that the brave men of this trade limit themselves to just studying local street names, think again. (5 minute video clip of that ride available on Blip.tv)

Now, half a year later in London the following dialogue took place in an ordinary black cab, heading home with friends around midnight.

Driver: "Excuse me, listening to you speak I can't help but wonder - are you from Norway?"

Us: "Close, but it's actually Estonian"

Driver: "I though it sounded Scandinavian! I've never met Estonians before! Actually, you're right, I was quite off - your speech sounds more like Finnish. Suomi, or how you say it. But again, this is the same Fenno-Ugric language group as Estonian, silly me...

You know, I know some Turkish and there are some resemblances there as well. If I'm not mistaken, Estonians started moving from the Altai mountains towards Europe, along with Finns and Hungarians about 10,000 years ago, wasn't it? Hungarians came in waves, right, there was some tribe first and then the Magyars... Did you know that Turks have this interesting legend that their Heartland once expanded as far as Finland?"

Us: "umm... uuuh?"

Driver: "Coming from Scandinavia, I'm sure you like Knut Hamsun? I just love him, you know. His writing has this sense of clarity..."

Us: "He could have been in our mandatory reading in highschool, but can't really remember..."

Driver: "Really? That's surprising, I would have imagined that in Estonia you read more of Bulgakov and Dostoevsky. I do love reading these chaps as well! In Master and Margarita, I've always admired how Bulgakov teases the Russian Orthodox church, that was not a common practice at all at his time...

But speaking of these lads, you have to agree that they could not have been if it wasn't for Mikhail Lermontov. That Raskolnikov character in Crime And Punishment would never have existed if there wasn't the legacy of A Hero of Our Time...

Other than these, I don't really appreciate Russian literature of the 19th century... Too streamlined, if you asked me, to be honest. A Hero of Our Time truly was ahead of its time, written in 1890, was it, but the rest of it...

Anyway, don't want to keep you for long, lads, here we are. Very nice chatting with you, let's carry on next time, 'aight? Cheers!"

And off he drove.

Leaving me and my friend no other option than sit down in the closest pub to transcript this encounter with a suspected literature and linguistics professor in disguise. He did miss with that Lermontov date by a few decades, but still...

If you have moved to London for four weeks, your son has fallen sick on the first night, but thankfully, two doctor occurences and five days later he can actually hold some food in, the sun is shining and spring is in the air, and to top it all, it is a Sunday which happens to be the (British) Mother's Day, do no more than head to Tom's Delicatessen for breakfast. And even if you're lucky enough to escape the context we had by today, I can still recommend the place.

Get a fresh juice, one of their excellent coffees and, if you are not the full English breakfast type, Eggs Royale with salmon and caviar (pictured above).

Googling around I've found people calling this the best breakfast in Notting Hill. Have to agree, even if I haven't had many out here. And, they are extemely kid friendly.

By the way, they say that Tom is the son of Terrence Conran. And what a talented, but down to earth gourmet son he is then. See more of his places to eat.

To share another recent radio appearance (the previous one in Estonian only, sorry) here is my interview for Marco Werman at PRI's The World that aired on a network of radio stations across the US in January: MP3, 4.5 minutes. We talked a little about Skype, but more about the factors that have enabled tiny Estonia to introduce a number of tech innovations both inside the country and for the world.

To understand the context for the interview, please listen to (direct MP3 link) Cyrus Farivar's report on Enterprise Estonia opening offices in Silicon Valley, featuring also Andrus Viirg and Steve Jürvetson.

PS: on a totally different topic, I got reminded of the above audio files being available by a blog post on The Future of Newsrooms. Interesting reading around journalists' changing role (information broker VS investigator). I'm afraid this specific post above here creates a crashing meta-referral of "my own thoughts" back to "mainstream media", El Oso?

Small and medium businesses form a dominant part of any economy. Countries, governments - in some more progressive corners in the world, whole societies - work hard to create fertile environments where new startup companies could spawn from. Just a tiny percentage of them will become the next [insert your favourite global brand here]. But we couldn't live without even those who don't. As a random example, SME's give over 50% of the jobs and turnover of the UK economy - and the UK is supposed to be the most "large corporate" one in Europe.

Given this, it is no wonder that you hear the "we need more startups!" rally cry, especially in innovative and more value generating fields promising a brighter future. Depending who you talk to, there is always a different benchmark to look up to. Estonians feel that we should get to Finnish level. Finns feel that they don't have as many startups as in Sweden or Singapore. Anywhere in Europe you can't escape the discussion on when and how we get to where Silicon Valley is without startup culture and volumes.

And now a scary though from Silicon Alley, in the context of the MSFT-YHOO acquisition:

For $44 billion, Microsoft could buy every Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley venture-backed start-up in existence. That includes Facebook at $15 billion. It includes Slide, RockYou, and every other elemental company. It would be a Moe Green kind of scene like at the end of the Godfather when Michael Corleone takes out all the heads of the five families. It would turn Microsoft's Internet business around overnight. It would be the ultimate coup.

Just $44 billion (well, I know it's no pocket change, but remember the times when AOL paid about $182 billion for Time Warner? and US dollar has become a lot cheaper as well since then.) and for a second there are no more startups in the Valley? Nor the Alley. That is scary.

At the same time, the venture capital market looking to invest in those startups is better financed than ever. VC investments reached $40 billion globally in 2007 (why does this number look so familiar?), high since 2001. And the result? Sellers market, of course.

Paul Graham's essay The Venture Capital Squeeze from 2005 is a must read now. To understand why having rich employees is a benefit, how post-Enron SOX rules are suffocating the IPO market and how VC industry has gone head to head with corporate acquisitions.

On Monday I was in Helsinki, speaking at a seminar organized by Tekes, Finnish funding agency for tech & innovation. They are launching a new generation of integrated startup financing schemes - which I do not know much about, as my Finnish is below par to fully understand their published materials. But it was a nice half-day event to provide context around their announcements.

The guest speakers included Dr Orna Berry who shared the Israeli innovation financing experiences, Quatar Capital's Mikko Suonelahti's talk on venture capital markets. In between them, I was asked to share the story of Skype as a recent startup.

This is actually a very very simple restaurant review: Ikeda has the best sushi I've had outside Tokyo. Period.

When (shouldn't be "if"!) you go there for a first time, say Omakase!*, sit back and watch the chef's choice of freshest sushi and sashimi magically appear on the red counter pictured above.

Apparently Ikeda has been around for 25 years already. And there is a reason why.

Footnote: *In Japanese, "Omakase" means "entrust" or "Chef, I'm in your hands". (Taavet)

Since the first day of this year my daily route from home has been hemmed in by outdoor banners for Eesti 90 - the year-long calendar of celebrations of the 90th jubilee of the Republic of Estonia.

I like the logo design better by day. The "birth" theme of a stylistic plant is subtle enough to take anywhere between 5 seconds to 2 weeks for a person to realize the embedded 9 & 0 digits. And the aesthetic choice of typography next to it is as cold and Nordic as we are.

Full brandbook and goodies are available here.

Thank you, Kaarel Vahtramäe @ Velvet for winning that logo contest last summer.

(the video above is just a teaser - to see the story in full glory, see storyofstuff.com)

The Story of Stuff must be the lowest-effort way to spend 20 minutes of your life getting an introductory glimpse into the impact of our consumerist lifestyle to Mother Earth. Simplistic - yes. Slightly propagandist - maybe. US-centric - a bit, but guess where most of negative environmental impact originates from? Definitely worth your time nevertheless.

What I admire the most is the extremely effective use of different mediae and interaction of putting this thing together. Narrative meets video meets illustration meets animation meets data visualization in just the right way. Enhancing your consumption of new information while entertaining you. Importantly - while not overwhelming you with unnecessary effects.

After watching the story try to imagine how boring it could have been if written down as a text-based web page. Or a PowerPoint deck. Or even an audio podcast. Would you ever have made it to the end?

Don't you wish the author of your daily dose of business presentations or school lectures had put in 2% of the effort seen here?

• 1997 it was postcards.
• 1999 e-mail.
• 2001 e-cards.
• 2003 sms.

• 2005 all of the above.

• 2007...

I tried to roughly estimate the number of "Merry X-mas" and "Happy New Year" messages I received (or rather - was exposed to?) over this holiday season. Probably in the range of 200? Or 300? In addition to the channels listed above, also came through Skype chats, blogs, RSS feeds, Facebook, Orkut, Twitter, you name it.

Weirdly enough the fact that no single asynchronous channel of delivery, neither analog or digital, clearly dominates over others any more has made it less stressful to be a receiver of good wishes. I have time to physically read through the paper postcards, because there aren't many. Number of SMS-s is in repliable range. Due to my work I am good at quickly sorting through incoming digital messages and feeds I subscribe to, allowing very little interruption from mass mailings and pure spam - both problems of e-mail and social networks.

Another aspect is that each channel there is has a different level of trust and closeness to it. A good friend who could use any of the above will pick the right channel, timing and message that will get your attention.

In short, the ones that matter, get through. Even if the total number of all messages is much larger than it used to be.

On the flip side, a simple principle I really tried to follow this year when sending greetings: no matter which channel, do not send anything you will not / can not include the addressee's name in.

No "write to 500 Orkut friends' scrapbooks at once". No "send SMS to everyone in adress book". No reuse of any "xmas cards 2003" mailing list in Outlook. This limits your throughput and you don't reach everyone you'd like - true. But the ones you do can really be sure it is personal.

And finally, there is nothing more personal than synchronous communication. Call. No wait - make that a video call.

My academic (albeit brief) and professional encounters with public relations and communication theory in a broader sense occasionally have left an itching about the image of that field itself. Transparent, targeted communications and some really smart people who know how to make it happen are often overshadowed by the common associations to long-legged blondes from beauty pageants and talking black into white.

I am very happy that Daniel has taken some holiday time to ponder about the topic:

Once I met a British colleague at a dinner table who said that he would like to do the “real thing” from time to time, “not just PR, because PR is about painting things”. I felt both sorry for him and angry because this is what most people think of PR. Our profession is flooded with too many persons who have built their careers on polishing what they or their clients “seem to be” and not developing what they “really are”. As many of them will not be able to reorient themselves towards different kind of professionalism, they will continue dragging the industry to the depths of disrespect.

I couldn’t agree more with (almost all of) his views on status quo and way forward.

Besides the communications consultancy story, he is also observing an interesting trend from the product marketing world. Some of the most desirable objects you own (or still lust for) don’t carry a logo any more. A product becomes the brand. If this alone doesn’t change the communication requirements, I don’t know what does.

I would like to thank all of you 8332 unique visitors (yes, you too Teller) coming from 106 countries for finding this blog in 2007 and for reading through those 29372 pages.

The fact that over half of you have come back more than once is great. The 239 of you who have over 200 visits per year under your belt - really, I wish I managed to post that often... Make your life easier and subscribe to the feed, like 171 loyal readers have already done.

A year ago there were zero hits and no feeds here. Your time spent means a lot to me. Especially as I know you are not numbers, but real people.

Have a great 2008 and talk to you soon!

This is just a technical announcement that seikatsu is now running on new and shiny MovableType 4.

The upgrade worked without a single visible glitch (well, I didn't dare to touch design templates yet), but it wouldn't be a surprise if I hurt something deeper down.

Please let me know if you find something broken.

Just like in 2006 I took a look back to the calendar again to recap the time spent on the road (or in the air for that matter) in 2007:

• Number of business trips: ~28
• Flight legs: 79
• Days away from home: ~95
  • London: 67 days (including a ~30 day stretch stay, though)
  • Prague: 8 days
  • Luxembourg: 6 days
  • San Jose: 6 days
  • Tokyo: 4 days
  • Brussels: 2 days
  • Netherlands: 2 days

Now, when it almost seems that the year on year travel stayed basically flat, I also looked at family holiday trips. These four (Tenerife, Burgundy, Zürich & Dominican Republic) add to another 14 flights to get away for ~30 days. Of course, with your loved ones along, those were much preferable kind of "away from home".

Since you asked - yes, I am laid back in an armchair at home right this very second. And loving it.

A free tip for your next social event. Get a group of friends together in a Skype multichat. Set a date for a dinner. Divide courses and entertainment responsibilities and set no further rules.

If your friends are anything like mine you will end up with six hours of pure joy featuring:

• Three types of game sausage (boar, deer & moose)
• Pickled wild mushrooms
• Home made bread
• Thai-style chicken skewers with cucumber-coriander salad
• Veal carpaccio parmigiano
• Phaesant leg on grilled portobello mushrooms pictured above, with a topping of pomme grenade foam (latter á la El Bulli)
• Crème brulée
• Alsace Gran Cru Riesling, Cotes du Rhone Villages and 1er Cru Sauternes on side (not to mention the vodka for carpaccio)
• A pop quiz revealing the true usage of whiskey in 7th century Ireland (involving donkeys) and greeting traditions in Tibet (involving tongues)

Just lovely.

The way I met this book is quite as bizarre and coincidental as David Mitchell's writing itself. I happened to finger through a flight magazine (probably SAS, and probably Copenhagen-London) and stumbled on a brief book review of something that sounded like "fast-paced cyberfiction set in modern Tokyo". Given my childhood love for anything cyberpunk and that I was just freshly under Tokyo influence, I really wanted to get that book. Alas, I immediately forgot the title.

Weeks later, I was walking down Market Street in downtown San Francisco, to get my rental car from a parking lot and drive to SFO to fly out. I passed a small bookstore and somehow the memory of that review crawled out from the back of my brain. I entered the store, still clueless on what to look for and spent probably half an hour googling various combinations of "tokyo dream 9 nine cyber fiction" type search strings on my Blackberry. Once I finally found the name of Mitchell, I also found the M-shelf with the last copy of the book.

number9dream is all about this sort of seemingly coincidental events by themselves, set physically and situationally well apart, but building up to a great storyline of Eiji's quest to find his father from the faceless concrete maze of Tokyo. There is a hint of technology playing it's part (as it is in our lives), but it is not pure cyberfiction per se (if that's what would scare you away from reading it).

If I could think of the most kliché-ridden way of describing the stylistic mix, I'd say that number9dream is William Gibson meets Lost meets Robert Ludlum meets Kazuo Ishiguro meets your favourite yakuza manga and then a black and white Japanese 2nd World War movie to top.

Mitchell's command of detail and dialogue is stellar and his time spent as an Englishman in Japan brings a distinct angle of knowledgeable but still a bit distant outsider reporting to the whole thing. The only thing this book could live without is the sidestory of Goatwriter, which feels like an artificially attached showoff of Mitchell's ability to also switch easily from minimalistic japanese translations to archaic few dozen syllable phrase constructs of a victorian fairytale.

VERDICT: Must read.

Last night the Von Krahl theater in Tallinn hosted crowds from all over the past ten years to cheer for the tenth birthday of Mutant Disco.

As for many other good things in this category, we have to thank again late John Peel. By becoming a fan of Röövel Ööbik and giving them a lot of BBC One airtime in early nineties, he inevitably helped to build a strong network between the Estonian and UK music circles, with the now inseparable tandem of Raul Saaremets & Chris "Rythm Doctor" Long to start with.

MD has been so much more than another club event here. It has consistently exposed local and international top performances to the scene, shaping our tastes and values. Bringing guys like Bob Jones or Frankie Valentine or Basement Jaxx or Moodymann over to a tiny cold Northern European capital must have been extremely hard for Raul and Chris when they started, but hugely because of their pains of the early years, Estonia has become the vibrant alternative music and culture host it is now. There is a video interview with them available on how they got started (mostly in Estonian): part 1 and part 2.

Over the years, MD has innovated with not just music, but also with consistent branding, their web presence and active online community around md.com forums, creative flyers (first on paper, fully virtual these days), redefining Von Krahl from a theatre to happening, multifaceted event location, etc etc.

But most importantly, Mutant Disco has had an unprecedented effect on building a strong horizontal network inside a certain generation of our small country. Many in their student years gathering to Mutant Discos 10 years ago are now the who's who stars of business, investment banking, government, law, technology, media and many others making things happen in arts - music, literature, visual arts, cinema, fashion. In the mixed nostalgic-euphoric vibe at the event yesterday, I couldn't help but wonder what extremely unique value has been created just because of the out of the box mindsets people end up with here. A successful attorney hanging out with music critics or a software developer with his best friends in experimental video think much differently than their colleagues stuck in narrow professional groups of their industry. The experience of belonging to the diverse group of mutants must have released ideas and energy in places we don't even admit.

Respect, Raul & Chris, and happy birthday again!

NIN's Downward Spiral was probably the favorite album of mine in 1994.

So when Priidu forwarded me the Johnny Cash' version of Hurt above I had a little emotional shock wave. On one hand I can't believe I've missed something this powerful made of a song that left a mark as it was originally. And on the other hand, if you see the video for the first time only today, post the passing of Cash a few years ago, you are entitled to even deeper layers of additional meanings and references from it as an epitaph.

The virtual radio silence here is excused by a lovely internet-less trip to the Dominican Republic and the busy weeks post-return. I finally managed to sort some photos from there, at least.

Cheers to Carlos for thorough briefing ahead on where to go and what to see in his homeland and Rosendo Alvarez III, the Honorary Consul for Estonia there for his kind invitation in the first place.

An interesting graph from a presentation by Ott Pärna, CEO of Estonian Development Fund (see also my post from their recent event, in Estonian). Estonian & German industries being compared here by employment (left) and value added per manufacturing area.

One common characteristic we share is that there are a lot of areas where a large share of people is adding a tiny part of the value for country's economy. However, it is quite concerning how tilted towards the bottom (= less value) is the distribution of Estonian workforce.

It would be very interesting to see service industries in different countries being compared in a similar way - such as the software, biotech, nanotech and other innovation/R&D fields we talk so much about. Anyone have a good pointer?

PS: most value in German manufacturing is added with oil, nuclear fuel and tobacco? Scary...

Hakkasan (SkypeFind reviews) has been on my to-go list for a long time. Can't even remember who was the very first to recommend it (and maybe the place was just better a year+ ago?). It is right around the corner from our London office, but for a reason or another I never made it.

Now I did and what a complete disappointment it was.

GOOD:

• Those who had 'em, praised the cocktails.
• Dimsum & duck appetizers were nice.
• That's it.

BAD:

• Well manned (headcount-wise), but careless service. The wet wiping cloth coming between you and your food kind.
• Robotic sommelier who says his lines and just does not listen if you ask something about the wine. As in ignoring you.
• Loud and overcrowded as a cocktail bar... on the restaurant side on Monday night.
• Most appetizers could not compete on Cheap Chinese Takeaway championships if they tried.
• My crab (pictured above) tasted like paper towels. I rarely leave my seafood uneaten.
• All this and more for about 100 pounds per head.

Who exactly decides on Michelin stars these days? Some Anatoli Michelinovski running a parallel business in some dark alley?

And #19 in the 50 World's Best Restaurants list??? Come on...

PS: my friends say that the same owner's Yauatcha is still a good place for dimsum.

At some point the Radisson Edwardian hotel I usually stay at in London started leaving me hand-signed welcome notes to the room when I arrive. Nice touch, even if common for regulars at many hotels.

Now they've taken it a step further - the note speaks my mother tongue. And quite familiar in tone, I must say. ("Kallis" is usually used in the very friendly context where "darling" if not "sweetheart" is appropriate, as opposed to casual "dear").

Thanks for the neat surprise, Radisson! Estonian has just a bit over 1 million speakers globally, so we don't get service in our own language abroad too often.

Learned at the last minute that The Tech museum across the street from the hotel I'm staying at in San Jose is opened later than I thought. Spurred through just one floor there in 30 minutes and found even that limited glimpse very cool. Cleanrooms for chipmaking, multi-G robots, hands-on 3D rendering stations for a roller-coaster ride that you can then experience in virtual form and so forth. Silicon Valley in a condensed, playful form.

Presentation-wise they do one thing that I have never seen in any museum. Many of the exhibits are equipped with a bar code scanner. You pass by, or rather interact with what's on display and in the process scan the code on your ticket. And afterwards some output of your experience is available online at My TheTech. You can use the demo account to peek inside, or use my ticket code 0000001504656457.

Sad that my 3D headscan got messed up, but the thermal portrait (above) is cool (except for face & palms) enough.

The Estonia-England Euro2008 qualification game at Wembley was quite an experience. For the most part, not for the devastating game but the emotions around it. Roughly 2000 Estonians trying to outshout & -sing 84600 English supporters. Apparently, our Song Festivals are not that unique after all.

A few more mobile shots here. Note to self - you actually could bring a decent camera to this stadium, no matter what the back of the ticket warning says.

And a trivia quiz: Who is now the first Estonian to score a goal at Wembley? (Hint: the score was 0:3)

Messing around with travel pictures today on Flickr I suddenly noticed that their front page greets me in Estonian. No, this is not localization (they still only support 6 languages), just one of the randomized foreign language tutorial/greetings. Cute, nevertheless.

Weird how after that I have started noticing other interesting versions such as Lingala, Maöri and Tshiluba rotating in the same real estate. This happened only now after seeing a familiar, but surprising phrase there once. The same level of attention was never "bought" with the usual Hindi, Portugese and German greetings I've known they use there.

So... what? Flickr has conceptually changed the way people organize and share their photos online. That sort of fundamental interface approach change is virtually impossible without grabbing users' full attention first.

Maybe there are more cognitive (not just functional) tricks around the successful web2.0 sites like Flickr that users even don't realize exist, but what keep them attached?

Spent a few days in Tokyo. Finally. This place is now officially number #1 in my World Cities toplist. And frankly - I was sort of expecting (or hoping?) this to happen.

The Skype Developer event I was attending there was a huge success with great turnout of interesting partners. Everything else in the counted few days before and after was just mind-blowing. I need to have the thoughts and emotions settle a bit to blog anything sensible. Until then, you have to live with the photoset.

My special thanks go out to German customs who were so happy to see me back in Europe that they decided to welcome me with some extra taxes + a 350 EUR fine, because tumbling off a 12 hour flight I did not voluntarily land in the red customs corridor while I had a certain new gadget in my bag with purchase value exceeding 175 EUR. Did you know that this extremely low threshold is applicable to "all other items not listed explicitly like alcohol and tobacco" in whole EU? I do now. Hier, nehmen Sie meine Kreditkarte.

My post on cognitive aspects around charitable giving provoked a reply from Elver. The discussion continued in the comments there, from where I'd like to aggregate another thought that seems to be contextually important.

Getting funding for a charity is all about optics and active marketing to achieve it. Madelaine and Colin McRae are (were?) world famous, heavily pushed brands. Anonymous dying kids and anonymous flying tourists are not.

Read a great column by Clive Thompson in Wired's September issue on how big numbers (and lack of numeracy there) affects people's charity decisions.

He studies a troubling paradox in human empathy: We'll usually race to help a single stranger in dire straits, while ignoring huge numbers of people in precisely the same plight. We'll donate thousands of dollars to bring a single African war orphan to the US for lifesaving surgery, but we don't offer much money or political pressure to stop widespread genocides in Rwanda or Darfur. The problem isn't a moral failing: It's a cognitive one.

Congrats, Dick & Christoph at PamConsult on winning the Skype Mashup Competition 2007! Even though I have not sent a fax in like 10 (ok, maybe it is just 5) years I am sure that PamFax has conservative old school business users flocking as we speak.

There was a whole bunch of good entries, really happy as it was the first competion we held. I've actually used a few of them before, like Twitter4Skype and Anothr. However, my humble request did not show up yet - so there is still a chance for you to develop it for the next round. Or before.

Stepping outside of the Kogo (highly recommended, btw) restaurant in Prague I found myself chatting with our waiter of the night who had also come out for his break.

I learned that he was originally from Macedonia (ex-Yugoslavia). And that there is a notable Yugoslavian community living and working in Prague. Having a certain interest around free movement of labour in the contries we have offices in - and that includes Czech Republic - I had a few further questions.

At some point his English unfortunately failed. They guy stopped mid-sentence about his & his friends' experiences with working in Prague to search for the right word. But then sighed and said: "Anyway. Nationality is nationality. Business is business. Life is life."

Probably there are more than a few possible interpretations here. For me, this means that nationality-based borderlines (and preconceptions) in business are obsolete. How good you are in what you do, matters.

The service we received throughout the dinner was excellent.

A creative "do not disturb" door sign at the La Bergère Design Hotel in Maastricht, the Netherlands. The next step could be hanging small live animals on a doorknob?

This is by far not the only trick they play in that place to justify the "design" part of the name. However, randomized door numbering on a floor can get quite annoying if you are really tired and would prefer to actually find your room.

Swallow street is located just off Regent street in Westminster. There are a few great restaurants there, for example Bentley's has definitely the best seafood (and best dressed lemons) I've had in London. Now - putting two and two together, you get the perfect brand for a restaurant street, worth designing into a logo.

There are two more Swallow streets in London. Wonder if they all have good restaurants and share the brand?

From the London Transport website today. Thank you, Metronet, strikes are so much fun, aren't they?

Fortunately, the good old tricks still work in even the busiest of metropols. Stay in a hotel close to the office. Eat out in walking distance. Preorder cabs. Remain on the the grounds where you can actually see the sky. Do not join a union.

PC World has published a comparative review on video sharing sites. With the exception of Korea and France, YouTube still seems to be the #1 global option to get distribution for your flicks. However -- as I've also concluded recently for myself -- there is so much variety of (non-clone!) alternatives out there that beat the YT-behemoth hands down on quality, interesting niche approaches, revenue sharing models and more.

I'm especially happy that Blip.tv (a recent ASI investment) has come out first on PC World's Top10 quality chart (check out the side-by-side embedded video comparision page as well).

The premiering content partners for Skype's video sharing, Dailymotion and Metacafe also get mentioned. First as the feeder of all those French eyeballs and second for the monetization models for independent producers. Get Skype for Windows 3.5 gold or later to share the content of those two sites with your contacts.

A great half-day of sailing on the Tallinn Bay with friends, featuring 34 knot wind and sunshine. A rare combo.

Margus (pictured above) posted his pictures here.

Happy to say that I was just a bit hasty with my posting a few days ago. Apparently the blogged country list was not exhaustive - just learned that RealEyes has sent in an application. Good luck with making it to the Top 20.

As the Seedcamp key dates are rolling by and the September week in London is getting closer for the lucky 20, Saul has been posting some intermediary updates.

My little personal sad news is that among the 260 applications sent in there was no a single one from Estonia. Hope it was not because the spreading the word effort was modest (thanks, guys, for helping on that!) rather because every startup (idea) around here already has enough competence, experience and financing. Wouldn't be that nice to believe?

On there more positive side I'm going to be dropping by the event anyway on September 4th which is the Going to Market day covering product design and development as well as marketing strategies. It is quite cool to see that there is a notable group of people from and around Skype going to mentor. Even cooler - we didn't agree on this internally as a Skype "raid", but people are donating their time.

Looking forward to getting to know this wave of best & brightest entrepreneurs in person soon.

As any next person these days I've been suffering for years with the issue of storage. I mean the digital photos & music & file backups, not golf clubs and bicycles this time. We have three notebooks in our household, one of them employer-owned e.g. both policy-wise and philosophically not personal content friendly. All running close to hard drive capacity. Plus I have a few external hard drives that are a burden enough to find and attach at the right time to be regular at backups.

So I went out and bought a gadget, a 1 terabyte Iomega Storcenter Wireless Network Storage box to be more precise. (BTW, Iomega seem to have lowered the price by 40% since then, thankyouverymuch).

Spent five days of my vacation in France to get Burgundy checkmark to the wine-areas-visited list, next to Bordeaux and French Catalonia (Languedoc Roussillon) trips from a few years ago. Chateau du Four de Vaux was our base camp pictured above. Should you ever look for a place to chill at with a group of friends - very highly recommended.

As Kusti has already done some more thorough reporting (in Estonian) on our visits to Joseph Drouhin winery in Beaune and Francois Freres oak cask factory in St-Romaine, I will spare you of the quick'n'dirty summaries for now. However especially the cask making process was very interesting, so I might return to it. Until then - mobile photoset available here.

I will eat my hat if this is not one of the highest margin products in the world. 150ml of Evian water for about 7 EUR (47 EUR per liter!) because... you can spray it! (I'm sure many people have tried this spraying trick with the plain old water and miserably failed, right?)

The product on the shelf above (not displayed) gets even better - a 50ml bottle of the same thing runs at a calculated liter price of 76 EUR! For comparision, a cubic meter or 1000 liters of tap water in Tallinn, Estonia where this picture was taken at costs about 0.9 EUR. That's 0.0009 EUR per liter.

This is potentially a 8 500 000% profit for you if your brand is strong enough to turn people insane and make them buy your water in a bottle. With a spray. I'm sure the packaging and transport will cut a few thousand percent off the margin, but you're still OK.

For additional data read what AskPablo recently calculated on the true costs of exotic water imports from Fiji to the US.

And if you should ever buy something like sprayable Evian, unsubscribe from this blog and just go and stand ashamed in the corner.

Now this is a fair warning for all of you bacon lovers. They make it of pork. Really.

Makes you think what did you really have for breakfast at that last hotel which did not have a "contains pork" disclaimer clearly presented.

After having a chat around the weird superstitions people have over lunch with Rodrigo I found the number of the room Hilton Luxembourg booked me in... entertaining.

I hope this guy (no, not a lady) at Amsterdam´s Schipoli Airport did not grow this hair while waiting for his flight.

As the Skype Mashup Competition (see the wiki page as well) is still going on until August 31st, I thought I'd throw an idea out there maybe someone cares to implement and submit. (Creative Commons applied).

The Problem

People send me links through Skype chats. Would it be an interesting article somewhere, a page on the internal wiki, a video on YouTube or some other funny you-got-to-see-this thing out on the internet.

Some of those links I need and want to click right away. Some of them (the "recreational" ones) I maybe would go through once or twice a week... if I still had them in front of me, not in the depths of a high-traffic multichat.

The Solution

Had the pleasure to chat with Cyrus Farivar yesterday, a man whose work you might have read in The Economis, NYT, Wired, PC Mag and Engadget among other places. Most recently he has covered the Estonian cyberattacks, a topic I believe is very important for the world to learn about and from.

Hope I could help him a bit with his upcoming book on the Liberating Effects of a Wired World. I'm quite in the loop what has happened in Estonia and have some (second hand) understanding about South Korea & Iran. Comparing the story of Senegal into this picture is something to look forward to. :)

Now this is a must-have summer kitchen gadget - hot chocolate waterfalling down from the fountain at Ammende Villa in Pärnu, Estonia. Should have taken a video of this not just a photo, it looked way too cool.

Skype 3.5 beta update that went out yesterday features a very neat way to share video content. Add videos to your mood message that your contacts see, create multichats with embedded video to discuss it with friends, etc.

This is a project that has been cooking in my team's kitchen for a while so I'm personally very interested in your feelings towards the new experience. Do you like it? Is the experience natural? Does your computer behave fine when playing videos? Is there anything we can improve?

Please download Skype 3.5beta for Windows and play around with it. And ping me with feedback or speak up in community forums what you think. Thanks!

Saul & the team have softlaunched Seedcamp and the applications for the first event in London in September is now open.

Why?

Europe has so far under-delivered in terms of globally successful technology startups. From securing funding to developing the right network, young entrepreneurs in Europe face challenges in building globally competitive technology businesses. Through the provision of seed capital and a world class network of mentors, we want to provide a catalyst for Europe's next generation of entrepreneurs.

What?

Seedcamp is an intensive week long event held in September in London targeted at young entrepreneurs from across EMEA. There will be a diverse mentor network of serial entrepreneurs, corporates, product designers, venture capitalists, recruiters, marketing specialists, lawyers and accountants that will help the teams put together the foundations of a viable business.

Who?

Young, commited, eager, unfunded (yet), creative European startups with 2-5 founders. See the full application criteria.

Bonus

At the end of the week the venture capital houses will make the funding decision to invest €50K each in 5 teams for a 10% stake.

I very much hope to see at least one Estonian group among the 20 there! Don't hesitate to ping me if you need a push. Or just apply here.

The way Estonians do this: have a Song Festival (aka Laulupidu) every few years. There were 20,000 people on stage and about 100,000 present on the festival grounds alltogether - not bad for a nation of 1.4 million.

Really quite powerful feeling this time, for moments there was the vibe of the good ol' Singing Revolution in the air.

More pictures here.

Dobré Ráno is the morning show on Czech national TV station ČT1, watched by about 40% of the country's population older than 15. I had the honour to be invited to talk about the future of internet communications there last week. See the video to improve your czech skills (the interview starts at around 7:45 o'clock or 01:48 into the video). UPDATED: sorry, video link did not work, should now.

Skype development centre in Prague is now officially open, by the way.

Why go through the hassle of carefully laying out dozens of No Smoking signs as well as ashtrays on tables? Wouldn't this be an either-or decision?

Very unorthodox but tasty addition/replacement to the usual eggs'n'bacon breakfast. Combine your own miso soup from assorted components at Andel's Hotel in Prague. They must really get a lot of japanese tourists.

Boy, this designer has had fun with the wine label. I can just imagine him sitting in front of a fancy Mac and starting with a blank InDesign worksheet. To point out some of the obvious examples of what was twirling in his head around the French Rabbit brand:

• the letters "bb" in brand typography
• still motion hopping on top (powered by methane exhumes from the rabbits, as noted by someone)
• oh, do carrots hop now as well, with enough inertia to bounce off the "o" in chardonnay?
• "bitemarks" into the green area of the package
• the overall choice of TetraPak instead of a glass bottle so that your mom would accidentally buy it for carrot juice

PS: Didn't try it, but was told it was quite drinkable... in the 4-euros-for-a-litre category.

This specimen is cautious enough to wear full body camouflage to steer clear of Andres who hosts him in his old well.

Had an excellent dinner with colleagues at Le Table des Guilloux a bit outside Luxembourg city. As it was quite late on Sunday evening and after two tiring delayed flights, I did not feel like taking written or even mental notes on what exactly we had for food and wine, just enjoyed ourselves. To put it bluntly in the non-gourmet-review language:

• Oysters were the sweetest I've ever had. Almost as if they were caramel filled.
• Asparagus under perfectly lightly crusty white fish (I'm sure it had a beautiful French name) had gone a bit mushy
• Warm cherry dessert of the day stopped any conversation around the table for 15 minutes at least
• The sommelier surprised with both the main and dessert course selections, especially the latter of replacing the too-easy-to-default-to Sauternes with something much lighter and richer in nuances. (I actually wish I did take a picture of that bottle.)

All-in-all I am not quite sure if the place is worth both of the Michelin stars it has. Maybe just Michelin has drifted a bit off course and you always think that multiple stars places need to be somehow cold, formal and clinically exact in what they do. Chef Guilloux' place feels somehow too homely, with a friendly and even a bit casual service with laughing waiters, owner's huge dog laying around and so forth, to be "starred".

VERDICT: definitively worth getting out of the Lux city limits for a very good dinner.

PS: a few more photos.

While waiting for the elevator this morning I noticed that the guys operating the vending machine in our lobby have really gone over the top with making the office a safe environment. Candy or tissues, anyone? How about a three-pack of condoms?

Saul published his slides from the NextWeb conference.

We had a good lunch with him a few months ago on the philosophical topic of supporting the seeding European ventures (and OpenCoffee as one of the tools for that).

I would have loved to hear him on stage of course, but still the deck provides some pointers for further thought or at least some reassurance against the skeptics out there thinking that there is no chance for tech success outside the Valley, or at least not on this side of the pond. There is, watch and see. Or do.

As a follow-up on finding the best phone (for moblogging to narrow the scope), SonyEricsson K800i has now become the #1 choice on Flickr. (Some quite amazing photo samples behind that link as well).

Fighting the awful sunburn from Saturday I went to a store with an intent to fetch different liquids in wholesale quantities. That's what water and -- God forbid! -- beer shelves looked like...

Thought 1: how much planning effort would it really take to increase supply of the very basic goods specific for a season?

Though 2: goods that were out were very brand specific. Does the fact that A. LeCoq was out, but plenty of Saku left tell us what consumers love? Or just who's logistics work?

When I read from the papers that 15 policemen specializing on football hooliganism were invited to help Estonian police over the days of the Estonia-England game, I imagined them to be some suits in an office, "consulting" the local officials.

Actually there were the good old black helmets walking in the Old Town Tallinn, stopping by the English supporter groups at open air pubs and chatting with them. Probably they have a bit more experience on how to communicate with a bluecollar bloke from Sheffield after his 8th pint under the belt. Plus the visual effect of merging cultures. Quite a smart trick.

A display in Gatwick Airport, asking readers looking for "Additional flight information" to check "television screens". From the usability viewpoint, this might raise a few questions:

What is the difference of this display to what they refer to as "tv screens"? Way of transmission of displayed data? TV signal over coaxial? Something digital? Doesn't TV do both these days? Or is the difference the way of displaying data? LCD versus CRT? Flat screen versus the old big box (as cathode ray tube might not be in everyone's daily vocabulary)? Don't they do TV-s with both technologies these days? Oh, wait, Television was the thing with moving full screen pictures, CNN & soap operas? So the flight data is somewhere as video? Uhh...

If you don't have anything useful to say on a screen or a sign, just turn it off. Or in this case, maybe show a big arrow facing towards the location of useful screens instead of trying to describe them vaguely.

Airports (even if subway maps are cooler) are a very interesting area for user-friendly design, due to the busy schedules, complicated logistics, mass of very short-term users and -- above all -- overwhelming amount of information on those. Apparently there are about a million web pages talking about "airport signs usability" alone out there.

Landing in Tallinn late last night our plane from London was greeted literally at the door by Nigel Haywood, Her Majesty's Ambassador of the United Kingdom of Great Britain to Estonia himself.

He was personally handing out maps of the city as well as brochures on how to stay safe in the Old Town after 67 pints of beer to the England supporters flying in for the Euro 2008 qualifying game between the two countries tonight.

How cool is that?

PS: The Embassy also has some travel guidance online. Just doesn't feel the same, does it?

Spoke today (wow, these have been some busy public speaking weeks?) on East Capital's summit in Tallinn on the topic of building global Skype from the tiny Estonia. As the organizers introduced, the few hundred people in the audience indirectly represented about a quarter of a million investors who have put their money into the Baltics through East Capital. Hopefully I could help them understand the realities of what their capital can do in Estonia (effectiveness, innovation) and what they shouldn't expect to happen with it (labor intensive industries).

I yesterday formally joined the Supervisory Board of Praxis. Praxis is a think tank of about a dozen people doing very thorough analysis for policy makers in Estonia and increasingly elsewhere in Europe. Some of the topics they cover are obviously very close to my heart, such as IT & communications, innovation, R&D, economic development. Others like the public health or social policy are something I know less about, if from the end user / citizen experience.

Check out the recent publications for more. And they also blog, however in Estonian only.

I hope that in my humble role I can contribute to the growth of Praxis, both profile and size wise. I very strongly believe in the role of highly professional and thorough research and analysis, which yet is practical enough in format for a common man to understand, as the basis for conquering the challenges our small society and the world in general have. Independent thought goes a long way before any smart decision can be made. And we all know what some decisions can look like if they are led from day to day politics as opposed to longer term scientific rationale.

In response to anyone wondering "Do you still have snow in Estonia?". Global warming does the trick.

And - no, this is Celsius, not Farenheit.

Find ten things different if you can - Magnus in the middle of his trial swing VS him swinging to hit the ball:

Just a note that led by recent examples of Jaanus and Skype blogs, this blog is now also trackback-free. The precious time I put aside to maintain this site will go into semi-manually sorting through trackback spam no more.

I've used the FeedBurner FeedFlares since the beginning and they do add a Technorati referrals count, among other widgets such as the del.icio.us bookmarkings, to entry footers both here as well as the RSS versions delivered to your feed reader. If I didn't, I'd get the counter provided by Technorati.

Why? I just like to know (and share) if and who builds on what I've said.

A few months ago I happened to pick up a few (business) biographies from a bookstore. The stack is still quite high, but I've gone through some now and thought I'd share some reading notes.

First off, Sir Richard Branson's Screw It, Let's Do It. Don't be intimidated the self-help-in-ten-steps-guide style title, it actually is a nice and quick (a few inter-European flights) intro to Branson's world and Virgin in it.

Why read it?

• For most of the world Branson = Virgin. The latter actually is an umbrella brand for hundreds of businesses and the thinking behind how and why Virgin has moved into new areas over the years is interesting. And curiously enough, Branson has had a few business adventures before the first Virgin Music store opened on Oxford Street.
• Speaking of adventures, the book puts his famous boating and hot air balloon record attempts into business timelines and family context.
• Ecologic and social responsibility. A quick briefing for those who haven't seen The Inconvenient Truth, followed what's up with that CO2 thing and climate change or haven't calculated how small of the share for US spending on the war in Iraq would contain the massive AIDS problem in Africa.
• Parenting. That was probably the most surprising takeaway. Many of the childhood references and how his dad & mom handled raising him create food for thought if you happen to have a junior around.

Why pass?

• If you suffer from slogan-tagline allergies you'll probably dislike the structure the book is built around.
• The compressed format leaves you behind thinking that you've just been exposed to a commercial brochure advertising his full bio book(s). So maybe just start with the real thing? (I haven't yet)

To celebrate, Bank of Estonia held a high-profile conference on Opportunities of Estonian Economy in Global Competition today where I had the pleasure to participate in a panel with a fancy long name: "Competitiveness of Europe and Nordic-Baltic region - private sector view", alongside with esteemed gentlemen like Microsoft's European Chairman Jan Muehlfeit, Nordic Investment Bank SVP Gunnar Okk and Stockmann CEO Hannu Penttilä.

I have to admit that for the most part I recycled what I said in Budapest half a year ago. The issues facing the long term competitiveness of European businesses have not really improved recently anyway, have they?

The best speech of the day definitely came from Siim Kallas, our VP of European Commission. He naturally has the colorful first-hand memories of introducing the Kroon, but also shed some light in the political processes behind Euro these days. And shared some criticism to those of Estonian entrepreneurs who have sold their shares off to the West too early, such as the blooming larger banks of late 90s. It was soothing to hear that he gave some relief to Skype, where the Estonian office is still booming along with our global growth and nobody has really retired on the money they made from eBay transaction.

Duncan's lecture "Talking with Computers: Short stories on usability, interaction and designing Skype" held yesterday at the IT College is now available for your viewing pleasure. (Fastforward past the first part in Estonian)

Really glad he made it despite of a cancelled flight. And guess if his flight back was cancelled as well?

It took a while this year to get on the green but when it finally happened today... it was sweet.

Teeing off the 3rd hole of the most beautiful Sea Course at Estonian Golf and Country Club in Jõelähtme.

Today's mobile photoset available here.

One of those moments when you feel really old and feel the Moore's law kicking in with a full blow. It reminded me the file server at my first job at Primex Data (nowhere to link to, as the company went down too early in the internet days) in 1993 which had a massive and expensive (a thousand dollars?) 300MB harddrive to host a few dozen users and still have plenty of room for the file archives of the BBS I used to run there.

Pictured above is the new 1 gigabyte memory card I got for my phone. Weighs one gram and cost about 30 Euros. Is that a grey hair I see in the mirror?

This sample is quite mild compared to some really extreme examples of early-90s opulent residential architecture risen from that newly found independence and wealth. Still, a brave man to take it down now to - hopefully - build something really nice instead, considering this unique location right by the sea.

A few hundred meters from the residence of late President Lennart Meri, at Kabelineeme, Viimsi, Estonia.

UPDATE: Eesti Ekspress has picked up the story and apparently no such luck as hoped above. Same architect, the new house will be 1000 sq meters instead of current 600.

A few additional references to those who have followed up on my previous post about recent Russian cyber attacks against Estonia:

• There was a second wave of coordinated attacks that started on the night before May 9th. Most of the targeted sites were still government and media related. Among the affected this time was also Hansabank, the largest bank in the Baltics of whose transactions 90%+ are made online, with their internet bank down for almost an hour and a half.
• Estonian Informatics Centre claims that more than a million unique hosts from all over the world have been used for distributed attacks in the first 10 days. The local CERT unit has been busy.
• Estonian Minister of Defence, Jaak Aaviksoo (his blog has been quiet recently), has promised to escalate the situation for consultations by the upcoming summit of NATO ministers.
• Jaanus has taken time to cover this topic very well, I especially appreciate the broader overview of the various internet governance bodies involved and their role in these kind of situations, today and in the future.
• Edward (the most passionate friend of Estonia in top tier international press) is keeping his eyes open on the cyber war. Check his blog for updates, often more thorough than his printed writings in The Economist. Like this very balanced view on where we are a few weeks after the riots.

In today's world of the overcrowded communication and overwhelming hype, the MoMB blog really stands out.

Get a fulfilling feed of what's up and coming (or "gone into public beta" in tech speak). From fancy web 2.0 social mashup services dreaming of a quick acquisition to geeky experiments on what AJAX can do for transforming applications online.

Very few words. Black and white. Small is beautiful.

Shel Israel has written a quite extensive entry on recent cyber attacks on Estonia, following the riots 2 weeks ago, and their potential impact.

He also asked me to chip in and I did.

I still think that no matter how tense and grim it looks today, smart people regardless of their nationality can get in sync on the history, display enough empathy and respect to each-others' past tragedies to peacefully cohabit this small country going forward.

Despite how some leaders of an aggressive neighbor envision it should go.

Someone made good cigarette butt disposal use of the barb wire seen on Toompea, Tallinn, Estonia these days. These fences have been set up all around the government cabinet's Stenbock building after the recent riots.

Tallinn TV tower is a miraculous place. In most elevators the numbers on buttons indicate floors, in this case it must be years the time machine will take you back. As you can see, today you can choose to go back to approximately 170m high (trivia fact: the tower itself is 314m) as it was in 1986.

This is what people ate in 1986 in Soviet Estonia as a fancy dish. Chicken Kiev is basically a cutlet filled with... melted butter and herbs. Load of potatoes on the side not pictured.

The view on Tallinn Botanical Garden for some reason reminded me that I haven't started the golf season yet. Wouldn't this be a nice location for 18 holes?

Happy birthday, Alice and thanks for inviting us up/back there!

My working day started with a blue screen. Had not experienced that for years. However more annoying than the crash itself (unread Skype chats list, Firefox tabs restored themselves quickly) were some of the error messages presented to me.

Who on earth would have typed this address manually as the message suggests?

And how would you answer this "question"?

There are plenty of guidelines for proper error message design out there.

It has been a hectic few days since late Thursday when the riots in Tallinn broke out. I happened to be out of the country, returning on Friday and trying to get information myself on what is really going on (most of Estonian online news outlets were under heavy DDoS attacks originating from "friendly neighbors") as well as responding to worrying friends and colleagues, especially from outside Europe.

Things have calmed down now a bit. Tallinn was under police control last night, it seems. Some action shifted (in a much smaller scale) to North-Eastern cities of Estonia, but nothing extreme there, I understand. So maybe it is time to think about what happened and what's next.

Had a lovely romantic dinner at Pied á Terre on Charlotte street in London, a two Michelin star venue run by Shane Osborn. (Trivia fact: he apparently was the first Australian to ever receive a Michelin star recognition in 1999).

Everything from the apperative Apple Martini to the basics of how bread & butter are served was as perfect as the first time I was there about 6 months ago. Highly recommended. The menu on their website seems to be out of date a bit though, prepare for some (good) surprises when you go. And unless you feel really confident around the two hardcover books of wine lists (PDF-s available) I recommend letting the sommelier matching them by glass to each dish.

The top gourmet experience for me this time: scallop sausages served along the white fish pictured above.

We had a fabulous home cooking night with a group of friends, featuring Chef Risto at my place the other night. There was too much deliciousness going around to describe it all here, but a few ideas worth trying can be shared.

Got a tip from our unofficial Wiitards of Skype multichat that accidentally solved a problem I've pondered about for years but never have really come around to solving: an online digital music library played on where it should - the proper hifi / home theatre setup in the living room.

There is a myriad of options. MediaCenter PC-s. Sonos. Airport Express and Apple TV. XBox360 streaming from a PC. And probably hundreds of niche solutions more. I just couldn't choose and the issue didn't hurt enough - I do have a few CDs I like.

We were discussing various well-established and hot-out-of-the press web 2.0 (pardon the overused buzzword) applications and social networking sites each other actually use and like with a colleague. I came to think that there are more of them than I thought before listing them out. In no particular order:

After the recent odysseia of fixing my broken mobile communications I've now solved the written comms part as well. I've joined what some consider the forces of evil and landed on a BlackBerry 8800.

"A Trojan Horse without any soldiers hiding inside is... just a gift" - Jaan Tallinn, 2007

That's it. I had enough.

Nokia E70 was a dream phone found for me:

• Nice form factor, but still with a very usable QWERTY keyboard when folded open.
• Almost a big enough screen with an excellent resolution (640x480 or VGA).
• Camera with minimalistic feature set (but not bad quality at all, if you've been following the entries below) for moblogging.
• Wifi.
• Very good browsers, especially the HTML one with preview mode, but also OK for WAP.
• Downloadable applications for Exchange mail & calendar sync, GMail and even Google Maps.

Now, about half a year later of quite normal use I'm sending it back to where I bought it. And will just throw it away if they don't want it. I couldn't give it as a gift or sell it on eBay unless I wanted to make some enemies:

The Design Museum has two cool exhibitions on: Top 25 design icon's over the past 25 years (apparently it's the museum's birthday) and Luigi Colani's Translating nature.

The unbeatable Aeron, the chair of choice for Skype offices (video proof) worldwide and with the ripple effect into the home offices for many of us (including yours' truly) was apparently the Design Thing of 1994. Can't believe that's 13 years ago already, still does look fresh.

Sample of typical (if I may) Colani design. If nothing else you just gotta love those windscreen wipers. Did you know the guy also did the modern-day Canon SLR body?

While in Estonia you get quite used to the orange-and-black Wifi stickers on doors and street signs everywhere, it is definitely not a standard globally. The merrier I was to find one featuring also the things you should do while connected (talk to people using Skype) on the door of Spreaded Eagle pub in Camden, London.

A display of logos I noticed passing the Universal building this morning on my way to work. The last time I ever saw some of these true classics (like Island & Polydor) was browsing my dad's vinyl collection... maybe fifteen years ago, was it?

I can understand it in the virtual world of music downloads, but I wonder why do the music industry logos on the CD-s you buy stick in the eye so much less than the (as I remember them to be) prominent ones on 12" covers? Were they really bigger then? Or was holding a record just so much more special that you cared to notice the details? Or did/does vinyl as a medium dictate a much wider range of cool brands than those of the few mainstream global music powerhouses everything has consolidated into?

(I'm going to be kicked now by all my turntable-savvy postmodern friends here if they care to come out from behind their stash of hot vinyl releases from last week.)

Ott found a new fancy job title to aim for in his future career.

A glimpse of nice and sunny Luxembourg before shutdown for one and a half days into a meeting room.

If you're hanging around Covent Garden and don't quite feel up for shopping it can be amazingly hard to find a place to sit down at that would offer a glass of wine AND be baby friendly (e.g. not loud and smoky).

Those witty Eastern Europeans always find a DIY solution if a commercial one is not available. Kalm serving wine & cheese from Tesco's, on a bench behind a nearby church this time.

(And no, it was just cookies and juice for Kusti, if that's what you're thinking here.)

A dinner to celebrate the SkypePrime launch 2 weeks ago (better late than never!) led to a surprise discovery of a Korean beer named correctly just for the occasion. Hite Prime.

(I'm cheating with the picture here - it is from MJ's phone, because it is far more artistic in composition than the ones I made.)

Skype Prime is the way to share advice, knowledge or services over Skype to anywhere in the world... and make money in the process. Get the Skype 3.1 for Windows client or later and call me for deep thoughts at just 1 EUR a minute! Or become a provider yourself.

I attended today's OpenCoffeeClub event, the one in London. It is a loose framework of entrepreneurial meetup events that Saul Klein recently kicked off, as part of his recent broader initiatives to encourage interaction between and raise the confidence of European entrepreneurs.

The 90 minutes I was able to spend at the event included a grande latte and a series of quite interesting talks with several people. As I was wearing a Skype t-shirt, most of the contacts evolved around startups wanting to work with Skype so I have quite some business card passing to do internally to see if anything will come out of it. I've now also asked the guys from our Software Developer Program to attend some of the future events once in a while so that the ecosystem interest can fall into right hands more directly.

The energy level in the room was surprisingly high and enthusiastic entrepreneurs wooing and sharing ideas really seemed to dominate the group. As opposed to a pool of thirsty nametagged VC sharks circling around rare prey, the direction some of these type of events can easily turn into. Maybe it is just because of the excess of capital available these days. Most of even the very early stage startups I talked to had already raised the money they need.

On more personal immediate takeaways, I now have joined Hakon Haugnes' .name space (sten[ät]tamkivi.name and www.sten.tamkivi.name setup took less than a minute!). And Mobyko's approach to mobile phone contents backup to web sounded quite cool, I'll take time to check out their implementation later.

You can be able to converse with people and write to audiences in two languages, have a mobile and upload the pictures on the go through flickr, and all these other neat things. But it all doesn't matter if you just learn to walk.

The traffic over last two weeks to this blog and Kusti's, respectively. Handover moment to the next generation.

Inspired bt wolli's recent revelation I'm publishing my personal strengths as well.
Read more about the thinking on why should I care, but in a nutshell:

People progress more rapidly in their areas of greatest talent than in their areas of weakness. Yet too many training and development approaches focus on making improvements in areas of weakness.

So here we go:

I have owned an iPod for a couple of years now and rarely use it. First, there are not that many moments in the daily life in Tallinn when I could encapsulate myself from the world with headphones. Secondly, I have been too busy/lazy to get a proper iPod connector installed to my car. Being a bit on the hifi enthusiast side, I'd prefer proper cabling + charger dock to entry level FM transmitter.

iPodding hasn't even really worked for me in flight with the exception of catching up with some Kuku radio shows. I usually sleep or read on planes.

From today to April 13th (that would be 4 weeks) I am working from our London office. Partly it has to do with my new team which is dominantly based in London. But no less important reason has been the strain my weekly back-and-fourth bouncing has put on my family. So they've come along.

The only thing to suffer from my extended stay here is the rapid growth of frequent flier miles, really.

Looking forward to the long-postponed catchups with Kalm, Kristi, Catherine, Saul, Eileen and others. I hopefully make one of the OpenCoffe Clubs, likely the one next Thursday. You never get time for these things when coming over for 1.5 days a week.

The high life quality standards in even the darkest alleys of Zürich, Switzerland lead to arguably the poshest trashcan branding on the planet.

I've always considered one of the coolest things about working for Skype the deeply international group of people. About a fifth of our Tallinn staff of almost 300 have moved to Estonia from elsewhere in the world to work with us. And that group of happy expats has over 30 nationalities. In Skype globally, the unique nations count must be something in higher fifties, I think.

I very strongly believe into the cultural, linguistic and human diversity this setup has brought to our products and the company overall. We could never continue to delight people in almost every single country in the world if we didn't have a sample of them working with us.

My freshest personal experience is my own eCommerce team. On our first team offsite meeting in Tallinn earlier today we did a round of introductions and after some intriguing personal stories shared about ... oh well, let it be... there was the bit on where everyone has their roots: Australia, England, Estonia, France, Germany, Iran, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, United States. Not bad at all for a group of 20 present.

This fellow does look a little sad about all this stuff going on in his nostrils.

Amazingly enough these very realistic wax statues at the Ahhaa, Panoptikon anatomy exhibition date back to as early as 1856. The worn-down buildings of Tartu University's Old Anatomical theatre provide the exactly suitable ambiance.

A bit morbid but educational way to spend one's sunny Sunday. Recommended.

Even though the numbers seemed funny at the time, it is obvious now that DS is a much more balanced person than I am. As of last night, my physical age is 75 and my brain age 33.

Apparently the lust for (next-gen) gaming does not drop with age and Nintendo does a great job with bringing some appropriate sense into this as a good excuse to find time. (Not an issue with DS [edit: aha, confusing, meant the Nintendo DS Lite this time, as opposed to the DS person linked above], given the extensive flying on European routes with shrinking seat space often prohibiting you to open a computer).

Thanks a lot for the b-day gifts!

A door of a power box on a street in Tartu, Estonia, morning of the election day. Probably both candidates (left one in black and right one in orange color) wanting a parliament seat. Danger of high voltage in any case.

Ecologically sound citizens of Tartu, Estonia gathering on thin ice to turn the coating of hometown river Emajõgi into Swiss cheese. And see if the fish care to surface alongside them.

Seth has written a great piece on the differences between what is "very good service" organizations provide to consumers versus to other businesses.

I'd like to add another twist to this.

For about two weeks now I've been acting in a new role in Skype as General Manager for eCommerce (while still holding the role of GM for Skype in Estonia). As with any change in positions it always takes quite an effort to get up and running, but I already see light in the end of that tunnel. Fortunately there is a great team of individuals and a pipeline with highly potent projects in place.

A friend recently pinged me in fear:
[13.02.2007 21:48:36] DS: anyway, wii is blaming me that my "fitness age is 66 years" and nintendo ds claims that my "brain age is 55 years"...

For added context, he is not that much over 30.

I remembered this chat when I read about the 4-week Quest to Be Smarter in Wired. There still is hope, isn't there?

Even though I never played either of the devices referred to, I think out of the list of things to do to improve I'm doing fine only on the coffee front. My average hours of sleep per night probably are around 5-6 hours lately. And the diet of choice: tasty. Even though the latter would probably improve both the Wii and Nintendo DS performance.

Without the intent of becoming a restaurant review blogger now, here still is another one: Abeno, the Okonomiyaki place. Interestingly enough they claim to be the only one of this kind of Europe, however right above the reference to "we do have another place in London" in their menu.

Okonomiyaki is a Japanese crossover between pancake and omlette, in the most naive european terms. The Kansai/Osaka versions are based on rice and the Hiroshima ones on noodles. And Extra Grande Modern ones at Abeno have both. Mixed with egg, bacon, choice of meat or seafood, asparagus and whatever not. Probably you'd get away with adding almost anything you like. In the strech case you can make "okonomi" the "economy" food made of what you've got.

As with many things Japanese the cooking process for okonomiyaki is as enjoyable as the result. It all happens on the hotplate in the middle of the table, with acute sequence of components and care. Especially cool are the finishing touches, from thin spirals of mayonnaise to seaweed powder and - my favourite - extremely thin slices of ham that keep "dancing" when thrown on the hot cake.

Anyway, a nice discovery for me from the Japanese kitchen, a bit off the usual sushi-miso-yakiniku route. Thanks, Duncan.

Cat of Hearts aka the Valentine's Day dinner table decorations reshuffled in the Three Sisters restaurant. As a sidenote, the 3S hotel which hosts the restaurant would definitely be my #1 choice for a place to stay at if I didn't live in Tallinn but just travelled here occasionally.

The whole evening was just perfect. The oysters very fresh (as the should be on a Wednesday, as most places up north here fly their batches in every Thursday). Our friend Jenny the Sommelier did a fabulous job with matching wine: a proper Beaujolais (not one of those bubblegummy grape juice drinks of Noveau) to accompany deer carpaccio and a strong South African Zinfandel with the white and oily cod, as a bit more unorthodox combination. Mmm.

I had the honor to chair the first day of Cynensis R&D Management conference in Brussels yesterday. The event was much smaller and more intimate than I expected, which in combination of the very impressive speaker and participant roster created very good atmosphere and interesting discussions.

I was driving around the city and got stuck behind a bus. Continued to think my thoughts until in about 5 minutes I felt somewhat disturbed. Took a more careful look at the bus' rear and realized the "serial number" there was exactly the same as a 4-digit PIN code I use the most! Hope you understand why this is my first mobile blog post without a photo of the PIN, in big bold numbers. :)

Weird how the brain triggered a subconscious personal privacy alert before I even consciously read the number. More so, I have never seen or written the number down before.

Back from a quick vacation trip. Will backfill with some thoughts and pictures on that later, just wanted to share the good feeling of lacking the usual unread e-mail hangover.

I spent the past week deliberately in a wifi-less hotel and only opened the computer once for 30 minutes. Back in the office today, I had only about 80 unread e-mail messages and 31 Skype multichats with unread content. So, what's so good about it?

For comparision, while working with Helmes before Skype, I used to get about 100 e-mails a day. A minority of them with just myself on the To-line, internal and external mailing lists and tons of carbon copies dominating. A week of out of office time could easily result in a big bold four-digit Inbox "unread" count, I remember. Getting through those took a better part of the week of return, rendering it effectively unproductive.

Sure, unread 31 Skype multichats also contain on average between 5 and 40 participants, hundreds and hundreds of entries, but in a very compact form, mostly staying in the thread and to the point and formatted in condensed inline text as opposed to a typical myriad of small-body-big-file-attachments style of corporate e-mails. There were only three files that people sent me over Skype when I was away, I now accepted just one I needed and declined the others.

When I opened all the relevant links to more information (memos, reports, statistics, news articles, etc) from the multichats, I had a Firefox window with about 12 tabs.

And now, mere six hours later I'm back in business. Communication catchup done, some items marked for later reading. I even had time to get coffee and spend about 1.5 hours in face to face catchups with colleagues.

I seriously considered copying my e-mail out-of-office reply from Henry, who usually just says something in the lines of "I will not reply to e-mail received during my vacation. If it is important enough, you'll find me when I'm back or just resend then." Apparently I didn't need to. We have effectively managed to kill e-mail, at least inside Skype.

I've always hated coins as the most outdated and impractical way to physically represent money, a very virtual concept in itself, especially in the days of electronic banking, chip cards and PayPal accounts. Fortunately Estonian Kroons are all paper notes in real life. We do have coins, but you rearly use something smaller than a 5 kroon paper note if you pay with cash and do not use cards or mobile payments. The pocket weight that goes with every trip to London is much worse.

However, I never thought of the upside of those annoying coins. The owners of binocular vending machines (for lack of a better idea how to call those) on the shore of Tenerife, Canary Islands have left meeting their revenue forecasts up to the randomness of whatever piece of metal a passing tourist might have in their pocket. Same equipment cost, same "effort" but easily doubled revenues if it just ... happens so. Very zen. Try to do that in e-business.

I was quite proud of the job I did fixing Kusti's child safety chair this time. It's one of those models which can be used either way, facing the direction of travel or the opposite. In theory, at least, as in the rear-facing mode it usually remains under weird angle and kind of wobbly. Not this time.

... until I looked on the back seat after driving about 10 minutes. There had been a quiet squeak a minute before from the passenger, but one of those happy kinds, so I did not pay attention at once.

Kusti actually seemed to be enjoying the new, kicked-back easy rider style but I'm not sure that is as safe as the chair manufacturer intended.

Jaanus, sharing his initial thoughts on Apple iPhone speculates among other things on where the design could go further:

... taking the accelerometer (the portrait/landscape detector) and the proximity sensor a bit further and having a Nintendo Wii remote-like capacity to have the phone be fully aware of its 3d orientation and motion vectors. Though I can’t really imagine an application and use for it other than, say, theft detector.

Here you go, Jaanus, some potential applications:

We have all been convinced by media, American Psycho and personal experience that you can recognize successful bankers from their expensive suits -- or at least really smart casual wear -- and all-n-all sharp looks no matter what the hour. From Lower Manhattan to London City to ... well, I guess, Pegasus in the Old Town, Tallinn.

Please meet Priit and Andres. As any good member of the financial circles would, they really do dress up before meeting their colleagues on a Saturday night.

Healthy. I really feel safe trusting my money with these guys.

On the last Sunday evening of his vacation Ott suddenly discovered that his glass of Alsace Riesling (to accompany ML's tasty first chicken salad with tuna dressing in their new kitchen) is throwing out flames.

So, the Apple iPhone is out. There are enough blogs covering every single aspect of that little piece of history made, so I will not dwell on the product features much. I want one very badly. You want one. And if you don't, you likely will at some point quite soon.

Instead, let me share some initial thoughts I had from the amateur investor angle. No buy/sell/hold verdicts, just aspects to consider.

A very rough summary of travel statistics from 2006, excluding vacations (ahem, those were not there much anyway):

• Number of business trips: ~30
• Flight legs: ~70
• Days away from home: ~70
• London: ~25 days
• Luxembourg: ~7 days
• San Jose/Santa Cruz: 6 days
• Shanghai: 5 days
• Number of countries visited (excluding airports): ~13
• Most active month: May - 10 countries in 33 days
• SAS Eurobonus miles collected since August: 53000+

This is an obvious occasion to say thanks to Ede and Kusti for being so understanding about this madness. If anything, 2007 will hopefully be bit lighter on short intra-European cityhopping. Thank you in advance as well!

UPDATE: Apparently, having a geeky overview of your travel statistics over time is one of those geeky things we do at Skype...

One of those Google homepage personalization widgets, Japanese Word of the Day is advertised with a surprisingly relevant screenshot. Worth reposting here for the educational pleasure of Seikatsu-blog readers:

Transcript of my speech at the The First Two Years of EU Membership conference in Budapest, as kindly typed up by the organizers.

My name is Sten Tamkivi, and I am representing Skype. As I prefer two-way discussions to one-way speeches, I will try to be quick. I guess I was invited to speak at this conference mainly because our company is very young – just three years of Skype’s existence –, and secondly because it is very European by its roots. Just to give you a short introduction: we are headquartered in Luxembourg, but our largest office is in Tallinn, Estonia, where I actually come from. Our second largest office is in London, and there are other smaller entities in various countries in the world. We are a quickly and enormously growing company.

Imported some 2-year-old entries from archive depths to decrease the feeling of loneliness of a fresh blog engine install.

A flight carrier ad in Gatwick Express cart promises to take you straight to Brooklyn. And the smallprint adds an even more exciting destination: heart of Big Apple. Which for most new yorkers, I believe, should be more like lower Manhattan?

Didn't the two pilots on 9/11 already deliver on this promise?

Mr King has obviously left his belongings behind in the pompous "lobby" of the Hungarian Parliament building in Budapest. Spoke on a conference there.

Behind the City Court of Tallinn.

A bit hard to read from the image, but City of Westminster's Loo of the Year it is, ladies and gentlemen. I kid you not. Must be the Holy Grail for hard-working English janitors.

The dessert is gone for good, but who has the heart to lick chocolate-powder-plate-designs on top? I like to think that they don't even use a template for this, but just careful artistic freehand...

If you have a meeting in London on Friday and another one the following Monday, Eurostar can do miracles in between. Such as a short-sleeved open air breakfast in a random street café with friends and escargot aioli in Paris, on what's supposed to be the first official day of winter:

Taavet is looking forward with excitement for the next stop on infamous Zoo Bar - Lobby Bar - Mini Bar route in London.
MJ is too fuzzy to comment on.