seikatsu

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.

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?