Märt Ridala's thoughts

The "economic crisis 2.0" is a popular theme in the media right now and most certainly this is something that everyone of us should be concerned about. Stockprices have been falling for months, GDP growth has slowed to zero, most western nations, businesses and households have debts that really cannot increase and China is fighting with inflation. The methods used to soften the "economic crisis 1.0" in 2008 cannot be used this time anymore. So what is the solution and what are the methods we can use this time? The Reason In order to find a solution for the crisis I would define the primary reason for it. It is a bit abstract, but nevertheless it is true. The reason any economic crisis is that the things we do and how we do them no longer maches the technological and social situation of the society. By this I mean the following: - we overproduce some goods and services and underproduce others. This results in stores, businesses and factories being closed - the

The operating service is a totally new level of IT management service on the Baltic markets. Services more or less similar to this have been offered in the Scandinavian and Western markets, but in the Baltics Elion is one of the few companies capable of offering such a service. Elion is operating the E-waybill system for the Forest and Wood Industries Association. The E-waybill system is a huge innovation for timber logistics. But we can say that the way we set up the IT management model is almost as innovative. Here is a small video presentation describing the differences between traditional hosting and the operating service. I will be giving a longer version of this presentation on 31.08 at the conference organized by the Estonian business newspaper Äripäev .

If you have interesting and innovative news or analysis about IT trends, startups, enterpreneurship support programs from your country, city or company then I would be most happy to promote them on Pilveraal.ee. It would be interesting for other readers to know what is happening in the IT field in Romania, Hungary, Vilnius etc. and what kind of new IT, mobile or SaaS (Software as a Service) services will be conquering the world next. In order to do so just send me an e-mail: mart.ridala@pilveraal.ee

The Garage48 series of events is a very interesting phenomenon! The idea of a Garage48 event is to gather different teams in one facility and let them develop an IT or a mobile service in 48 hours. The series originated from Estonia but has gone really global with next events planned in Tartu, Nairobi and Kampala. According to the business newspaper E24 the founders of Garage48 receive constantly invitations from all around the world to organize events in their city. We in Elion are sponsoring Garage48 and will open our platforms to the events so that the teams can develop new services for example for our digital TV subscribers. We find this is a great way to implement open-innovation and co-operate with people outside the company. As a great fan of startups and open innovation I can surely recommend Garage48 as a co-operation partner to established IT service providers and telecoms. This is one of the best ways to find ideas for new services and new business. So if you need n

The poll on Pilveraal on mobile platforms closed and the results are clear: 85% of the voters think that Android will rise. Only 14% think Android will fall. 35% think that Windows Mobile will fall and none think it will rise. Regarding iOS the results are more uncertain with 35% voting for rise and 14% voting for fall. Our predictions about the domination of platforms is more or less a self-fulfilling prophesy as we choose and promote platforms that we think will be dominant and abandon platforms that we think are without a future. Can we therefore predict that: - Android's position on the smartphone market will be similar to Windows's position on the PC market - iOS-s position will be similar to MacOS's and - Windows Mobile will enjoy the same position on the smartphone market as Linux does on the PC market?

Amazon AWS and Microsoft BPOS are experiencing major downtime on their Ireland sites. By now it is almost over and most of the service is up and running again according to the status report you can see here: AWS Service Health Dashboard . The reason to this outage was a lightning strike hiting a transformer. I have been in the IT services, datacenter and hosting business well over 10 years and my experience is: - If you are an IT service provider and have an incident then the most important thing is to inform your customers . Sometimes it is even more important to focus on communication than to fixing the problem. - By moving servers to hosting providers, centralized datacenters and even to the cloud-provider we concentrate risk and if something major goes wrong then more systems are affected. But this does not mean that moving to hosting or cloud provider means more downtime. Actually the opposite is true. The difference is that if Amazon or my employer Elion for example has an o

There is a new poll up on Pilveraal about the rise and fall of mobile platforms. Please choose the options you think will happen by 2014! Will Android's popularity rise or fall? Will Windows come and beat the current dominants? This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the majority of people think that some platform will rise in popularity then they prefer this platform when buying a new mobile and recommending a new phone to their friends. This in turn increases the popularity of the platform. The same is true for the opposite of course.

As E24 wrote in their recent article the number of applicants to the IT College rose significantly this year. The average number of candidates applying to one free scholarship was 3,96 last year rose to 5,35 this year even the number of free scholarships was risen by 10 places. The number of applications has risen to 207 from 60 in the year 2007. According to IT colleges marketing director Sigrid Tammiste the main reason for increasing number of applications is the personal and direct marketing programs that IT college ran this year. The overall practical approach in their programs and the media coverage about the lack of IT specialists have also supported the popularity of IT education in Estonia. I also did my small part and took part in the campaign of promoting IT education. I talked about the perspective of learning IT to high-school students. As a presenter I must say it was a very interesting and really challenging! The public was quite different from the one you have on se

In Elion we offer e-mail and homepage hosting service to business customers. From time to time we get inquiries from our customers who want to do e-mail marketing. Could you recommend what e-mail marketing tools are good in your opinion? Are there any Baltic or Nordic solutions for that? Any freeware solutions? For Pilveraal.ee newsletter I use GetResponse’s free and limited version. In my opinion GetResponse is good. There is an easily configurable form for registering e-mail addresses, the user experience is OK and there is a lot of newsletter statistics available. The only problem with GetResponse is their high price. I as a blogger would be ready to pay about 10,well maybe even 15-20 euros/year. $98 per year with maximum 250 subscribers is at least 4 times too much in my opinion.

I am moderating the European innovation agencies taskforce analyzing the use of e-portals in the agencies. (Innovation agencies are for example Tekes-Finland, Enterprise Estonia, Vinnova-Sweden, Research Council of Norway) One thing we analyzed in our work was the use of social media as a tool to interact with customers. The issues and results we encountered are general and relevant to all organizations so I hope you find this short summary useful. The first thing to decide is what the organization wants to do with social media. There are four levels: - Not to use social media - "One way" communication - Gathering feedback - Two way communication and customer service. I would argue based on the Estonian market that government institutions and innovation agencies are leading the way here. If for example the Estonian Police has a Facebook page to discuss general traffic and security issues then most businesses use social media primarily for marketing purposes only. Th

The small poll that on Pilveraal.ee shows that: - 49% of readers think that the number of Google+ visitors will exceed the number of Facebook visitors in 2011 or 2012. - 14% think that it will happen in 2013-2014 - and 35% think Facebook will remain more popular. The current situation according to Alexa.com is that 1,46% of internet users visit plus.google.com and 44% visit Facebook. I visit both of them on daily bases. How about you?