Märt Ridala's thoughts

There has been a lot of talk about the skills shift in the labour market in Europe and USA. A big part of the simpler jobs are moving to robots, low-cost countries and are being exterminated by more excessive use of materials, standardization, computerization and better processes. There is a very interesting TED talk (Are droids taking our jobs) about how this trend will get more and more powerful. But have you noticed that the same thing is happening at home? I mean can you even get all the stuff at home working if one of the parents is not a highly educated and experienced technician? For example when I was young the technical problem to solve was sharpening pens. Maybe you needed to sharpen a knife for that, but it was more about hands and less about brains. Now one must struggle with problems like Gmail is not working in a tablet because WiFi gets disconnected. Or reinstalling a telephone, because it cannot connect to the PC maintenance software anymore.  Try to remember how ma

Many countries, including Sweden and Estonia , have started open data initiatives in the last couple of years. The goal of these initiatives is to open up publicly owned data for enterpreneurs who can develop services on them and well... make money. However, the success of these initiatives has been only moderate until now. I think the highest success has been with services offering public transport route planning and similar, but mostly the services are more or less only interesting toys. So why is the success moderate? I see several reasons for that: - The data being opened (for free) is usually commercially un-interesting. It is not the citizen or business registrys that you get access to for free. - Consumers in general are not willing to pay anything for e-services. It is the businesses that make money with e-services and who are also willing to pay for them. - The institutions themself, like for example Stockholms Lokaltrafik  and also Google, provide very good services on th