Märt Ridala's thoughts

In July I wrote a bold prediction that Google+ will soon be more popular than Facebook. I have been following the popularity contest ever since. According to Alexa last week about 3,1% of Internet users visited G+ and 43,4% visited Facebook. The number of G+ visitors has increased since it opened up to the public, but not very fast. The number of Facebook visitors has remained stabile. But what I want to write about is the amazing speed of Facebook's reaction to Google+'s launch and how fast FB has built new functionality ever since! I have been working in different product development organizations and must say, that this speed is truly impressive for an organization with 2000+ employees like FB currently is. Probably most of the startup community don't understand my excitement, but I will illustrate the phenomena with some of the issues a big product development organization has to cope with: Firstly, if you have a democratic organization with specialists who put t...

I had the privilege to attend the Arctic15 conference in Helsinki yesterday. It was a great event and I would like the organizers from Arctic Startup for organizing it and getting so many interesting presenters together. I think we have a great startup movement going on in the Nordic and Baltic region. Looking at the finalists and presenters it seems to me that there is one important thing that the startup community should now focus on! It is time to take the next step. It is time to focus more on solutions that help the non-IT economy. Currently we have many startups creating economically rather irrelevant services like solutions for publishing posts on Twitter, LinkedIN and Facebook simultaneously, social networks running on other social networks, all kinds of games and so on. We should consider this as the training that has refined the skills of the specialists and now start serious work. The real value IT can create is not in the IT or internet sector. It is in making the non-I...

The global economic situation has been gloomy in the last months and the newspapers are full of economic misery coming mostly from Greece and Italy. But things are not all bad! In Estonia we have had many great economic developments overall and especially in the IT and technology sector lately. Here is a list of some of them: The Seedcamp event in London was overwhelmed by "the Estonian Maffia", with 4 out of 20 participants and 2 out of 3 winners coming from Estonia . Fortumo, the mobile payment provider, was selected as the best Estonian company by Enteprise Estonia. This marks a significant shift of focus to young and innovative startups by the society and government. The delegation from Brussels is looking for premises for the European IT agency in Tallinn. We hope to have many European IT specialists and decision makers moving to Tallinn. (Tallinn is a nice town with a pretty Old Town so why not.) Flybe, Utair and Estonian Air have opened many new flightroutes t...

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...