Author: BaseN

::: nBlog ::: Last Tuesday I visited Tallinn, Estonia and met with their prime minister Andrus Ansip together with the AmCham executive team. In his keynote speech Mr. Ansip did not try to hide his pride about the Estonian economy and several consecutive budgets with surplus.  Estonia can’t be said to be a rich country […]

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::: nBlog ::: When we pay salaries to our people in the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Spain and the US, it has always frustrated me that transferring the required funds from a bank to another takes at least 24 hours and sometimes three working days. Technically speaking, these transactions could happen in milliseconds, as nearly all banks […]

::: nBlog ::: Energy efficiency is a hot sales argument today for a multitude of products and services. Although financial savings may be microscopic in things like mobile phone chargers and washing machines, branding something green is a fashionable choice for any marketer. By haphazardly invoking Einstein I can extend the concept of energy to nearly everything, […]

::: nBlog ::: After my presentation here in Dresden I was flattered to have evoked parallels with such giants as Alan Turing and Ray Kurzweil, in the minds of some listeners. My poetic title – The Ephemereal Soul of All Things Computing – was probably to blame. Although Kurzweil goes a bit far by postulating that […]

::: nBlog ::: The Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) of the human body is a marvellous logic controller maintaining all the essential life support functions below the conscious brain activity. It is connected to thousands of nerves which collect and transmit data every few milliseconds. Based on these measurements, it then issues chemical and electrical signals in order to […]

::: nBlog ::: For the last 16 years, the European Court of Auditors (ECA), the independent audit institution of the European Union, has issued predominantly negative statements about EU’s budget implementation, especially on the largest accounts like Agriculture and Energy. In the latest report from September 2011, the court states: XI. The Court concludes that overall […]

::: nBlog ::: Politicians in the Nordics are grinning in agreement when giants like Facebook and Google convert old paper mills and other aging blue chip infrastructure into high density data centers. Electricity supply is not a problem and cooling is usually available from a nearby river or sea. Sounds great? Well. While the EU has […]

::: nBlog ::: Predicting the future is hard. Some of the earliest and even nowadays most powerful supercomputers are used eg. for weather forecasting and financial market analysis. Accuracy has surely increased, but not even nearly at the pace of the available storage and processing capacity. As an experiment, New Scientist magazine recently tried to predict the […]

::: nBlog ::: When I was made a VP in 2000, my first thought was that I again need to learn, and a lot. So I went on and bought more than hundred books of management, each promoting a bit different approach to perfect management.  Empathic, evidence based, phenomenal, compassionate, questioning, firm, listening, demanding, goal […]