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Welcome to my Blog!
Here I will post sometimes something about my life and my work.
If you want to comment, just drop me an e-mail (see contact) or use the comment function of the corresponding blog entries. Have also a look at recent changes.
2009-08-25: Server Migration: MoinMoin-1.5 to MoinMoin-1.8.4
Today I migrated my server from moinmoin-1.5 to moinmoin-1.5.4. If you discover any difficulties, please don't hesitate to contact me. Read about the migration here: projects/moinmoin/migration.
2009-05-30: ICIW 2009 in Venice
I am just back in Estonia from a very nice conference in the wonderful venue Venice. I made new interesting contacts, re-newed old ones, and enjoyed the beautiful sights of the city.
You can find my pictures here: http://picasaweb.google.com/UNorbisrath/20090523To20090529ICIWVenice
2009-04-06: Mobile Monday Launch Latvia
As a supporter of the Mobile Computing at the University of Tartu, I yesterday joined two of the founders of the Mobile Monday in Estonia to the Launch of Mobile Monday in Latvia In Riga. I missed the first talk as we got stuck in Rigas rush hour traffic.
The event went pretty smooth for a start (I counted something around 70 participants). It had the classic setup of four talks plus panel discussion. Sadly, there was no room for questions after the individual talks leading to very few audience related questions. Until the panel discussion most people had forgotten the previous talks. For a panel session (people who know me know that I think that panels are a very poor mean for networking people) this particular panel went pretty nice as the Panel leaders had an interesting set of questions. However also here, I would love the organizers being more brave and trying to replace the panel with more network enabling activities (just my personal opinion). Also sad was, that people left pretty early (a lot of people were already leaving during the panel session). Maybe as suggested by the organizers themselves, adding some more demos in the talks will capture these people longer?
Strange was also, that there was such a small presence of operators and research facilities at the event - hey, we academics don't bite (I know, people from industry neither). I think getting these both more involved would be beneficial.
Still congratulations to the organizers for the good start and I hope you will have fun and enthusiasm to organize many more.
2009-03-25: The Flight Simulator in Tartu - Distributes Systems group pays a visit
On this Wednesday, we set out to visit the flight simulator at the airport in Tartu. Our guide Lauri Laasik gave us an exciting tour over the whole area. We saw the Tower simulator, got the chance to try out the flight simulator, and saw the real new tower and teaching facilities.
We also could question about the rumors, when the first passenger can fly from Tartu airport to international destination. We were told that the runway and tower are actually ready for serving this, but the terminal has to be renovated. So maybe, maybe in one or two years, we will have really an international airport in Tartu, can't wait!
Thanks Lauri, also from my students, for being such a great host. We will all consider doing a pilot license now!
Konstantin sent me some pictures, which I uploaded on my picasa web-account. Click here to view them.
2009-03-23: Mobile Monday Estonia, Successful Workshop Introduction
Today we had another of these events, which present a nice opportunity for networking people from industry, entrepreneurs, and university in the mobile world (link to MoMo-website.). We (about 40 people) met in Ülikooli Kohvik for talks about "How Does a Student Project Grow into a Successful Mobile Service Provider", networking, and a little workshop.
I personally think it was a great choice to replace the former panel discussion with a little workshop. It offers a great and much more personal opportunity to network. And thanks to the organizers to respect our suggestions.
I was in charge of leading one of the workshops and I think I should share the results with you here. Our team set out to answer the following questions:
As a startup in mobile IT:
- How to find industrial/university partners?
- How to find the right team members?
- How to bring research to real life?
- How to get funding?
After an active discussion we agreed mainly on three solution areas:
- networking and communication
- financing and funding
- legal and structural issues
Most important in the networking and communication part were for us the following points:
- Universities should not hesitate to approach companies to offer their services
And vice versa interested people from industry are very welcome to talk to us at university (if you don't know to whom, just write to me).
- More events like Mobile Monday would be very appreciated, it would be good to have also events covering other areas of it
- Some Founder's Table would be nice (read more on this below, we are actually planning to found one in Tartu)
- University should market and point out their role more in successfully industrialized projects
- University should actively support students wanting to do a startup
- Institutionalizing a required internship in IT studies might give a way out to loosing students to industry at an too early point
In financing and funding:
- There is currently a lot of public funding available. Pairing up industry in the public sector (like university) incresas the chance of getting funding significantly.
- It could be good to lobby for a venture capital company assigned to the university which could support startups, bu being able to act more economic than the public institution university is able to
In legal in structural issues we were mentioning again the legal restriction in terms of acquiring profit for the university and possibilities to change this.
As several people expressed their wish to create some Founder's Table, I will hereby just try to establish one. We will meet the first time at 18:30 in Ülikoolikohvik at Tuesday the 14th of April. The meeting will last until about 21:00. We will try to continue networking and maybe continue discussing the topics of the workshop outlined here. However any other ideas what to discuss can be brought in and be addressed. In the evening I will create a little subpage of this page with more infos (the subpage is here). Therefore, if you are interested, please start monitoring this site, or drop me a note or email (see my contacts).
As Priit linked this page directly and not my blog, here is a backlink to my blog, where you can also leave comments:
2009-02-16: Deutsche Lufthansa, welcome to the past!
I think this was worth blogging. Living most time in a country where internet is just ubiquitous in your life, it is very interesting to deal with some big companies in my home country like the Deutsche Lufthansa. In one of my ticket bookings there was a booking mistake where Deutsche Lufthansa charged me 30 EUR too much. After phoning their expensive phone line a couple of times and trying to use their internet contact form, I got finally a fax number where I can send my documents to. Great, I thought. However, the German fax was not able to talk to our Estonian fax machine, so I asked again if there would be an email where I could sent the scanned fax instead. I often do this for conferences, they always provide an alternative email for the fax. But no! Deutsche Lufthansa has no email address! How great is this? The only chance left now is the good ol' post! Long live snail mail! Welcome back to the past!
2009-02-09: SIP Communicator on FOSDEM - awesome event
I was mentor at the Google Summer of Code 2008 for the SIP Communicator project and thanks to Emil Ivov (and Google) I could visit the team members at FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels. This conference/meeting is a dream for every geek. It is so easy to network with other persons and do tech talk - what a pleasure! Thanks to the organizers this event combines a casual habit with a lot of professionalism. Keep on the good work!
I think we had a very nice booth from our sip-communicator group and it was great to meet the people in persons from whom you only know their email addresses. I hope, I will be able to take part next year again (and hope also to be mentor for GSoC 2009 again)
Here are some links to pictures: