Happy Holidays to all

I must admit that I have been working like a mad dog (to translate a bizarre Latvian phrase I often use recently) at my day job. We're all reporters now, with me covering telecoms in the broadest sense, including postal services (often a disaster in Latvia), so I get asked to go to some pretty strange events (Santa Claus at a Riga post office).

Anyway, it is only now that I get around to wishing all my readers a Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanza and belated Happy Hanukkah (this lunar/?/ calendar thing of Jewish holidays shifting around always confuses me). Also, all the best for the New Year and new decade (or is it?).

As for me, I am taking a break from the "running of the mad dogs" (skrienam kā traki suņi) to go to the US via London on Sunday (Monday -- to the States). I will spend a few (maybe too few) days near Boston at my mom's place and visit my brother and nephews/son's cousins (my wife and son are also flying). Then we go to Orlando for around a week (for the warm weather) and back to Latvia via London again.

I hope to get into a groove again despite my different workload and write more often for this blog in the New Year. Consider it a resolution with, perhaps, the same fate as most...:)

TeliaSonera honcho on the 4G launch

I happened to be in Stockholm on December 14, when TeliaSonera announced it was launching the first commercial LTE network in the Swedish capital (and its Norwegian subsidiary NetCom was doing the same in Oslo). TeliaSonera's Mobility Services honcho Kenneth Karlberg spoke to this blogger just after the launch press conference. The video has bilingual English/Latvian titles, as it also appears on my Latvian-language blog for my "day job".

SAP regional honcho on sustainability solutions

Karen Nilsen, SAP's regional CEO for the Nordic region and the Baltic States, talked to this blogger ahead of the Copenhagen global climate conference about SAP's solutions for sustainability management. Basically, it is a matter of extending the functions of the ERP system to gather and analyze data relevant to such matters as carbon emissions and other environmental factors. So there is no new rocket science involved. The leaders in adoption of SAP's and competing technologies are the Nordic countries with their long history of environmental awareness, according to Nilsen.