Irina's Blog

Review Challenges of the information society has been written in 2004 by Pekka Himanen. In his report Pekka is writing about the challenges that are facing the information society and challenges that will become especially prevalent by 2010. Actions that can be taken to reduce the toll of these challenges on the society are also discussed by the author. Ten global trends taking place are highlighted: 1. Increasing international tax competition and countries competing for investments with each other. 2. The new global division of labour when production is moving to the countries with cheaper labour. 3. Population ageing, that is especially prevalent in Europe and some other regions. 4. Increasing pressures on the welfare society by ageing population. 5. The second phase of the information society: technological to social development. 6. The rise of cultural industries particularly TV, literature, games and similar fields. 7. The rise of bio-industries such as medicine and ...

Once upon a time in order to travel, people were going to the travel agency. They would flip through the catalogue and choose a fully planned travel package, that they can afford. On the agreed day they would come to the airport and be taken away to a resort of their choice. During their stay they would have a pre-planned guided tour and be taken to the restaurants and shops that the tour agency has selected (or have a commission with in place). And as it always goes, with internet advent, travel sites started popping up like mushrooms after the rain. Travel blogs, review websites and magazines full of beautiful holiday pictures and advice to a traveller. There is even a possibility to see everything prior to actually arriving to the destination. Couple of hours on google images and street view and you have a feeling like you have already seen it all. Once you actually arrive to the footsteps of Big Ben you find it more attractive on google images. But j...

Technologies develop fast. Some innovations come to life, but soon they are substituted by something better and become obsolete and forgotten by everyone. There are many examples of technologies that came before the internet and are still in use to this day. There are also many examples, that are no longer in use, and probably won´t even be recognized by today's youth. Do you remember an answering machine... with a tape? If you do, you must be over 25. First answering machine with a voice recorder was invented in 1935. Voice recording itself was possible by using a magnetic recording technology. Of course that answering machine was not accessible to general public in 1935, and it's updated version came into wider use only in 1984. These commercially produced answering machines still used magnetic recording technologies and had a cassette to which caller message was recorded. By the way, cassette is yet another forgotten technolo...

Projects fail all the time. Let it be in the tech industry or in the personal life, for any project there is space for success, but there is also space for failure. And it is not just start-ups or novice companies that fail, big companies also fail, losing investments, precious time and resource. So let's have a look at three examples of failures in the tech world and see what they tried to achieve and what might be behind their failure. Zune  What is Zune? Zune was a portable music player produced by Microsoft. The first version of Zune has been launched in 2006 and since then several improved versions have been released with Zune HD in 2009. Product line has been discontinued in 2012. Why did they fail? Reading through the articles it appears that Zune player was a good product, with a sleek design and a quality technology behind. No matter the design or technology, however, Zune has never took off and the cumulative reason appears to b...