Nota Bene

Ireland does IT real well – it both understands it and supports it. But it doesn’t just attract and help out ‘adult’ tech businesses, it also does its bit with IT-incubators and supporting  IT startups. But I waxed lyrical about all that a year ago.

// Ireland’s also seriously into pharmaceuticals, but I won’t be discussing that today. Pharmaceticals to me are like a parallel universe (and the term ‘pharma’ mostly reminds me of the illegal drugs trade on the Internet.

So here I was at the Web Summit exhibition-conference in Dublin, November 2014.

Among other things, Web Summit is a yearly gathering for all sorts of different IT-startups, which come here in search of partners and investors. It really is the place to come if you’re a budding IT ‘infant’-company with loads of ideas and plans and dreams but no money. IT-infants (plus investors and large business) come here from all over the world.

Here’s what it looks like:

Nano-stands :)

Read on: I see pink sheeps!!…

What are you supposed to do in Japan if you’ve a free Saturday, you’ve already ‘done’ Tokyo several times, you’ve just had a partner conference in Osaka, and Kyoto’s also been fully inspected before?

My Japanese trolls-cum-colleagues suggested shooting up to Fukushima, but when I asked them what’s really worth seeing there, they went all quiet. So with Kyushu and Hokkaido being too far for a day-trip, we ended up deciding to hop onto a train to speed over to the west coast of Japan, and then travel by boat a bit further – to the island of Sado.

Source

Now, when my Japanese trolls colleagues kept referring to ‘island’ – ‘here on the island’, ‘they reside on the island’, etc. – it seemed a little strange to me. As if Japan were the ‘mainland’, and just Sado were an island. Still, I guess the largest island of Japan is both ‘main’ and ‘land’, so maybe I’m nitpicking… Hmmm.

Anyway, what’s there to see on the smaller island? :)

Simple: not much. Hardly anything interesting whatsoever. A visit is purely just for the check mark on a list of been to’s of the world. Japanese west coast/island: check.

But wait… There’s always something… Surely. Yes: here, it’s the colors of autumn across Japanese mountain ranges: simply stunning.

Read on: Glide with Boeing…

Konnichiwa folks!

Apologies for the chronological mix-up of recent events: The described-below happenings occurred before Monaco. So let’s rewind a bit… and off we head to the land of the rising sun.

Once a year in fall in Japan we have our regional partner conference, with accompanying whirlwind meetings, interviews, presentations, parties, and all sorts of other stuff. The highlight for me personally was how well my new presentation on how we protected the Sochi-2014 Olympics was received. The press liked it so much it appeared on the national news during prime time and was then repeated several times over. On the country’s No. 1 channel! Like!

At least the data cable’s green

Read on: green bear, redesigned…

Hi folks!

Here I am in Monte Carlo, Monaco, to attend this year’s INTERPOL General Assembly. I love this place. I’ve been here several times before, but never tire of it. One thing I’d never gotten round to doing though was getting up into those hills that tower up above it.

This time, I finally managed it. It was just a shame that in the morning it was really overcast and rainy…

The view from the top of the hill – from a village called La Turbie

Read on: Mercifully the weather soon cleared up…

“Why don’t we do a Banksy, kinda?…” someone in our creative collective suggested one day. Why don’t we, indeed, I thought, and issued the proverbial green light. “Only, our artwork needs to be bigger, brighter, better… than Banksy (cough),” I added. “So our logo’ll be easier to see.” :-)

Months later, several towns across Russia had had a particularly dismal apartment building side-wall brightened up with a dazzling, cheerful, multicolored mural!

Here are some pics… Not half bad. Like. Much like :).

How @e_kaspersky challenged Banksy, kindaTweet

Read on: we win the towns over…

The Kuril Islands are bleak – plain and simple. Extreme weather, poor communications with the continent, a 100% mark-up on all imported goods (and just about all goods are imported from mainland Russia), and a constant threat of natural disasters such as volcano eruptions, earthquakes and tsunami!

It takes a tough individual to survive here; an even tougher individual to love the place. However, there are things to love about it; you just need to know where to look…

The total land mass of all the Kurils is slightly less than that of Israel or Slovenia, or about half the size of Belgium. However, its population is only around 20,000, half of which lives in three towns: (i) Severo-Kurilsk (North-Kurilsk), (ii) Kurilsk, and (iii) Yuzhno-Kurilsk (South-Kurilsk). All very logical.

Surprisingly, the first two have the official status of town, yet their populations combined are smaller than that of the third, which is officially deemed an ‘urban type settlement’. (Logical?) There are also a few tiny hamlets plus seasonal fishing villages which come to life in the summer after hibernating through the winter.

So what’s it like living on the Kuril Islands?

Read on: your complete guide to Kuril settlements…

Somewhat infrequently, I come across something that’s both reeeaaally simple but at the same time reeeaaally amazing and astonishing. For example, the funicular in Wiesbaden, Germany.

At first glance – it’s just two tram cars going up and down a small hill: simple. However, on closer inspection you find out that these tram cars weren’t built say in the middle of the last century… No – it was actually 1888 when they were commissioned: amazing! And the engine they use?… Nope – no engine! The cars go up and down the hill using just gravity plus one other unlikely source of energy – water: astonishing!

Read on: how this hill-tram works?…

Every day we release up to 2000 updates for our products.

Every week our users around the globe download those updates over a billion times.

Every month we distribute around four petabytes of updates.

These updates (together with our other technologies) protect you against new cyberthreats. In recent years we’ve been seeing new malware popping up not just every day or every hour, but every minute and even every second! Each year we analyze more than a billion samples of malicious code.

For the average user, receiving antivirus updates is a simple, automatic process. They run silently in the background without disturbing you (and quite right too). However, there’s a lot more to an update than first meets the eye. Updates are merely the tip of a sophisticated iceberg that connects our products to a huge distributed IT system that we built up ourselves using a whole bunch of original ideas and know-how.

That’s the overall scheme. The details get more interesting…

Read on: So what actually happens when you update your antivirus?…

The first Formula One Russian Grand Prix was really great!

The track is very fast, whatever the nay-sayers claim about it being boring and needing more challenging turns. The grandstand is huge, the paddock is well designed and the logistics really work. The teams said the organization was superb and everything went off without a hitch. The people behind this deserve a lot of respect – if properly motivated, people can achieve great things :)

http://instagram.com/p/uGfnwXOiVl/

Read on: A monochrome podium…

Not all trademarks make much sense. Especially where whisky is concerned

For example, the other day, I was wandering through the night in Jerusalem like a proper tourist. I sat down on a bench some bar, I can’t even remember its name. But I can remember their menu promising me ‘Monkey Shoulder’ whisky. I was astonished, but not for long. The name didn’t quite do it for me. But there you go. No Talisker, no Jura, no Macallan. Not even Glenfiddich or the notorious Chivas. Ladies and Gentlemen! We give you …. ‘Monkey Shoulder’.

Read on: a few more “whiskys” I recall …