According to the economist, revenues in the enterprise SaaS industry will reach $6bn in 2008, accounting for 17,5 % of all enterprise application sofware. The article is also an interesting read on NetSuite recent flotation and the business of enterprise Software as a Service in general. Read it here.
Don't ask how, but today I was lucky enough to participate at the annual conference of NHO (Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise) in Oslo. Even though I knew that this must be the most prestigious conference you could possibly find here in Norway, I was slightly struck by all the familiar faces of politicians, journalists and billionaires that got crammed together in a fairly intimate conference hall. (The conference hall itself was a bit out of the ordinary with a 360 degree canvas showing images, movies and presentations being played around a rotating stage. )
The theme of this year’s conference was education and enterprises role in education. After an inspiring introduction by the American astronaut Robert Curbeam, OECD's vice-secretary general Aart de Geus presented the cold facts from the last Pisa survey that sadly shows that Norway is well below the OECD average in terms of skills in reading, math and science (A fact that everyone that took stage later, including a wide range of politicians, agreed was a serious issue). His advice to the Norwegian educational system can be summed up as follows:
Other speakers ranged from three different Norwegian ministers, a former labor minister to the Clinton Administration, a Danish minister and a range of researchers, CEO's and other politicians. The whole conference was wrapped up by the prime minister himself, that I think surprised everybody (certainly me) by giving the perhaps the most charismatic, personal and humorous speech of them all.
Some of the presentations and videos from the event have already been published here:
http://konferanse2008.nhosp.no/category/Multimedia/category.php?categoryID=27
Now I'm off to sneak into the equally prestigious annual dinner party :-)
Seasons greetings! I apologize for the prolonged silence to the few of you that follows my blog on a regular basis. Desember was busy as always, but now that next years budget is nearly finished I will try and post on a more regular basis.
I have to confess I didn't spend much time in front of my computer this holiday. But here's a few of the things I did this christmas that could be worth sharing:
1. Converted to using Google Reader as my main rss reader. About time? I used to think it was a mediocre but the massive improvements made to this piece of software over the last year has made it into the best online applications I've ever used. I will try to post items worth sharing here: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/02565532683670666986
2. Read a brilianty simple and short article about privacy which I hope all of you will find time to read trough: An Inalienable Right to Privacy.
3. I learned to use keyboard shortcuts in gmail.
4. Upgraded my work-computer to Windows Vista. I must say that I was pleasantly surprised (even the "horror" of the new security feature "User Account Control" hasn't bothered me much), allthough expectations where low considering all the flack it has received over the last year.
