How eEstonia is driving innovation in the cloud

That's interesting how Estonia's past success in computer security may put it in the forefront of cloud computing, at least in the public sector. Overall, everything is moving to the cloud nowadays. There are numerous cloud storage services, such as the ones listed on www.Top10CloudStorage.com, which provide top notch services. answer

This piece seems really out of place on BBN -- it reads like a marketing whitepaper.

Anyway, the author is off by a lot. The cloud revolution is not just started -- it has already happened. Take the example of Amazon Web Services mentioned in the article -- they launched 10 years ago. In my business (and we are by no means on the bleeding edge), we were using cloud services more than 4 years ago.

So if the author thinks the cloud revolution is now, then it just shows how far behind he is.

Now in terms of the real area for innovation, I'd say it's mobile apps. Already in the US, more than 25% of people use mobile devices as their primary means of accessing the internet. This is only going to grow, and the market is still somewhat fractured and there are plenty of opportunities.

In this area, at least so far, Estonia is lagging far behind. Estonia was a leader 10 years ago, with technologies like mobile parking (through SMS), but then dropped the ball and stopped innovating. The iPhone app for mobile parking was released less than a year ago (December 2011), more than 3 years after the iPhone was first released. It's not only in mobile parking -- the penetration and innovation of mobile apps in Estonia is simply far behind that of other countries. answer

dear ameeriklane, the fact that something is available and somebody uses it doesn't make it de facto standard. With the 'availability' logic we could say that smartphone revolution took place in '96 when the first Nokia Communicator was launched... answer

For sure if you are launching a startup in 2012 your natural choice will be to use AWS or Joyent i.e. you aren't going to start buying hardware and installing it in a server room. But for Enterprise and Government the migration to cloud has barely started and in that sense cloud computing is still in its infancy. That is why there is an opportunity for Estonia - the barriers to entry revolve around data security which has long been Estonia's expertise. answer