On Estonian Customer Service

Customer service stories are always popular with readers, right? Got a few different ones saved up for you.

The Good

Motodepoo is a largish motorcycle supply shop (and Kawasaki dealer). Along with Tartu's Motohoov, it tends to be the default choice for parts and gear, and it has a nice big storefront in Tallinn with a good stock of gear on the premises. Beyond that, it has an online presence, Motopost.ee.

With enough stock come leftovers, and occasionally the store has some really good discounts - especially right at the end of the riding season. Last year, I picked up a nice matte black helmet from them for a song, and this year they had one in the same color scheme as my bike, and in my size. (As personal acquaintances and long-time blog readers might recognize, I have a big head.)

The helmet, an HJC FG-14, cost me 35 euros (original list price was supposedly 250), plus overnight shipping. I sent in the order on Thursday morning, paid the invoice in the afternoon, and got the helmet delivered on Friday.

Except that it was the wrong size and the wrong color.

A system is not defined by its mistakes, but its reaction to mistakes - and Motodepoo was very cool about it. One phone call, and the dude apologized, said he'd find the right helmet in the warehouse and ship it to me. I could return the wrong one via Smartpost (my idea), or just drop by their store some time - no rush (their idea). The right helmet got overnighted again, and I had it on Saturday morning. The box with the wrong helmet was indeed mislabeled; Motodepoo's mistake was in not checking the contents before sending the box off, and they certainly handled the situation extremely well. Considering that this was a very low-value transaction for them - clearing warehouse space, selling a product almost certainly below cost - I am very happy with the company and will certainly deal with them again in the future. Oh, and the helmet's very nice.

The Bad

This was a few months back. I'd just returned from my Nordkapp trip, and didn't want to go out for dinner in Tallinn (where I was spending the night). So I ordered some food via a new service I'd seen somewhere called TapTender: you download an app to your smartphone (or use a Web browser) to order from a restaurant's menu, and they'll either deliver your order, or have it prepared and ready to serve by the time you specify, so you can arrive at the restaurant and get your meal right away. I'm not absolutely convinced there is enough added value in the idea to make it a business case, but here was a good opportunity to try it out.

I'd used the browser to put in my order and the address where it was to be delivered. The wait time was an hour - not particularly fast, but not unreasonable. Except that after an hour, the food was still not there. About an hour and 45 minutes in, I called the restaurant; the food was ready, but the delivery driver had not picked it up yet. They promised to call the TapTender people and figure out what was going on. A few minutes later, I got a call from TapTender's manager: their driver had become inexplicably unavailable, without warning. It did not occur to them that they could fix their mistake by getting the restaurant to use its other delivery service - which was working fine - until I'd suggested it. They said they'd call the restaurant and ask if that was possible, and call me back. When they did, I told them that so much time had passed since my food was supposed to arrive, that there was no more point in it.

My experience with the service was a complete and utter shambles, but to be fair, the TapTender people were very apologetic and seemed to be genuinely sorry and embarrassed. I got a call the next day, from their founder/CEO/whatever, offering a free delivery as compensation, but as I was not in Tallinn any more, I told them to forget it and just make sure it doesn't happen again. It's ludicrous that a contracted, professional delivery driver would simply fail to answer a call-out, but I have reasonable hopes that it taught the company a lesson. If you've used TapTender recently, I'd love to hear about your experience.

The Ugly

Möku is one of Tartu's premier pubs, a tiny room in a basement on the main pedestrian street that is open only in the evenings, serves only drinks (no food), and is extremely popular. It was started as a passion project by a couple of IT guys who wanted to bring the "local pub" culture to Tartu - to open a place that would establish a crowd of regulars, and stimulate a community feel. The combination of cheap drinks and an excellent location made Möku a staple of Tartu's pub culture. For two years, they hosted the monthly open mic shows for Comedy Estonia, of which I was a part. On show nights, comedians drank for free. I quite enjoyed that bit.


Unfortunately, Möku seems to have fallen victim to its own success - something that happens to a lot of personally motivated businesses while they grow big. Möku's crowd has grown to be many times that of its capacity, and these days the street in front of it is one big block party on weekend nights - certainly boosted by two other drinking establishments immediately next to it. On a warm, dry, mosquito-free night, this is a great place to hang out, and a place where you can go and expect to find people you know.

That is, if you can get a drink.

Möku's conceptual notion remains the same, even as its actual business has changed drastically. While in the early days, the founders themselves ran the bar, now it is all hired staff. And while I've met some cool people who worked at the bar while I was doing the comedy stuff, it seems that Möku has had trouble keeping them.

On a recent Friday night, I'd persuaded a few friends, old and new, to leave the dubstep-infused meatmarket that is Shooters and head over to Möku for a few drinks at a place where we could hear ourselves think. A few of the people were foreigners, so I figured it would be fun to buy them an Estonian Flag shot - like I did with a bunch of visiting comedians when we'd go to Möku after our main show. Now, different pubs make Estonian Flag shots differently, and I like the Möku version: pina colada, Salmiakki vodka, and Curacao Blue. (I know it sounds disgusting, but it works.)

After waiting for fifteen minutes to reach the bar, I was told by the girl there that I could not buy Estonian Flag shots for my friends. Not because she didn't know how to make them, but because it would take too long. There was a line, you see; and the only things she would sell were bottled beer, or whatever was on tap. (Maybe if I asked nicely I could have gotten a gin and tonic or a rum and coke, but I didn't dare ask.)

This was not the first time that Möku staff refused to sell me anything more complicated than two ingredients quickly thrown together in a plastic cup. It's a recent phenomenon, and while I can certainly blame the individual bartender, I also think it's a failure of Möku's management. On a massively busy Friday night, they only had two girls on the staff - one of whom was gathering up the empty glasses, running the dishwasher, getting more stock out of the back room, etc. With a clientèle of hundreds, Möku still only has one point of sale and one wired card terminal. And while I'm sure they could make more revenue from selling bottled beers in the time it took them to prepare a few expensive shots, refusing a sale like that is just ridiculous. I have a lot of historical loyalty to Möku, it's been good to me, but after repeating that experience a few times, I have no desire to return. I'd rather just go to that newish Pirogov place, where they make a great White Russian, and if you get there early enough, they might just give you some fantastic soup.

Untapped Market

Why is there no self-storage available in Estonia? I've even seen a place like that in Latvia, it's just off the Tallinn highway on the outskirts of Riga.

Get a prefab warehouse building in an industrial park, separate it into units, let people rent out a unit and put all their unnecessary shit there. Have a store on-site that sells packaging materials and boxes and stuff. Partner with a kolimistakso company.

How much would you pay for something like that? I figure, for the space of a regular one-car garage - let's say 20m2 and 2,5m high - I'd definitely pay a hundred Euro a year. Just to store things that I don't need lying around my apartment.

I've considered just renting or buying a garage, but with a storage space I would not need to worry about keeping it warm and dry, and it would provide some reasonable level of security (cameras, at least).

There are laohotell services, but that's not really for consumers, it's just space on a shelf where you can put your standard europallet.

Am I missing something? Is this available already?

I need a bed

I moved out of my parents' place in Tallinn when I was 18. Went to university in Tartu, lived in a really shitty dorm. Owned nothing but a pan, a pot and a computer. Moved to a better dorm, got my old TV over to Tartu. Graduated, moved to a rental apartment, fit my entire life into a 1988 Honda Accord sedan. The apartment came with an old mattress on the floor; that lasted one winter. Too cold. So I went to Sotka and got a bed. Eventually I also got a nice chair. When I moved from the rental apartment to the one I bought, three years ago, I actually had to make several trips (in a significantly roomier 1993 Mazda 626 hatchback), as well as enlisting the help of a friend with a minivan to move the bed.

The chair's been thrown out since, but the bed is still around. There's nothing much wrong with it, but it's only 105cm wide. That's more than enough for one person. When fitting two, it's in that death zone: manageable, but hella uncomfortable. Honestly, I've never been able to actually just sleep next to a girl in that bed, I'm always really cranky in the morning. Maybe that's why I haven't been able to make a relationship work in the long term. The too-comfy-for-one bed has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So here's my dilemma. I've gone around the furniture shops in Tartu. I need a 160cm wide bed, the jenkkivoodi type (set of mattresses on legs), since my apartment has a 165cm wide sleeping nook. There is a suitable bed in Sotka that costs six thousand kroons. There's one next door, in Asko, that costs thirteen thousand (but supposedly used to cost twenty-two). The more expensive one is indeed more comfortable. Is it worth more than twice the price? Is there anywhere besides Asko/Sotka, Masku, E-Kaubamaja and Teguri Kaubamaja that I need to check out? Is there an awesome local Estonian mattress manufacturer that can give me a great product at a decent cost? (All things being equal, I am willing to pay a small premium for keeping the money in the local economy.)

Th!nk3, and Gadgetry

Over at Th!nk About It, taxes on financial transactions and impressions of corporate governance in Russia. You can see all of my Th!nk3 blog posts here.

Closer to home, my preciousssss:



There's a long post that I've been meaning to write about the comparative merits of this spring's new gadgets, and why I want to buy an iPad, but won't. But my blogging energy is pretty much devoted to Th!nk3 for now, and I'll be doing it until the end of August, so in the meantime I'll just say that my choice of HTC Legend over all the competitors has been very well-considered, and I genuinely believe it is the best device I could buy right now.

The Right and Wrong Ways of Shopping Online

Today, we shall be discussing an aspect of life in Estonia that every enterprising resident has encountered, and everyone else has at the very least bitched about: buying stuff in the US. (I'll be talking about electronics, because that's what I have experience with.)

There's a number of reasons why certain things cost a lot more in Estonia. One of them is market segmentation: the manufacturer will sell for volume in one market and for margins in another. The US consumes a huge number of goods, and there's also more competition. On this side of the Atlantic, people don't buy quite as much vacuous crap; plus there are obligations such as warranties (the EU mandates a minimum warranty of something like a year on all goods, whereas in the US you'd be lucky to get 30 days without having to pay for an "extended warranty"), taxation differences, etc. All this means that manufacturers tend to set higher prices for their goods. In fact, there's a rough rule of thumb that a product will have the same numeric price tag - in USD over there, in Euro over here.

More importantly, manufacturers are really annoyed when people circumvent these limitations. This is why US warranties are often not honoured abroad, even if the manufacturer has an official repair centre in the country and sells the exact same device locally, warranty and all. (There are differences between policy and practice - I've talked to people whose US-sourced cameras were routinely serviced at nominal or no cost by the Canon affiliate in Tartu, and I've also talked to people whose laptops with "worldwide warranties" were denied repairs because the person who brought them in was not an American on a business trip.) This is also part of the reason why Amazon.com has the line "Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S." in the description of all of their electronic components. The other part of that reason is that Amazon has subsidiaries in Europe, and would prefer you shopped there, and paid higher margins to Amazon as well as Apple.

For Estonia specifically, there is the added problem of us being a very small market. It's mostly not worthwhile for manufacturers to set up a presence here, they just sell the franchise to a local company. The reason an iMac costs $200 more in Tallinn than in Helsinki is because the Apple stores here are actually all iDream or iDeal - local companies that buy small volumes of stock at less than Apple's best wholesale prices, then add their own costs and as much profit margin as they can get away with on top of that.

Fortunately, you can get around all of this. There are companies in Estonia that will buy an item for you in the US, ship it here, take care of all the paperwork, etc. But these schemes involve a lot of extra steps that make the goods expensive, often more expensive than an equivalent that you can get right here, so they are mostly used by people who are looking for a highly specialized niche product that simply is not available in Estonia by any other means - people for whom getting exactly what they want is more important than the cost. (I've never seen a company like this advertise its services for more than a few months at a time, so there's a good likelyhood that such companies just go out of business, or offer the opportunity as a sideline to their main revenue generator.)

These days, there are also ways to buy things from the US directly. B&H is the biggest one I've seen - a store in New York City that started out dedicated to professional photo & video equipment, but now does most of their business online. They will actually ship anything in their (quite expansive) stock anywhere in the world, including Estonia - and if you choose a slightly more expensive shipping method, they will even have their partners deal with customs on your behalf.

Both of the options above, however, involve paying customs duties. It still makes sense on some purchases - the B&H site was pointed out to me by someone who wanted to buy a Canon 50D semi-professional camera, 13 700 EEK delivered to Estonia versus 16 800 EEK at a local supplier. But the true bargain hunter will want to bypass the Tolli- ja Maksuamet entirely.

Here we come to the bit that made me write this entire article. Because in buying electronics from the US, there is a Right Way and a Wrong Way.

The Right Way is to find an acquaintance who happens to be going to the US for whatever reason, and ask them to bring back the gadget for you. I brought a MacBook Pro back for a friend this summer - even with Washington DC's sales tax and whatever SEB charged me to use my credit card abroad, the final cost out of my bank account was 14 000 EEK and change; even half a year later, the same model in Estonia costs over 18 000. The first time I went to the US - years ago - I was bringing back not just the MP3 player and digital camera I got for myself, but a suitcase full of special equipment for my employer's technical support center, and a snowboard. (The snowboard was for a colleague who was returning to Estonia a week later, but couldn't bring it himself because he was already carrying a full desktop tower PC and a huge, professional CRT monitor.)

The Wrong Way, if you're buying anything expensive, is to get it from eBay and have it shipped to you privately.

Postal packages have a declared value for their contents. If the value is below 150 Euro, the Estonian customs authorities won't even look at it - this means that you can buy books, CDs and DVDs from Amazon.com without any trouble. (Actually, even purchases from Amazon's main site will be shipped from the German warehouse half the time if the delivery address is within the EU, but that doesn't happen every time and you shouldn't count on it.)

If the declared value of the package is more than 150 Euro, it will be subject to import duties, equal to the local VAT. 20% right now, but it was 18% years ago, when I was receiving a shipment from India containing spare parts for two thousand inflatable dildos. (It's a long story.) There's also an administration fee attached - the threshold used to be a lot less than 150 Euro, so I've been in a situation where the fee was more than the tax itself. You can find the full set of customs rules for postal packages here, or a partial bad translation into English here.

Finally, here's the Really Wrong Way: you can buy an expensive piece of goods in the States (or on eBay), and try to outsmart the Customs Board. You can have the goods delivered to a friend in the US, who will resend them to you directly, marking them as a gift and declaring a very minor value. Murphy's Law dictates that the package will be lost in transit (more likely than not, stolen by a postal worker en route - a friend in Canada has taken to labeling all his packages "educational materials" on the assumption that the same Canadian posties who appropriate expensive-looking boxes are fundamentally uninterested in education), at which point the international postal system will either shrug, or refund the sender the $1 declared value of the package and tell him to have a nice day.

Then you can do the thing that is not just Wrong, but annoying, the thing that a friend of mine has been whining about all day: buy an expensive piece of electronics via a third-party vendor on eBay, have the vendor declare the package as a gift, then explode in righteous indignation when the Customs Board says, "no, this is actually something you bought, so yes, you'll have to pay the equivalent of Estonia's VAT on it". If, as my friend, you've also selected a private delivery service such as FedEx and UPS and didn't want to pay them to deal with Customs on your behalf, you'll also experience all the joy of getting a bureaucratic institution governed by bysanthine local and international regulations to pay attention to you as an individual - exactly the sort of entity that a Customs authority has absolutely no interest in accomodating.

What annoys me isn't the attempt to get around the Customs rules. The Estonian version of the regulations has a paragraph that specifically addresses eBay purchases with a dubious declared value: A non-commercial package is a goods package that is sent by a private party from a third (non-EEC) country to an EEC resident on an ad hoc basis, contains only goods intended for the personal use of the recipient and his family (such as gifts), whose type and quantity do not indicate a commercial purpose, and which the sender is sending to the recipient for free. (My translation, their emphasis.) Thus, an iMac that the recipient's American cousin received, unboxed, played around with, placed back in the box and sent to Estonia along with pictures of the cousin's new baby and a bag of home-baked chocolate chip cookies is something the authorities should not be taxing. An iMac sent by someone for whose effort you paid, is not a gift or a delivery of your own property - it is a purchase, and as any purchase in Estonia, it is subject to local VAT. (For bonus morality, see this site, which talks about state sales tax on Internet purchases in the US in terms of whether the recipient is benefitting from the services provided by the state and paid for by the taxes.)

I am annoyed by people who claim some sort of ideological high ground for downloading movies & music from the Internet - "information must be free", "copyright is unfair" etc.: just admit that you're doing it because you can, it's convenient and there's an infinetisimal chance of ever getting caught. In the same way, I am annoyed by people who claim the Customs Board is being unfair to them by not accepting their argument that an eBay transaction somehow constitutes a delivery of personal-use property, not a purchase of goods from a commercial seller. It's disingenuous, and it makes you look like a twat.

The Slightly Used Book Shop

I've often said that there are only a few international consumerist icons that I really wish existed in Estonia, and that among them are Subway (the sandwich place), and Waterstone's bookstores. I have a vocational disorder where I cannot read a book in translation if I know the original language - I keep getting distracted by the artifacts, keep going "I see what you did there". The selection of English books in Tartu and Estonia in general, while significantly improved in recent times, is still inadequate for my requirements. Half of my baggage coming back from the States was dead tree.

Yes, there's Amazon, but a)shipping gets expensive, and b)I still enjoy the experience of visiting a brick-and-mortar bookshop and browsing through the tomes. It's probably ironic how, in the age of the Internet, physical books are still so eminently popular. Popular enough, in fact, to fall under the "80% of everything is shit" maxim. For proof, go no further than the guest segments on The Daily Show.

I saw something in NYC that is even better than Waterstone's, or Barnes & Noble, or Borders. The biggest bookstore in Manhattan does a very brisk business in second hand. They actually have a section and staff dedicated to buying back people's books.

This is an idea that, I think, would be extremely beneficial to Tartu. I have actually considered doing it myself, except for the fact that I am far too lazy to handle all the minutiae of starting up and running a small business; I would need to find a really good manager and stay a silent investor type myself. (I do know a person who'd be perfect, but that very character quality means she's already quite busy with various organizational duties.) But I genuinely think that a slightly used book store could be successful in this town. Tartu has an Apollo and a Rahva Raamat, and the university bookshop, but beyond that it's just antique stores with derelict wares. There must be others like me in this town, people with shelves stuffed with books they enjoyed once but probably won't re-read in the future. If, say, the average new English-language paperback costs 150 EEK, my shop could buy them back for 50 and sell for 75. And we don't have to limit ourselves to English books, the point rather is to offer a cheap alternative for modern, mainstream literature, in any (physical) form. How many times do you think we would re-sell the same Harry Potter volume, collecting a profit each time? I gather that US videogame stores have been doing quite well off that model.

And no, I wouldn't be competing with libraries: they have a limited selection, aren't motivated to keep up with demand, and come with a built-in obligation to return the book by a certain deadline. Ownership just feels good.

Until I get off my ass and make this happen, however, here's the next best thing: BookMooch. It's the book version of an idea some friends and I threw around for a while, the International Beer Exchange - the point was to mail a bottle of your local brew to someone far away, and get a credit that you could use to request a different flavour from elsewhere. (I even owned the domain internationalbeerexchange.com for a while.) My plans for the Slightly Used Book Shop did actually involve providing the service across Estonia, using the SmartPOST network. BookMooch is a more Web2.0 community-ish affair: you list the books you no longer want, and people can show their interest. You send off the book, and get an arbitrary credit that you can use to request another book from someone else. Encouragingly, Estonia is actually already represented quite well, with around 60 books currently available.

Here's my page on that service. Sign up, and tell your friends about the service!

Still Unconvinced

The conclusion of the Th!nk About It project. Check out the video at the bottom, it's hilarious, a much better execution of stereotypes than that "Union of Subsidized Farmers" crap.

Comments on that page please.

FWIW I'm going to vote for IRL; I'm not a huge fan of anyone, but at least I can respect Tunne Kelam for bothering to hang out at Tartu's main footbridge at 9am on a Thursday, handing out free coffee to passersby. (The coffee is horrible, but I did score a rather cute EPP-ED bottle opener.)

The Thousand Dollar Car Theory Still Holds

The Mazda RX-8 was launched in the early 00s, and at the time, I really thought it was close to the perfect car. It was a rear-wheel drive sports coupe, looked really good, and was relatively practical; in fact there was an ad campaign for it saying that if you tried hard, you could actually justify it to your spouse as a family car.

I liked it so much at the time that I made myself a promise. Obviously I couldn't even come close to affording the RX-8, but others bought them, and of course new cars depreciate rapidly - especially expensive sportscars from non-prestigious brands. I told myself that when I was 25 - which seemed like a long way away - I would buy one. Even if it was used. Even if I would have to pay it off until I was 30.

I turned 25 a little less than two weeks ago.

Unfortunately, the RX-8 has a serious flaw. Its engine is unusual, a completely different engineering solution to regular piston motors. It's called a rotary engine, or a Wankel after the German who invented it. I won't go into detail, but basically it is smaller and lighter than a piston engine, but produces more power. The downside is that because of some inherent problems with Wankel's design, it's not terribly reliable. Reports from RX-8 owners suggest that the engine tends to break down catastrophically after 100,000km, even with careful maintenance. If the RX-8 had come with a regular engine, such as Mazda's 2.3-liter turbo from the MPS line of cars, it would be perfect; but it doesn't. An RX-8 that has done around 30,000km costs about twelve thousand Euro in Estonia today; not completely outside the realms of my budget, but not the sort of money I'd feel comfortable spending on an inherently unreliable machine, despite the fact that I don't drive that much. (My current car has done around 25,000km in two and a half years, and the bulk of that has been on the Tallinn-Tartu freeway.)

However, I would still like to keep the promise to myself. And it appears that the Estonian Volkswagen dealer got an unusually large shipment of the new Sciroccos. Now, I like the Scirocco: it looks good, and it's based on the VW Golf GTI, which is considered one of the most fun cars this side of something fundamentally impractical. (People who write for car magazines have repeatedly stated that on real-world roads, a Golf GTI will certainly be able to keep up with a Ferrari.) In Estonia, today, VW will sell you a Scirocco with all the equipment you need for less than 20,000 Euro. For a car in this class, that's bloody cheap, and VWs keep their value quite well as used cars, and hey, my mortgage interest rate dropped like a brick in April, didn't it?



I was in Tallinn this Friday on other business anyway, so I went to the main VW dealership and test-drove the Scirocco. The one they had was the top-end model, with the turbocharged engine and DSG gearbox - the best automatic gearbox in the world right now, by general consensus of people who know about these things.

My first reaction was that I was right to aim for the cheapest model, with the less powerful 1.4 twin-charged engine (which is still powerful enough to force me to contribute to Estonia's ailing budget), and manual gearbox. I've had the argument with Mingus, who dismisses the common argument of manuals giving better control, because with an automatic you always have both hands on the steering wheel - and that's safer. Honestly, I can't refute it, and the DSG was really awesome. I simply enjoy driving a stick shift more.

But honestly, even while I drove the Scirocco down the back roads of Tabasalu, I couldn't feel it. I wasn't experiencing that wonder, that sense of do want that I would need to justify the purchase. I spent over eight thousand kroons on my little aluminium HP laptop, which was more than the competition, and I didn't strictly need it - but the satisfaction from owning something genuinely awesome was worth it.

It's the same thing, every time I drive a new car. It's great, sure, but it's not mind-boggling; it's not an order of magnitude better than whatever I am driving myself at the time. I had the same experience with a Suzuki Grand Vitara, back when I had a 1988 Honda Accord; the Suzuki was quiet and comfortable, but dog-slow in comparison. Modern cars are just too heavy to take advantage of the power, and neither do they have the ability to filter out the imperfections of our roads - certainly they don't provide the difference to match the price increase compared to a ten-year-old car. Yes, a new one will be more reliable - but, if you choose your ride carefully, a used one will not be more expensive to run than the maintenance costs of something that still has to be serviced at the dealership to keep the warranty.

It's odd that, for such a gearhead, I am having such trouble getting properly excited about something as nice as the new Scirocco.

----
PS. The guy I talked to at the dealership was a real pleasure. Friendly, active and competent. I feel like an asshole for deciding against the Scirocco, so if you're looking for a new car these days and have been disappointed with the customer service levels at most dealerships, go to Saksa Auto Pluss in Tartu (corner of Aardla and Ringtee) and ask for Allan Ainson. And I think there are some really good discounts on most VW models these days.

Do Want, Assorted

It's spring and the gadgets are coming. HP has finally released the HD-screen version of the 2140, and I want it. I've got a 2133 right now, as long-time readers might remember; it's by far the best notebook on the market in terms of build quality, and has an excellent keyboard that I have typed very long texts on. The trouble with the 2133 is its dog-slow CPU. The 2140 has an Atom CPU, which means it's faster and lasts longer on the same battery. It also has a larger screen, in the same outer casing. Up until now the screen they offered was a meager 1024x576, but the new one is 1366x768 (same pixel count as the 2133, but 10.1" instead of 8.9").

I just tried the configurator on HP's website and a 2140 with the HD screen, six-cell battery, 2gb RAM and a 7200rpm hard drive came out to $684 (sans Windows). That's less than I paid for my 2133 a year ago, and it's the top hardware they have. The 2140 is even available in Estonia; let's hope they get the HD model in stock soon.

Meanwhile, I keep drooling over cameras. The Sigma SP2 is what compact cameras should have become ages ago: a really good sensor in a small body. It has no optical zoom, but it shoots in RAW mode, so at 14mp you can just crop to taste. Still, it costs $649, and ultimately I don't need all those megapixels; what compact cameras really need is a very, very good 2mp sensor. (How many photos have you printed in poster-size, in your life?)

This should appear in Europe soonish as the Canon 500D. It's the 50D's sensor in a 450D body. Desirable for a second, but ultimately I will probably have to wait for Micro Four Thirds cameras to drop in price. I need a tilt-screen, and the entire SLR concept is useless for digital cameras; its point was to show the same image in the viewfinder that would be captured on film, but now you can just export the signal from the sensor to the LCD, before it gets captured in full detail. Micro Four Thirds keeps the high-quality sensor and swapping optics of DSLRs, without the extraneous bullshit, and in a smaller package. Since there are companies making adapters that let you fit standard Nikon/Canon lenses to MFC bodies, that's definitely the way to go. Until then, there are things my Canon SX10 can do that I still haven't learned to use properly.

By the way: the keyboard on my N85 broke and became unglued. Apparently it's a common problem, a design flaw. I like the hardware on the N85, but the build quality is atrocious compared to the 6500C I had before, and the phone itself is a lot more expensive. So while I'm waiting for Tele2 and Nokia's warranty to get back to me, I've ordered an Ericsson T39 off eBay. 344 EEK including shipping, and two batteries. It's old, and it's eminently cool.

Feeding my "ooh, shiny!" reflex

Anyone want to buy a Mazda? I've had my car up on auto24.ee for a month now. Spent some money getting it into shape for the technical test, which it passed with flying colors - and then realized that I've had it for almost two full years now. In that time I've put less than 20,000 km on it, and most of that was a couple of extended trips to Riga and a lot of time spent on the Tallinn-Tartu road. Most Estonian bloggers will have bad things to say about that road, but honestly, it's an acquired skill. You have to get used to driving the best part of two hundred klicks on a windy, dark, icy dual carriageway. One can always tell a driver with extensive experience on the Freeway of Death, because they don't blink if a car bears down on them on a kamikaze overtake before getting back into its own lane a few inches from their bumper.

Other than the black bumper (ripped off the old one in a parking lot, decided not to paint the replacement - good decision, retrospectively) and a few other scars, there's nothing really wrong with the Mazda. The point is simply that it's a big family hatchback, and I hardly ever drive with a passenger, let alone more than one. In the winter, it takes me longer to scrape the ice off the car than to actually drive to work. I have no pressing need for a 626, and I'm a bit bored with it. I suppose I might as well drive it until it explodes, but just in case, I put it up for sale. The price is probably higher than I'd actually expect to get for it, but it's the one I would let the car go for.

Thing is, I've been looking at the ads, and there doesn't seem to be much to replace it with. I don't, strictly speaking, need a car - in Tartu I can just as easily walk everywhere, and the occasional cab ride would still come out to a lesser cost than the petrol, insurance and maintenance on the car. So the replacement would have to be something special. I don't want to get a big car loan, just out of a general sense of imminent apocalypse, otherwise there's a sweet WRX STI wagon being offered in Tartu, with 15,000 km on the clock, for the price of a middling Kia. Without external financing, and assuming I could either sell the Mazda or trade it in, my budget stretches to maybe fifty or sixty thousand kroons. And the sad thing is, in that price range, there aren't really many cars that are worth the hassle. For a '93, my Mazda is stunningly comfortable (I'm reminded of this every time I drive someone else's car of a similar vintage), as fast as I could practically need it to be in Estonia, and depressingly reliable. It has that Japanese econobox quality, there are plenty of small niggles that make me think of getting something newer, but ultimately there just aren't enough things wrong with it to justify throwing it out. It's never, to use the favourite expression of Rolls-Royce owners, failed to proceed. Almost anything else in this price range will be, at best, marginally more comfortable, fast, or reliable. Though many will be more cool than a dirty-green, fifteen-year-old Mazda with an unpainted front jaw. But even then there are pitfalls. For example, I would never buy a BMW. Objectively, I know that they are fine cars, but I really don't want to be the sort of person who drives one.

I used to be a massive gearhead, but like a lot of people in deepest, darkest December, I guess I just find it hard to get excited about anything these days.

Nordic Mobile Media

Nice conference, a lot more interesting and useful stuff than I expected. Not entirely sure what I was doing there - the organizers wanted someone from my company to attend, put my presentation in the conference booklet, but never asked me to actually stand up and talk. (And covered my expenses. I'm pretty sure my employer didn't pay any attendance fee.) Played stomp the teacher a bit, but not too much - actually the best reflection of the quality of the speakers. Some boring stuff, and Aspiro's mobile music spiel was so much buzzword bingo.

Salient points:

1) I brought this up back at Mobile Monday a few weeks ago, and I still maintain that mass SMS campaigns are ridiculously annoying - and it's only the carrier that can do them cost-effectively, so the carrier gets the bad will. A very pleasant lady from Tele2 asked me for my card to give to her people so they'd stop sending me SMSes about concert tickets; so not the point. Opt-in is only there to alleviate the carriers' collective conscience and get the EFF and its ilk off their backs: most users will tick the box somewhere without really thinking about it, and aren't too likely to go and demand to be taken off the list. I've been with Tele2 ever since it was still Q GSM (in fact I still have my original SIM card from 1998 as a souvenier), but fuck if I know their customer service number off the top of my head. My point is: the bad will appears in the second that your user receives the spam text. Don't tell me that it's actually opt-in and it's dead easy for me to get off the list. Too late, you've already pissed me off.

2) The dude from Elisa (not the same dude that offered me a quarter of a million kroons to write a service that ties in all manner of blog platforms, social networks and photo sharing sites through their existing APIs to be used from the mobile phone, but then this one was sober) assures me that the Estonian networks aren't going to run out of bandwidth in any foreseeable future, even if flat-rate 3,5G broadband takes off massively. He also assures me that theirs really is flat-rate, that they aren't really enforcing the 3GB per month limit in the contract, but I expect that will change when people in Võhma start torrenting. Apparently the entire Tallinn-Tartu road will get 3G coverage within a year. Cheers mate - the Kõu backhaul in the intercity coach's free WiFi sucks donkey balls.

3) I'm the compleat skeptic at these events, and I'm sure I'm annoying a lot of folks, but I believe it is a necessary service. Almost two decades ago I played the runt in a holiday production of The Emperor's New Clothes at a major Tallinn theater, and my job was to run out and shout: "The king is naked!". Now I do conceptually the same, except I'm asking "Where's the money?". I don't believe in Web 2.0 business models. I'm sure Rubberduck gets very nice revenue from all the carriers buying their Mobile TV solution, but ultimately they're just enabling a fundamentally idiotic proposition, and sooner or later the music will stop. Like it has for Joost. Then again, I'd watch Ze Frank on my shiny new N85 (as long as it doesn't max out my shiny new 500GB-per-month data plan), and I'm really not their target audience.

4) I love John Strand for the ability to stand up in a conference hall, say "I've been in this business for 14 years and have never been wrong", and not get pelted by rotten tomatoes. I'm sure he sees the same people from the carriers over and over again at these things, and I'm sure some of them are dying to just shout YES YOU FUCKING HAVE. (Disclaimer: whether he's actually ever been wrong is beside the point.)

5) Ultimately the future of mobile marketing is a banner on your phone's standby screen, and until we get there, everything else is just New Media wankery. It makes me sad, but no amount of user annoyance will stop it, because the carriers control the selection of handsets and their embedded content. Vodafone and Orange are very nearly there, except I don't think they've started rotating ads for third parties yet. All it takes is a heavy subsidy on a glamourphone, and equipping the cheapest plans with free data within the walled garden (a.k.a. not taking the piss), and the user base will eat it up.

6) Meanwhile, if you have to advertise on mobile, stick to the professionals who know how to set up a decent audience-participation exercise - I can see how those would work, and the case studies certainly look impressive. But for heavens' sake, NO MORE FUCKING BANNERS!*

7) I was almost the least appropriate attendee at the conference - a lowly Senior Technical Writer surrounded by CEOs and division heads - but I was representing a diversified multinational corporation with a 1,5 billion pound market cap. I know it's wrong, but there's just so much sarkastic pleasure to be derived from going "uh huh, good luck with your widget company!". In my defence, Jan Rezab looks like he's fucking sixteen.

---
* If I dare to show my face at the next MoMo, will I get bitchslapped by the Estonian carriers and their awesome Mobile Reach Package?

Went to Mobile Monday. Saw some mildly interesting presentations, including one by a reassuringly competent person from Tele2's head office called Josep Nolla. Properly underscored the lamentable fact that Estonians, on the whole, cannot do public speaking for the life of them.

The three main mobile operators in Estonia have joined forces for mobile advertising, offering a joint package - you can buy banner space on all of their WAP portals from a single source. It's expensive, 400 EEK for a thousand impressions; they're claiming a clickthrough rate of 2% to 7%, and a conversion rate of up to 25%, which means you will expect to pay about 80 EEK in banner costs to sell a single widget. Fine if you're selling flatscreen TVs, not so much if you're selling train tickets.

The Tele2 bloke showed an interesting case study of targeting people with an SMS campaign, but failed to answer my question satisfactorily. See, when I get text messages, it tends to be for two reasons: either it's a friend telling me something, or the bank telling me some money just arrived. So I tend to give a lot of attention to incoming SMSes. Consequently, I am disproportionately annoyed by SMS spam; and that is only practiced by my carrier. The carrier can afford to do mass text campaigns, because texts have the highest margin per cost of any mobile service. To Tele2, it's just 160 bytes of data sent to my handset. To anyone else, it's 2.50 EEK per mailing. SMSes have the exact same barrier that is considered to be the only effective (if theoretical) solution to spam: micropayments per message. Not too much trouble for individuals, but prohibitive to spam networks sending out millions of messages at a time.

The panel's answer was that the user alienation factor can be overcome with targeting - sending me only promotions I'd be genuinely interested in; but my rebuttal to that is, in that case, why is he, mr. Nolla (being Tele2), still spamming me with rock concert tickets?

The other issue is that WAP sites are getting more and more elaborate - which is fine, 3G network speeds make browsing rich sites acceptable, but the bastards are still metering traffic. If Tele2/EMT/Elisa want to show me banners, and funnel me to promo websites, and then charge me for the privilege of downloading their banner to my phone, they're taking the piss. But apparently we'll see proper flat-rate data added to operators' plans within next year. Inshalla.

HP FAIL

Wow.

I got my top-spec HP Mininote from the States a few months before they were available in Estonia (and at a useful discount, too). I love it, but its one weakness is the crappy Via C7-M CPU. Otherwise it's awesome: loads of storage (120gb), loads of memory (2gb), very good keyboard, outstanding screen, quite decent battery life, and the all-metal body rocks.

I'd been waiting for them to announce the next version, expecting a shift to the Via Nano - a competitor to the Intel Atom chip that seemed every bit as good in tests. With more CPU power, and Via's superior power-management expertise (the C7-M is meant to compete with ULV Celerons, and blows them out of the water) the Mininote MkII would have been the ultimate portable machine.

Instead, what HP has done with the MkII is fix the one weakness the old model had, and make it inferior to the old model in every other way. Worse screen, worse battery life, less storage, less RAM, plastic case... Way to FAIL.

Who do I know

that's coming back from the States in the second half of October?

Justin? Mingus? Anyone?

Things I've accomplished in three days of vacation

1) Meet a new blogger - specifically Colm and his charming fiancee Eeva. Met up for lunch at the Place, where he regailed Justin and me with tales of Irishness, such as the experience of crossing the UK national border while having red hair, and the ultimate purpose of the Irish army (to guard all the weapons from being stolen by the IRA). While he objected forcefully that no Irish person has ever been known to actually utter the phrase "top o' the mornin' to ya", he does write "ye" in his emails.

2) Got excellent customer service at the New Yorker store I blogged about previously. I bought a jacket from them and the zipper broke. I was actually considering just getting a clothes repair place to put it a new zipper, but that would not have been blogworthy, so I went back to the store to complain. To my complete amazement, not only did they take the garment back (despite it being past the 14-day no-questions-asked return period - of course this was not a question of wrong size or style, but of an actual fault in its manufacture), but they gave me my money back. That's right: no dicking around with months of expert assessments and repairs, no store credit - cold, hard cash. I'm sure Mingus's worldview has just shattered.

3) Saw a couple interesting crawlspaces while prepping my team's nightgame. I might do an article about some of these prime locations after the game.

4) Shaved. I'm told I look completely different without facial hair.

Early tomorrow morning, I'm getting on a coach and buggering off on a two-week Eurotrip. Tartu to Barcelona and back again, with stops in exciting locations along the way. Stay tuned for trippin' bloggery.

Tasku Revisited

Like it or not, the opening of the Tasku mall is the talk of Tartu and will be for a while. Being the compleat yuppie, I am not immune to its lures, and so you may have to endure further reports. In the words of a forum signature I once saw - if God is inside us all, then I sure hope he likes tacos, cause that's what he's getting.

The most significant item in Tasku's assortment is not the cinema, although that is very welcome indeed; it is the New Yorker clothes store. A chain that I have not seen in Estonia before, it occupies one of the largest spaces and differs in important ways from the Seppäläs that it ostensibly competes against.

It seems to be aimed predominantly at teenagers, which I suppose is a wise move, but also carries sizes and styles fit for an older crowd. The key to its appeal - and you will have to infer the extent of this appeal from the fact that I am writing about clothes in the first place - is a combination of very reasonable prices and fashions which are just a little bit more distinctive than what you would find elsewhere. It seems to commoditize an overall boutique aesthetic, but at a basic-casual price point. It's not entirely without competition, I've been shopping at Cartini for years, but it's new, different, and big. I walked into New Yorker after work today, and came out with a winter jacket. It's fake leather, but it's close enough, looks good on me, and cost about a fifth of what the real deal would have been even at a cheap place like Cartini. Since the only truly practical aspect of a leather jacket - the fact that it'll protect your skin if you fall of a Harley - is somewhat lost on me, I am prepared to take a chance and eating the price.

Furthermore, New Yorker brings a few new and very commendable touches to the shopping experience. I was annoyed at first to see a shortage of cashiers, but somehow the two blonde girls at the single checkout desk were managing to keep the Friday-evening crowd moving along at an acceptable clip - which is little short of stupefying for one with experiences of Hullud Päevad combat. Their shopping bags are free, and far more pleasing at a tactile level than the plastic ones at Kaubamaja; they try to avoid the expense by stressing environmental concerns, making the point that their bags are actually valuable and they would be very grateful if you brought it back for recycling the next time you stopped by Tasku. Whether that'll happen often enough is beside the point: I applaud a stimulation of that sort of mentality. And the most pleasant innovation is something no Estonian store has ever been known to do: New Yorker has a no-quips, 14-day return policy. If the garment is as-new, they'll actually give you your money back.

With the opening of this new store, Tasku and Tartu seem to have become the entry point for something which is long-overdue in this land: civilized retail.

Tartu in your Tasku

The Tasku shopping center opened at noon today. There's been relatively little fanfare, considering; maybe the developer, already over budget, could not spare the cash for publicity. Maybe he decided - not unreasonably - that people will come and check out the new glass blob right in the middle of town anyway. God knows the construction has been getting in everyone's way long enough.

The verdict from ambling around it with the crowds on my lunch hour: meh. Unlike most malls, designed to let you shop for absolutely anything, Tasku is almost entirely a collection of clothes shops. Officially they call it a fashion and recreation center; there is no general store, no electronics stores (except for the Apple outlet, complete with bowls of fresh apples and trays of apple crumble for the opening day visitors). I vaguely remember something about a Rimi back when they first started construction on the new mall, but it's not there. A smattering of eateries at least makes Tasku useful as a lunch destination.

There are two things in Tasku designed to draw in a crowd at least somewhat different from the teenagers that will gravitate to the mid-market ragshops: the Rahva Raamat bookstore and the Cinamon multi-screen cinema. The cinema is a very welcome addition to Tartu, but there is a potential problem: while Tasku does have a decent-sized parking structure attached to it, you will definitely not be able to park long enough to go in and see a movie without paying for it. That is definitely a competitive advantage that the old two-screen Ekraan theater has over the flashy new Cinamon.

The Rahva Raamat is big and impressive, but in terms relevant to me and the readers of AnTyx, pointless. Their selection of English-language literature is woeful, barely matching that of the Apollo bookstore in Kaubamaja. Maybe they will expand it, but for now it looks like a stunningly bad move. I refuse to believe that in a city like Tartu, between its expats and students, there is no market for English books. (There isn't much native-Estonian literature that I am interested in, and I absolutely cannot read translations, it's a professional hazard.)

Tasku will certainly serve a useful purpose, but it was supposed to be the end-all be-all mall. Which it isn't. It's just another link in the inevitable Kaubahall-to-Zeppelin axis of consumption that is downtown Tartu.

Surely you must be joking.

The iPhone 3G goes on sale in Estonia today.

At ridiculous costs. The device itself is actually quite cheap for what it does - from 1500 to 4000 EEK - but that's with a two-year plan at 550 or 890 EEK per month. While I do actually know people who spend as much on their phonecalls each month, let's look at what the plan gives you: 100 or 250 each of minutes within the EMT network, SMSes, and megabytes of traffic. Nevermind that for a device designed to show full-fat websites at 3G speeds, 250 megabytes per month is nothing. Fortunately EMT hasn't gone completely American-moronic, because they do log calls by the second instead of rounding them up to the nearest minute - which is the mindfuck behind plans with enormous numbers of "free minutes" in them - but the first time you call a non-EMT number, you're paying extra, above and beyond your already really expensive plan. At least the extra pricing is relatively cheap: 1.75 EEK per minute for calls, and 2.50 EEK per megabyte.

Because you can actually terminate the contract early, it's possible to calculate the actual cost of the device, purchased legally from EMT: 10,5 thousand kroons for the 16GB model. Over a thousand dollars.

Ridiculous.

Local News

Estonians are buying up Georgian wines in a show of support. Best thing you can do, really - guaranteed to benefit the Georgian nation rather than any political movement, so it is good irrespective of any doubts you might have as to who caused what. In conflicts such as South Ossetia, no side is ever completely innocent. I recommend the Akhasheni Marani, should be available in Selvers - a very good semi-sweet red.

Parliament is about to go into an emergency session to draft a joint statement on Georgia. An emergency session can be called with support from no less than a fifth of the Riigikogu (21 members). The session has been endorsed by all represented parties, except for Keskerakond. Vilja Savisaar's official statement to the press was, let's wait and see and gather information and not rush into things. Wouldn't do to piss off the Russians.

UPDATE 1: Meanwhile, Ansip is trying to get to Georgia. Might just be PR for now, but if he does show up in Thbilisi, that'll be a great move on his part. Compensating for political ineptitude with personal bravery; could be worse, and he's doing the right thing when it counts. A commenter on Postimees: "When the Russians came here, did anybody help out?" That is exactly why we need to be involved in Georgia.

UPDATE 2: There is a humanitarian aid flight being put together by Estonian Air, the Red Cross and various other local relief agencies. The Estonian Reserve Officers' Association is apparently putting together a team of 90 volunteers that will be on the flight and will distribute the humanitarian aid, as well as help out relief efforts on the ground. The email that I saw specifically mentioned that the group would absolutely not be involved in combat, but otherwise should be prepared for anything, including hostile fire. The email also says that perhaps the presense of Estonian reservist volunteers in Georgia will serve as inspiration to NATO. I haven't really heard of the group before, but it is certainly a good sentiment.

Get Smart

It's odd to think that it has been over a year since I got my apartment - and almost two years since I made the decision and signed the papers for it. It took me quite a while to get some furniture in it, because I was picky. An artist friend came up with an idea for the interior, and putting together the correct set of furniture was nontrivial. It had to be comfortable, functional (there isn't enough space in my little studio for fanciful decoration), and above all, interesting. I've spent two decades in a Lasnamäe tower block, and I spend all day in a bland office, but I could control my environment with the apartment.

There was one bit of furniture that I was missing until yesterday. I had been using a ghetto arrangement of boxes and trays in its stead, because I just couldn't find anything worthwhile in my price range. With a bit of disposable income from a freelance job, I finally fixed that. So, since I've talked about customer service recently, I figure it's worth actually praising the companies that deliver remarkably good service.

The item of furniture itself was bought from ON24, one of many online furniture shops in Estonia. It is distinguished by a special marketing trick: if you register an account, you start accumulating a small credit - something like 25 EEK per month, and occasionally they have campaigns where you'll get a bigger chunk of credit as a one-time deal, for signing up to a newsletter or something. This credit can then be used for up to a quarter of the price of an item you're buying from the store. The point is that you sign up long before you actually start buying anything, and they get to send you targeted ads. They might sell emails to a spam list as well - I didn't check the T&Cs, and since I gave them my spam-catching email, I didn't particularly care either.

Anyway, they had the exact item I wanted. I got to save a very decent chunk of money thanks to the credit. The website said the item would be delivered within six weeks, which I more or less expected, since it was from a small Estonian manufacturer of designer furniture and it seemed logical that they would make these things to order. In the event, I got a call from them saying they got the item a month early, and could deliver it ASAP. Which was nice. Good work, ON24. Recommended.

My other recommendation is the delivery outfit, SmartPOST. These guys are setting up a country-wide network of drop boxes in malls and shopping centers. I'm guessing they are targeting e-commerce websites who are not being trusted with people's addresses, or intend to do discreet shipments. The idea is that the seller leaves a package in one of these postbox affairs, and sends you an access code by SMS. You come to the mall at your leisure, punch in the code, and the box containing your item opens up. The obvious gag here is that the service will be of particular convenience to drug dealers (you can even leave a mail-order package in the box and the customer will use his credit card to pay a set amount before the goods are released), but actually it does solve an important issue - that of delivery times.

Estonians love to shop online, that goes without saying. There are a number of home delivery services, and they are affordable enough. The problem is that they have the same business hours as anyone else. You can order your stuff to be delivered to your office, but there are any number of legitimate reasons why you might not want to do that; say, it's a bulky item that you do not want to be dragging home afterwards, or you've just ordered an inflatable dildo from eBay. Otherwise, you have to wait for the courier to call you, then rush home to pick up the package. I've done that many times, but I live in Tartu, and can get from work to home in five minutes. What if you live in Lasnamäe and work in Kopli?

Anyway, the post box network is not quite online yet, so in the meanwhile SmartPOST is acting as a regular delivery outfit. Except they're better than the competition, such as ELS or DPD. When my package arrived at their central sorting, I got an email with a link to a web form, where I could select from multiple days, and then choose whether I wanted the package in the morning, afternoon or evening. Or I could leave a plaintext message for them, explaining what time would be convenient for me. In the event I selected Monday evening, and was told the package would arrive at my home at 18:11 +- 30 minutes. Actually the courier was twenty minutes early, but waited for me to get there. And whatever the size of the package, SmartPOST will deliver it to your home - literally. Other delivery services I've used only included delivery to the front door, if you wanted help getting your couch or grand piano or whatever up the stairs you had to pay extra. These guys will, apropos of nothing, set the couch down in the room where you want to keep it.

I am not in any way affiliated with either of these companies, but they did provide remarkable customer service: good enough that I am remarking upon it. ON24: excellent response to customer inquiries (fast and to the point), and a genuinely useful customer loyalty program.

SmartPOST: rilly klevur, akshully.