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Through Finland in Packets







Through Finland in Packets

Through Finland in Packets 06/17/2005 04:27 PM

crime scene jesus

« Crime scene jesus. »

Ever since the Washington Post started doing their 'Finland Journal' blog I've been thinking about saying something, but wanted to wait until they had finished the series and until I had enough time to think about what I wanted to say without sounding like one of the many wackjobs, both Finnish and American, whose comments ranged from explaining how to pronounce SOW-na to ranting about the Swedish Fascist oppression in Finland to bickering about nothing. Mostly I just found the commentary deeply depressing as monoculture was praised as the reason for all the good things in Finland and the reason for all the bad things in the US a bit more often than I found comfortable. I come from one of the most fucked up nations on the planet, but I'm awfully glad for the variety of people there since it is the greatest asset the US has in terms of creativity and innovation. Being a threat to this vaunted Finnish monoculture is not a fun place to be at times. Some expats just complain, some never do and the rest of us try to get on with life as best as we can and occasionally, cautiously, commiserate over beer and try to focus on the positive things as much as possible. One of the reasons I like my 'cookery' is that it's fun to explore the differences in cuisine, I'm reasonably good at it, it's something positive, and nobody hates the person who brings tasty treats for afternoon coffee. :)

There has been a lot of criticism among the foreigners, and even a Phinn, here about the series since visiting somewhere as a journalist on an official junket likely sponsored by the state vs. living here are two very different experiences and given the inevitable superficiality of the WP coverage, a lot of us were disappointed. One of the reasons that Finland is supposedly the "country that Americans know least about" is that aside from the usual Santa, sauna and sisu stories, very little else gets written in English about this country. I've taken to collecting books on travel to Finland, some more than 100 years old, and I could match the topics nearly 1:1 with the old travelogues to the Finland Journal coverage. In fact, I think I liked the bitchy and less fawning Mrs. Tweedie's Through Finland in Carts from 1898 much better as, in spite of her unsavoury British imperialism, she was a far more snarky and entertaining writer. But, again, same shit, different century. Surely, even the Finns must bore of this though the clichés are what keep the tourists coming. It's like the hackneyed 'pahk ya cah in Havahd Yahd' and Paul Revere legends of Boston. The Boston strangler, townies and Southie don't get a lot of press since they aren't exactly attractive to locals much less to tourists.

For the expats, there's precisely dick to prepare them for what awaits them making a life here. Trying to explain how Finland differs for residents as opposed to tourists to the newly arrived is a chore since you either sound bitter or are constantly doubting your own experience of everything in a miasma of cultural relativism and personal baggage. A lot of us come to live here because we have a spouse/SO, a spouse/SO who very likely does not have an objective view or an understanding of the difference between being Finnish and being not Finnish in Finland. I was in quite a sulk for a few weeks after I met an Aus-Fin couple who had moved here and, after two months, the Australian was escaping in defeat after being told repeatedly in interviews that her education credentials were worthless in Finland, the downside of an educational system regarded, and which regards itself, so highly. Her boyfriend seemed completely surprised by this and felt badly for not being a better judge of his own country. With the dearth of realistic information for those wanting to move here, many have no other choice than to trust their Finnish loved one which may or may not prove to be the best option. This seems to happen more often than not as expats don't often stay for more than a few years before giving up and heading back home, with or without the spouse/SO. I don't know if immigration actually keeps track of those who leave and why, but it would be interesting to see the average length of stay for expats as I expect it is generally very short. How many of the foreigners work for Nokia would also be an interesting statistic.

The question this raises is why do people leave? Finland is, in many ways, a lovely country, but why do expats frequently only stay for a short while? It's an important question, one few seem curious about or willing to discuss. The most frequent rebuttals to any criticism or merely mentioning that life here can be a challenge is that it's "the same everywhere" or that we can always just pack up and go home. Ironically, I would expect this sort of chiding from red state Americans. I think that this might be at the heart of much of our nebulous reasons for struggle here; that Finland is a young country, even by American standards, and with a long history of fighting off invading outsiders, Finland has developed a very, very strong streak of nationalism. What's wrong with nationalism? Well, after 9/11, I saw neighbours wanting to beat the shit out of the grocers down the street who had been there for over 20 years because suddenly they were those dark towel heads, "them", who flew into the WTC instead of the two brothers who had been selling them their groceries for decades. Nationalism separates as much as it binds and mostly it just makes people blind and monumentally stupid.

One of the first memorable experiences was while walking HB down Bulevardi about a week after arriving here and running into a smiling little old lady who wanted to pet him and started chatting me up. As soon as I started to say something the smile fell off her face which was replaced by a scowl full of scorn whereupon she screeched something, waved me off and stalked away in a huff. I was like, what the fuck just happened? This would be repeated quite a few times and, in spite of being able to rationalise the behaviour, first impressions tend to be difficult to change. I remain rather shy about being busted as a foreigner and still have a very difficult time daring to say anything to strangers. In the dog park, I'll stand around understanding everything the other dog owners are saying but don't join the conversation which has, on occasion, marked me as a foreigner just as much as saying something would have. :)

Generally, it's the small things, the day to day things, the very difficult to define things, that make life as an outsider here a daily struggle. Learning the language is the single largest hurdle in bridging the gap and becoming less of an alien, but after two years I'm still cautious, still shy, still neurotic about speaking it to the point of avoiding situations where I might have to say something to someone because I'm scared of being busted as an outsider. We all have little defensive tactics like this, depending on our individual hang-ups and struggles. One of my friends visited home a while back and she remarked in an email that she was in awe of how suddenly aware she was of how the little daily things in Finland make life so much more work than back in the realm of the friendly familiarity of home.

Some things, however, aren't so vague, but these are the things we don't talk about or quietly discuss amongst ourselves because they're either too depressing to dwell upon or tend to be met with vituperative attacks. There are things endemic to being an expat, a foreigner in a strange land, that often make you wonder if it's you, if you're not trying hard enough or if it's the culture that is responsible for the discontent and many things often do have simple explanations, if not simple solutions. I have lived elsewhere and, given the culture and the language barrier, Finland is a very challenging place to find a happy niche whether or not any Finns want to hear or acknowledge that. It's not a destination for the easily discouraged or the impatient.

Recently, I had the pleasure of talking to a couple with two adorable basset hounds who had just returned to Finland after 7 years abroad who remarked at how "international" Helsinki seemed nowadays. There are many words I'd use to describe Helsinki, most of them nice even, but international wouldn't be one of them. Being part of the EU while rejecting or reluctantly accepting some of the things that come with being part of the EU, like foreigners, doesn't make a place international any more than dining out at a Nepalese restaurant makes you a world traveller. This doesn't mean Finland should aspire to the problems of the Netherlands, but acknowledging the problems that exist here for foreigners might be something to consider since people do generally tend to stay in places that they feel welcome in and Finland, either intentionally or not, often gives outsiders the impression that we are either not welcome or just merely tolerated. If Finland doesn't want foreigners, it should really just pull out of the EU and close the borders.

So, I suppose the point of my rambling is that there are at least a few of us around who like it here and are trying with sincerity to learn the language, fit in and get along like everyone else but there are so many conflicting messages between what we read in the paper or hear from our spouses and what we actually experience at times that it makes it difficult to reconcile the disparity and still keep on trying. It's a struggle. It's like bloody musical chairs watching all the expats leave one by one.




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Ja sama suomeksi: Dan Gillmor, toimittaja-bloggaaja, joka on puhunut pitkään kansalaisjournalismin puolesta, on tulossa puhumaan avoimeen keskustelutilaisuuteen Helsingissä, Korjaamolla, tiistaina 12. huhtikuuta kello 18.00. Tervetuloa!

(Via Jyri.)


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The Weird Als of Finland 06/30/2004 06:07 PM

Everybody Humppa!

Finland has a dance called the humppa, but it's spoken of with the same disdain that disco gets in the US these days. It's for the geezers. I have been told it is something like the German polka only without the lederhosen, which is good since I'm half German and, after a few Straßenfests where people jump around in lederhosen with buckets of beer in their hands barely able to stand up, much less dance, the costumes just don't really add much to the overall aesthetic. I had a biology professor, a Bavarian who was really into opera singing, show up for a lecture in lederhosen and dance a polka for us while we sat there speechless. Everyone thought he was nuts, but I just thought he was hopelessly homesick and I couldn't imagine him doing that dance without the full costume in his usually disheveled professor uniform. I have been spared, so far, the spectacle of drunk Finns hopping around much like drunk Germans to goofy music. So far.

While we were off at the lake for Juhannus, my ear picked up something that sounded a lot like Viva Las Vegas but....not. I was informed that it was a group called Eläkeläiset [the pensioners] who are the humppa song gods in Finland and, well, everywhere else people like to humppa. I fried a few neurons just thinking about an Elvis tune done in humpaa/polka time. I can't describe their music except to say that they are the Weird Al Yankovics of Finland. Sample the Peljätty Humppa [2.2mb] and try to guess the song they are covering and be very, very afraid. It's like Ethyl Merman singing a disco version of No Business like Show Business [yes, she really did...], as it's so bad that it transcends the badness and is irresistibly brilliant. I must have more of their music. The guys actually have a regular band, Kumikameli, but I can't really tell the difference between the samples on that web site and the humppa music so it may be just a nuance only a Finn can hear. :) The lyrics are very clever and, unsurprisingly, the music is popular with the polka loving Germans. There even seems to be an OpenBSD-Humppa connection which does help explain a few things about OpenBSD. Weird Al has done a polka album so perhaps it is time he teamed up with Eläkeläiset and did a humppa album. Disturbing thought. *zot* There went another neuron.


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There are two companies offering WiFi; Sonera and DNA. DNA seems to be geared more towards the local geeks and ala carte folks while Sonera is mainly in the hotel and business traveller market. Sonera Homerun doesn't appear to have a pricing structure on the net. The DNA WLAN service has three different price plans which range from €5 per month with a per minute fee to €90 for those with a serious porn habit and large downloads.

Until mobile phones get much more sophisticated displays, surfing the net or reading email with them more than occasionally isn't as attractive as having a small laptop and WiFi in convenient spots around town. WiFi really means WIreless FInland. :)


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Schizo-J anne asks why Finland is lagging behind in WLAN deployments. There are roughly three free WiFi hotspots in Helsinki, a major difference to our neighbour Tallinn, which has open WiFi almost everywhere in the city center. Well, the Finnish cities of Oulu, Turku, and Lahti have already started lacing themselves with WLAN networks, and the Lappeenranta University of Technology WLAN network is to my understanding also spreading into the city, so the situation is not really that bad.

But Janne is right to ask this. Finland is not really very innovative in this area at the moment, partly because it's not seen as very important. A lot of Finland's technological and financial innovation is currently poured towards the 3G (aka WCDMA, aka UMTS) development and deployment. While technologically it offers a similar solution to WLAN, and Finns are doing pretty well in mobile phone usage (though nowhere near the top), there is one key difference that people tend to ignore when talking about these things.

Freedom to innovate.

In order for you to develop a fancy new 3G app, you need to talk to and appease operators, cell phone manufacturers, and all sorts of different companies that are in the so-called "value chain". Everybody wants their small piece of it, and you end up thinking about things like "brand dilution" and "quality of service" and "code signing". All this creates quite a lot of energy, and it does not guarantee that you will create a good app - it just means that you are really good at presenting your case, and it does make sense to a lot of people. Even if you wanted to just build a simple SMS-based service, you would need quite a lot of investment of at least time, if not capital, to interface with the network: you need the PC with a bunch of cell phones attached. Or buy a platform from an operator.

Open WLAN, however, means that you can start to innovate at very, very low costs. Web space is cheap, PHP can be done by anyone, and startup costs are minimal. All you need is the idea, and the tools and the knowledge are mostly there already. Granted, you can also run a browser-based application on a 3G phone, no problem, but this always is at cost to the user: the browser-based UI is not optimal for a small device. And developing an optimized GUI for a mobile device is difficult and sometimes nerve-wrecking.

You can split the space in two ways: you can concentrate on innovating vertically : building entire solutions from the low bits to the end application. Or you can innovate horizontally - build platforms which allow other people to innovate and build upon.

3G or WLAN.

It's just like "Nokia or Linux".

I'm not saying Nokia wasn't a success, obviously it was (and is). But I do believe that in the future, it's more probable to see a new Linux-like success story than a Nokia-like success story coming from Finland. Which is why supporting platforms for free innovation would be so important.


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(Via Jyri). Toimitus suosittelee, ja kiroilee kun ei itse pääse paikalle.

KUTSU

Avoin luento ja keskustelutilaisuus
Professor Lawrence Lessig Helsingissä
"The Future of Copyright, Culture and Creativity"
Maanantaina 24.5. klo 17.30
Kulttuuritehdas Korjaamo, Töölönkatu 51 b

Tervetuloa avoimeen keskustelutilaisuuteen Professori Lawrence Lessigin kanssa Helsingissä maantantaina 24.5. klo 17.30 Korjaamolla, Töölönkatu 51b. Professori Lessig on yksi maailman tunnetuimpia ajattelijoita, kirjoittajia ja luennoitsijoita digitaalisen kulttuurin, median ja tekijänoikeuksien kehityksestä. Nyt suomalaisella yleisöllä on ainutlaatuinen mahdollisuus kuulla ja haastaa kansainvälistä vaikuttajaa. Teemana on "The Future of Copyright, Culture and Creativity."

Tilaisuuden järjestää Aula. Aula on avoin verkosto, joka tukee ajatusten vaihtoa poikki rajojen.

Tätä kutsua voi lähettää sähköisesti eteenpäin kaikille kiinnostuneille.

* * *

INVITATION

You are invited to an open discussion with Professor Lawrence Lessig on Monday 24.5. at 17.30 at Korjaamo, Töölönkatu 51 b in Helsinki. Professor Lessig will speak on "The Future of Copyright, Culture and Creativity" followed by a discussion with the audience. The event will be held in English and is free and open to the public.

The event is organized by Aula. Aula is an open network that promotes the exchange of ideas across boundaries.

Please forward this invitation to anyone you feel would be interested in attending.

About the speaker

Lawrence Lessig (http://www.lessig.org/) is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Lessig was also a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and a Professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.

More recently, Professor Lessig represented web site operator Eric Eldred in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Lessig was named one of Scientific American's Top 50 Visionaries, for arguing "against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online."

Lessig teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, law and high technology, Internet regulation, comparative constitutional law, and the law of cyberspace. His book, Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace, was published by Basic Books, and The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, is available from Random House. His most recent book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, is now available online at http://www.free-culture.cc and from Penguin Press.

Professor Lessig chairs the Creative Commons project (http://creativecommons.org/faq). Professor Lessig is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a board member of the Center for the Public Domain, and a Commission Member of the Penn National Commission on Society, Culture and Community at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Lessig earned a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a JD from Yale.


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Commercial bl0gs entering Finland 04/08/2005 06:39 PM
My my, what an interesting week this has been: First, Blogilista goes commercial, and now Pirkka-magazine has launched a number of commercial blogs. The Finnish blogosphere reacts with violent distrust and confusion.

I see no problem. These are clearly blogs, simply because th e only meaningful definition for the world blog is based on form, not content. They're not lying about their affiliation. They publish polished content. In fact, I find it wonderful that a media publisher dares to go and try and embrace the new media. They even publish Atom feeds for all blogs! Way!

However, entering the blogosphere may be more difficult than just dumping Movabletype on your magazine web site: people will look at these blogs. They will discuss. They will find crap on them (if there's any). They will write about it. And it's difficult to ignore them, if you want to keep your credibility. Other bloggers will call your bullshit - and very likely, someone in that bunch is at least equal in writing skills and more knowledgeable on the subject than you. And they know it.

Now the question is how much integrity Pirkka wants to have: do they just want to publish news articles in a blog format - or do they really want to go full out and really try to embrace the dialogue that comes with the format?

You see, whatever else blogs may be, they work best as a personal media. You need to let people write with their own voice, not just copying material from others - even if you have all the rights to do so. It's the power and bane of the format; a personal touch creates reader loyalty, but it also means that you have to get involved in your writing - "laittaa itsensä likoon", as the Finns say. And that is not easy.

Welcome to the crowd! I'm happy you're here, anyway. People will grumble, but there's always room for one more in the jacuzzi.

(A quick hint to Pirkka writers: Read http://www.corporateblogging .info/, and Scoble's Corporat e Blogging Manifesto. Understand. Internalize. And stop posting articles from one person under the name of another... That simply takes away credibility from the author.)

(And a quick other hint to people who complain about these being on blogilista.fi: get a clue. Really. Would you stop using a phone book simply because it contains company phone numbers, or stop using Google because it's *gasp* a profit-making company? That's exactly what Blogilista.fi is - an index of blogs, nothing more. It ain't your personal blogospheric community where people live happily and go to the woods to get undressed and hug each other in a blogoslavic überbliss. If you don't like the direction they're taking, learn to use RSS and site feeds, and make your own personal bloglist.

Blogging in Finland is finally growing up. The hype around blogging will cease in a year or two, and hopefully we then can better understand what the media is and what one can do with it. And then we can get back to the really important thing: writing. Writing about your dog, or your political views, or celebrity divorces, or company products, or food, or your sex life, or whatever pleases you. Some bloggers will gain prestige; some bloggers will become influential; some bloggers will make many people laugh; some bloggers will make many people weep. Some will be completely ignored. Most will just for

...

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A few weeks ago, Conan O'Brien started a "Conan O'Brien Hates My Homeland" postcard campaign by asking people from around the world to send him postcards. Apparently, Finland was the first to send a card with a mildly profane greeting on it. :) Apparently, many other Finns have followed suit and the show airing tonight on SubTV should be fairly amusing for those of us here. Someone has a rather large [31mb] mpeg of the segment where he admits that Finland is his core audience and, to offer succor to his insulted fans, tells the world that Sweden does, in fact, suck. Now, I don't know that I have enough motivation to get Conan's head put on a stamp from the Suomen Posti as the earlier web page suggests, but what about sending Conan a postcard per week until he relents and promises to come do a show in Helsinki for a week like they did in Canada?! Maybe we can beg the Finnish Consulate, Finnish expats and other friends we have in NYC to go see the show and sing the "Finland, Finland, Finland" song until he agrees. It probably won't happen, but it sure would be fun to get him to do a show here. Think of all the things he could do: take a sauna, eat makkara, make fun of drunks on the trams and subway, attempt ordering coffee and korvapusti in Finnish, bring some Budweiser along and finally determine if Lapin Kulta is even more of a king of bad beer than Bud is, try salmiakki, wear something Marimekko, visit Santa, and sail to Stockholm to personally deliver the message that Sweden does, indeed, suck. :)

Finland, expats too, grab your pens, postage and postikorttit and direct your witty goading to:

Conan O'Brien hates my homeland Must Come To Finland
NBC
30 ROCKEFELLER PLAZA
New York, NY 10112
USA

Extra bonus points for those who can communicate to him in his native dialect, Masshole Townese. Tell him we have wicked good Dunkin Donuts in Finland and massively large packies but that we gotta go to Talinn, our equivalent to New Hampshire, for cheap stuff. His family lives in Belmont, just over the road from where I used to live so he's still a townie. :)


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in London
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More than 3,000 items belonging to the creator of Sherlock Holmes will be auctioned in London on Wednesday.

Lost Conan Doyle Archive Sold (Reuters)


Lost Conan Doyle Archive Sold (Reuters) 05/20/2004 08:32 AM
Reuters - A collection of long-lost papers giving a rare glimpse into the private life of Sherlock Holmes' creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was sold at auction in London for almost $1.7 million Wednesday.

Conan O'Brien's Quebec Shows Stir Furor
(AP)


Conan O'Brien's Quebec Shows Stir Furor
(AP)
02/16/2004 06:37 PM
AP - Canadian politicians are denouncing "The Late Show with Conan O'Brien" over a sketch in which a cigar-chomping sock puppet hurled insults at French Canadians.

Separated Twins Making Rapid Recovery
(AP)


Separated Twins Making Rapid Recovery
(AP)
08/07/2004 09:10 PM
AP - Two-year-old twin boys whose conjoined heads were surgically separated are beginning to thrive in their newly independent lives, one of their surgeons said Saturday.

SyberWorks Chosen by CustomerCentric
Systems LLC to Develop Online Content
and Host Their CustomerCentric Selling®
Sales Training Program Online


SyberWorks Chosen by CustomerCentric
Systems LLC to Develop Online Content
and Host Their CustomerCentric Selling®
Sales Training Program Online
03/22/2005 03:16 PM
SyberWorks, a leader in custom e-Learning Solutions and the Learning Management System industry, announced today they have been selected by CustomerCentric Systems LLC, a nationally recognized leader in sales process training and consulting, to develop online content and host their CustomerCentric Selling® Sales Training Program online with the SyberWorks Hosted e-Learning Solution. [PRWEB Mar 22, 2005]

Yahoo! News - Canada Condemns 'Racist'
Conan O'Brien TV Show


Yahoo! News - Canada Condemns 'Racist'
Conan O'Brien TV Show
02/13/2004 10:38 PM
Conan O'Brian "racist", if you consider Canadian a "race" .. Canada's government is already bitching about it .. petty shit

news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=638&u=/nm/20040213/en_nm/le isure_canada_conan_dc&printer=1
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Separated Siamese twin girl undergoes
heart surgery


Separated Siamese twin girl undergoes
heart surgery
07/09/2004 01:22 AM
Content.sina.com - Thu Jul 8, 08:10 pm GMT

Driving Car Sales Online


Driving Car Sales Online 11/01/2003 05:19 AM
InternetRetailer.com Nov 1 2003 4:03AM ET

Online sales increase


Online sales increase 08/06/2004 07:48 AM
Good news for etailers

Online ad sales gain again


Online ad sales gain again 12/10/2003 08:06 AM
ZDNet UK Dec 10 2003 7:37AM ET

Online ad sales hit new high


Online ad sales hit new high 02/12/2004 03:23 PM
Net advertising sales grew to $2.2 billion for the fourth quarter of 2003, breaking the previous record reached during the height of the dot-com boom.

The Web: Push To Tax Online Sales


The Web: Push To Tax Online Sales 02/05/2005 09:43 PM
E-Commerce Times Feb 5 2005 1:38PM GMT

Online-ad sales up in third quarter


Online-ad sales up in third quarter 12/09/2003 01:15 PM
Sales hit an estimated $1.75 billion, the fourth consecutive period of gains for the industry, according to new research. Much of the upturn is due to search engine-related marketing strategies.

Online drives entertainment sales


Online drives entertainment sales 06/24/2005 02:59 PM
New technology is the driving force behind a boom in the entertainment industry, a report suggests.

Emaar, online realty sales a hit


Emaar, online realty sales a hit 03/27/2005 08:21 AM
Ameinfo.com - Sun Mar 27, 06:58 am GMT

Online Sales Tax Enforcement May Become
Certain In 2005


Online Sales Tax Enforcement May Become
Certain In 2005
12/24/2004 01:07 PM
TechWeb Dec 24 2004 8:13AM GMT

Online War For Danish Music Sales


Online War For Danish Music Sales 08/09/2004 09:45 AM
Microsoft and Apple are vying for the growing Danish market for online music sales, with the two rivals planning simultaneious debuts of legal music downloading services in Denmark. By Copenhagen Post (via MyAppleMenu)

Through Finland in Packets

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