Hi,

and very good New Year 2011. I’m blogging from my usual holodeck at home office. Today had an interesting partial solar eclipse in the morning hours. It peaked at about 10:58 here (Lohja in Finland, there’s a map attached in the end of this posting)

It’s magnetic to realize the position of Earth relative to Sun, and perhaps even more mesmerizing to stare out in the black sky on clear nights – and see the belt of Milky Way, with its slight blue hue.

Astronomy aside, I spotted this news video from the net, it’s about the general economic outlook
for this beginning year. Brought to you by Thunderbird school of Management, in Arizona, USA:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChXTfbQ6vfM

In the first few minutes, the global crisis’ impact (how it was distributed throughout economic areas) in 2010 is interesting. China and India were high-performing and powerful fast-forwarding climbers, while rest of the world were on negative quite heavily. Remember, these % counts are relative growth, not absolute – but still, even more, given the sheer size of China and India combined, it is impressive and definitely shaping the world. Personally I believe there’s nothing particular that would wound the growth of these giants this year.

Companies are believed to have new investments in 2011 and recovery, even though it might be slow, from the depression in 2010. Finnish magazine Kauppalehti quoted a source saying that in the small and medium sized IT companies in Finland, those that survived the worst of depression, are doing surprisingly well – they only lost 1% of turnover in 2010. But those that had deep troubles went even deeper – which is a common phenomena in economy.