No, not us. We are none of these, though we got many of the u/m conveniences, sort of.
Estonia (population 1.3m) is a world leader in technology. Estonian geeks developed the code behind Skype, Hotmail and Kazaa (a precursor of the Napster file-sharing software). In 2007 it became the first country to allow online voting in a general election. It has among the world’s zippiest broadband speeds and holds the record for start-ups per person. Its 1.3m citizens pay for parking spaces with their mobile phones and have their health records stored in the digital cloud. Filing an annual tax return online, as 95% of Estonians do, takes about five minutes. How did the smallest Baltic state develop such a strong tech culture?
Mr Ilves, a co-founder of Skype says Estonia’s success is not so much about ditching legacy technology as it is about shedding “legacy thinking”. Replicating a paper-based tax-filing procedure on a computer, for instance, is no good; having such forms pre-filled so that the taxpayer has only to check the calculations has made the system a success. Education is important, too: last year, in a public-private partnership, a programme called ProgeTiiger (“Programming Tiger”) was announced, to teach five-year-olds the basics of coding. “In the 80s every boy in high-school wanted to be a rock-star,” says Mr Hinrikus. “Now everybody in high-school wants to be an entrepreneur.”
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/07/economist-explains-21
Interestingly, some time back ST had a piece entitled “Generating bright ideas in S’pore”. It mentioned Google and Facebbok but not Skype. Wonder why?
Related post: http://atans1.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/estonia-doing-it-spore-still-talking-about-it/
Related link on why S’pore can only talk cock:http://wikileaks.org/cable/2007/02/07SINGAPORE394.html
Thoughts of a Cynical Investor
*The writer blogs at http://atans1.wordpress.com