Latvian Personal Action Sports Drone Takes Off

If you ski, surf, motocross, wakeboard, bike or enjoy other outdoor activities you can now capture stunning aerial video for under $1500 – without using a helicopter or specialized filming crew.


Ex-Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis tests early prototype

AirDog, designed by a team of leading aerial system specialists based in Riga, is an easy-to-use auto-follow drone for the GoPro camera and is targeted at anyone passionate about action sports. Foldable, fast and tough, the drone is able to track and follow users and their trajectory capturing every frame with impressive accuracy. AirDog has a flight time of up to 20 minutes and can zip along at 40mph (65km/hr) keeping up with most action sports. To use AirDog, simply strap the programmable remote on your wrist or helmet, choose one of the seven preset auto-follow flight modes (or use the iPhone or Android App to map your flight path) and AirDog will do the rest – even take-off and landing is completely autonomous.

Edgars Rozentals, CEO and founder of Helico Aerospace Industries, is convinced that the latest design based on long-range BlueTooth technology is a winner. In June a Kickstarter campaign was launched with the goal of raising $200,000. Four weeks into the campaign and it already looks like the project will raise in excess of $1M. This investment will go into future improvements including an obstacle avoidance solution to avoid walls and trees.

Riga Becomes European Leader in Free WiFi

On my travels to Estonia’s largest island, Saaremaa a few years ago I was gobsmacked to be able to connect to the free public WiFi network – in a rural location that seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. But I shouldn’t have been surprised, because Estonia already had a reputation for being a worldwide leader in e-services.

This week Rīga, European Capital of Culture 2014, takes the front stage by announcing the further expansion of its free public WiFi network to become the top European leader putting Estonia’s capital Tallinn in second spot followed by Stockholm, Vienna, Paris and Helsinki.

The free WiFi service is provided by Lattelecom, a telecommunications company partly owned by the Latvian government. Lattelecom is also known for its innovative services such as Internet TV and blindingly fast 1 Gbits/s optical Internet connections. Each WiFi point in Latvia’s capital city will on average serve up to 750 residents and the company claims a minimum of 3 WiFi points per square kilometre. Lattelecom provides over 3700 WiFi points throughout Latvia including 21 hospitals, 165 educational institutions as well as major city parks and recreation areas.

To use the service connect to the “Lattelecom-free” WiFi network , watch the 15 second advertisement and then starting using the Internet. After 30 minutes of usage you will be required to watch another 15 second slot before continuing with your online session.

This service is just in time for the tourist season and the upcoming 8th World Choir Games to be hosted by Riga early next month. When you decide to go online from Vērmanes dārzs or other favourite outdoor venue don’t forget to send us your WiFi experiences.

More details on the WiFi service including locations are available from wifi.lv/en.html.

A New Design for a New Era

Much has happened since the last major redesign of the Latvians Online website back in March 2004. Facebook was only one month old, Twitter wasn’t conceived until 2 years later and the mobile Web only took off when the first iPhone appeared in 2007. Today we live in an Internet world dominated by social networks and accessed by an increasing proportion of mobile devices including tablet computers. The Internet is appearing everywhere – on desktops, phones, tablets, watches, glasses and even cars. The Internet speed has also increased hundredfold.

In response to your feedback from the survey late last year we set about redesigning the website to focus on what Latvians Online does best – produce quality content on topics ranging from news, politics, language, education, music, sports, food, culture, travel, history, traditions, technology, events – in both English and Latvian. The goal was to display this content in an easy-to-use, easy-to-navigate and easy-to-search environment and that could also easily adapt to new and emerging technologies.

With the ever-changing landscape of devices, browsers, screen sizes and orientations Responsive Web Design was employed to create a flexible, fluid and adaptive website. This means that a mobile user gets a totally different user experience to someone who is sitting at the desktop or laptop computer. To see the Responsive design in action slowly shrink the browser window and watch how the page automatically rearranges the page elements moving from desktop to tablet to mobile screen sizes. Or simply open our website from your mobile device using the same Web address and enjoy the experience.

We are embracing the latest Web technologies including HTML 5, CSS3, JavaScript and AJAX which not only supports the new Responsive Web Design, but also provides a better and cleaner user interface with visual cues, animated menus and a powerful search facility. If you need to print an article, a printer-friendly version will be created for you automatically. If you want to share an article with others, click on either the Facebook or Twitter icon. If you need to search for a particular article, enter the keyword or author and the website will quickly return results from the database of over 2500 articles.

Ten years ago when more than half of the Internet connections were dialup we had to design Web pages with optimized, small-size graphics in order for the page to appear reasonably quickly in the Web browser. Now that most users are enjoying broadband Internet speeds the new design employs screen-filling high-resolution graphics that look stunning on the new Retina technology screens. Advertisers are no longer restricted to certain banner sizes and can create compelling and interactive marketing messages at just about any size.

The new content management system provides more flexibility and features to prepare us for the technologies of tomorrow. We can run the website from our iPhone or iPad, authors can directly submit their articles for approval and publishing and sections of the website can be easily adapted for either the English or Latvian languages. Using the Application Programming Interface and Web services you will be able to create your own Latvian magazine (for a great example of how this works open up @latviansonline from the Flipboard App), develop a customized iPhone or Android App or even push content to your future iWatch or in-car entertainment system.

We hope you enjoy the new-look Latvians Online website.