With more 1 million mobile phone customers and more than 700,000 registered users of the social networking Web site draugiem.lv, Latvia has never been far behind the rest of Europe in the take up of new technologies. People in Latvia also are big users of Skype, a service that allows you to place voice calls using the Internet at a fraction of typical call rates.

Although Internet telephony software has been around for nearly a decade, it took two Scandinavian entrepreneurs and four Estonian programmers with their already proven file sharing technology to overcome previous technical hurdles and offer Skype. It is a simple and very affordable service now being used by 120 million people worldwide.

Skype has made such an impact that it now carries 7 percent of worldwide telephony traffic. Major telephone companies around the world are beginning to realise that the days of cashing in on long distance calls are well and truly over. In October 2005, after only two years since its inception, Skype was acquired by eBay for a mere USD 4 billion. Skype’s main operations centre is located in Tallinn and it has recently recruited a programmer from Latvia as well.

So what is the big fuss all about? With a reasonably fast Internet connection (broadband is recommended) and a Windows-, Macintosh- or Linux-based computer, you can be up and running within minutes. The free downloadable Skype client software has evolved to become an impressive communications suite with phone and video conferencing, instant messaging, voicemail and the ability to connect to any standard telephone service (SkypeOut) for as low as EUR 0.017 per minute. But the main reason for its popularity is that you can talk to any other Skype user on the planet for free—provided that they are also connected to the Internet and Skype is running on the other computer. Skype is also platform agnostic, which means you can voice or video call irregardless of whether the other user is running Windows or Macintosh. With the new Skype handsets it is possible to bypass the computer altogether—you can place calls anywhere where you can find a wireless Internet connection.

Skype has acknowledged its popularity in Latvia by providing a Latvian version of its Web site. It also plans to provide a Latvian interface in a future release of the client software.

The disparate pricing for SkypeOut rates to and from Latvia is due to the highly regulated communications environment that still exists in Latvia. If you are located in Rīga, a call to a regular Australian or U.S. telephone number is only EUR 0.017 per minute, but in the reverse direction it climbs to as high as EUR 0.122 per minute for calls to Latvian mobiles. For this reason the most popular way to use Skype remains from computer to computer and it is, of course, free.

Not to be left out Lattelecom recently launched a new home communications package for a monthly charge of LVL 13.90 that includes 2Mbps of broadband Internet access and free local calls. Expect similar deals from other major telcos to emerge in the near future as well.

I have been using Skype for over a year—mainly from Australia and recently in our travels ranging from a remote country house in north Vidzeme, Frankfurt airport, the Atbalsis retreat in Gaŗezers, a busy youth hostel in downtown Helsinki to the WiFi-enabled Vērmaņdārzs in Rīga. The quality of the voice conversations has been as good if not better than the ordinary telephone service. For best results plug in a computer headset to avoid voice echo effects and invest in a Webcam so you can beam your smile to your friends as well.

What are the drawbacks? Skype is only as good as your Internet service provider (ISP) and the quality of service you get from it. Don’t go cancelling your landline just yet, because low-cost ISPs can’t match the reliability of the ordinary telephone service provided by the major telecommunication companies. ISPs have a tendency to have service disruptions, whereas your standard telephone handset is guaranteed to be operational even during power outages — essential for those emergency calls. But the price of Skype is hard to beat.

If you’re a Latvian business or organisation operating internationally or simply want to keep in touch with friends and relatives you can save a bundle on your long distance communication costs and get a taste of this exciting new technology.

You have just created a new Latvian product or service, or have finally made the decision to establish an Internet presence for your Latvian organization, business, hobby or even the family blog. How do you select the domain name?

Lets say that Pēteŗa Pīrāgi, located in Kuldīga, wants to promote its locally popular bakery not only to the rest of Latvia, but to rest of the world. The owner should first sit down (best without a computer) and make a list of words and phrases that people are likely to enter into a search engine such as Google or input as a Web address. For example piragi, pīrāgi (with all the diacritics), Latvian food, beķereja, Latvian bakery, Baltic bacon buns, Baltic food delicacies or visiting Kuldīga. The longer the list the better.

The owner will have two audiences to target: one within Latvia and the Baltic States and the other in the rest of the world. For this reason they may need to go to at least two different registrars: one that handles the .lv domain and the other the popular .com space. The recently introduced European Union .eu top level domain may also be a consideration especially if the owner is expecting an influx of German, Dutch or British tourists to the bakery.

Latvia’s top level domain .lv is managed by the Network Solutions Department of the Institute of Mathematics & Computer Science at the University of Latvia. The department’s Web site is available in either Latvian or English. Visitors can quickly check whether a domain name is available at www.nic.lv. From the list start with the more generic or popular words. You never know your luck, because a previous holder of that name could have recently released it back to the pool of available names. During the 1990s the rules for registering a domain name were fairly lax. At one stage riga.lv was redirecting to a Russian language Web site that had little to do with promoting Rīga. Cybersquatters would often purchase a whole bunch of names with the intent of selling them to unsuspecting firms for many times the original price. Nearly 40,000 .lv domain names have been registered (compared to more than 50 million .com registrations) and the rules today ensure that geographical names and well known company names or trademarks are protected from these warehousing practices. Naming conventions are generally more relaxed and a business or organisation can register at the top domain without the .com.lv or .org.lv extension, for example, mybusiness.lv and myorganisation.lv. Domain names designated with the .id.lv extension are available free of charge for individuals. Surprisingly, a lot of the more popular surnames are still available (only 500 have been registered), so grab one while you can.

Going back to our example, the owner of Pēteŗa Pīrāgi is overjoyed to discover that the No. 1 choice of pirags.lv was available. Out comes the credit card and, after completing all of the necessary details and authorising the USD 35 or EUR 30 charge, the domain name can now be exclusively used by the bakery for 12 months, after which a renewal notice for the same amount will be sent for the following year. In 2004 NIC.lv also introduced the ability to include Latvian letters or diacritics. These domain names are considerably cheaper at LVL 10. The main problem is that for nearly all versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer a special plugin is required to recognise the special letters. Otherwise the user is taken to the standard “Server Not Found” error page. To implement this great idea, the owner of the bakery should have both pirags.lv and pīrāgs.lv for exclusive use and at no additional charge, at least until the technology has caught up and the Domain Name System has become Unicode compliant. NIC.lv provides tūdaliņ.lv as an example to test your Web browser.

For the dot com space Pēteŗa Pīrāgi will need to go to one of the many thousands of registrars located outside of Latvia. Some of the more popular are Register.com, NetworkSolutions and DomainDiscover, where prices start from a low USD 9 for a domain name—nearly 400 percent cheaper than the Latvian equivalent. At these prices Pēteŗa Pīrāgi can register several names, for example, pirags.com, latvianbakery.com and balticbaconbuns.com and have them all automatically redirect to the English language pages of pirags.lv.

The European Commission’s nonprofit organisation EURid has accredited three .eu registrars in Latvia, but only EUREG seems to work and inexplicably defaults to the Russian language. Prices for .eu domain names are quoted at about LVL 15. To date there have been about 3,000 registrations from Latvia. It is not clear whether these figures also includes the reserved names. The owner of Pēteŗa Pīrāgi decides they will watch this space and make an assessment later.

Selecting a domain name is only the initial phase of successfullty establishing an online presence and something that every business should consider sooner than later.

I have a whole bookshelf of Latvian dictionaries ranging from Mīlenbachs-Endzelīns, the nine-volume Latviešu Literārās valodas vārdnīca, to the Turkina favourites, but I find myself consulting them less and less as new online resources and more capable Latvian language software appears—most of which are free.

Several years ago the Rīga-based software company Tilde launched on online encyclopedia called Letonika. Although this is a subscription service, Letonika’s online dictionary is freely available to anyone at www.letonika.lv/dictionary. This is one of the most comprehensive dictionaries available, with more than 100,000 words, rivaling most printed dictionaries. It works between the Latvian, English, German and Russian languages. If this is not enough, Tilde also offer a Windows-based software package called Birojs 2005 that extends the capabilities to look up and translate whole phrases, search for similar words and add new words. The program fully integrates with Microsoft Office’s spellchecker, so that the red and wavy lines you normally see with your English spellchecker work just the same way in Latvian. But it is money well spent if you are constantly working with Latvian documents.

Tilde also offers an SMS dictionary (www.tilde.lv/sms) where for a small fee (24 santīms) you can receive a translation of a requested word on your mobile telephone. To translate “maize” into English you would send the text message “la maize” (where la indicates that you want to translate from Latvian into English, or latviesu -> anglu). With diacritics you will need to return to the old method using apostrophes or doubling vowels, because not all mobile phones are able to display the Latvian diacritics. The only drawback is that this service is only available to LMT (Latvijas Mobīlais telefons) subscribers.

The University of Latvia’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, headed by Andrejs Spektors, has since 1993 been publishing and improving its Latviešu valodas skaidrojošā vārdnīca. Entering “tulkot” gives you not only the possible meanings (for example, “1. Izteikt citā valodā” and “2. Skaidrot”), but also shows you some example phrases of how the word is used. For the more grammatically minded it also displays the conjugations or verb forms. If you don’t agree with the results you can use an online form to send the feedback to the lab.

The historical Mīlenbaha-Endzelīna Latviešu valodas vārdnīca has been an ongoing project for the last 12 years. With the help of the Unicode standard (included in all modern versions of Windows and Macintosh), the lab recently updated the dictionary to include intonation symbols, such as the open and closed “e”. To access this dictionary you will need to register.

If you need someone who is hearing impaired, the laboratory has also produced a Latvian sign language dictionary with animation.

What about specialised dictionaries? Computers have only been mainstream for the last 20 years and the Latvian language has needed to catch up. The monthly newsletter “LatDati” produced by Juris Mazutis during the early years had a regular section on translating computer terminology into Latvian. From this and subsequent online discussions (including the mailing list VALODA) new words were born, such as dators (computer) and tīmeklis (the Web), that are now regularly used by the major newspapers in Latvia. The Terminology Committee of the Latvian Academy of Sciences, led by Juris Borzovs, now runs a Web site dedicated to computer terminology at www.termini.lv. Did you know that “menu” translated is izvēlne, “chat” is terzēšana and “spam” is surogātpasts? However, the dictionary didn’t recognise “Google” or “Skype.”

A dictionary of biological terms can be found at latvijas.daba.lv/vardnica. If you want to be the next Latvian version of American billionaire Warren Buffet, the FinanceNet portal offers a dictionary specialising in economics and finance. Enter “trading” and you’ll get vērtspapīru publiskā apgrozība, while “depreciation” will yield either paātrināta nolietojuma metode or amortizācija. We couldn’t find any online legal dictionaries, but no doubt these will also appear with time.

For something a little more light-hearted, check out the Latvian Colloquial Dictionary, first published in 1990 by AIVA in Melbourne, Australia, and supplemented later by Ķikuraina valodiņa, published in 2001 in Rīga. With influences from both the Displaced Persons camps of World War II and the omnipresent Russian language during the last few decades in Latvia, the dictionary is sure to bring a chuckle or two. Who can guess the meaning of džentelbenķis, kumpels and mobiļņiks?