Estonian start-up stories by Toivo Tänavsuu
In: Companies
30 Oct 2008A month ago I posted a story about an Estonian 3D modelling technology company. But there’s another great engineering company walking similar path – it’s called MEC. MEC does more than just 3D models and stuff. Through 3D and special software they are assessing the strenght of different structures, for example cruise ships, ramps, helicopter decks etc. [...]
In: Companies
27 Oct 2008One of the most famous Estonian venture capitalists and former Chief Engineer of Skype, Toivo Annus is a minor stakeholder in California-based winery Crushpad. This is not a traditional winery for neat folks with “chateau and golden retriever”, this the place where tailor-made high-tech wine comes from. I wrote about Crushpad last year in Eesti Ekspress. [...]
In: Companies
15 Oct 2008Estonian undertaking NOW! Innovations and US start-up StreetSmart Technology will launch new innovative mobile parking service in city of Decatur near Atlanta, Georgia. Starting from next Monday, 20th of October, the citizens of Decatur will have unique opportunity to pay for parking by using their mobile phones, while the parking lot is being monitored by detectors inside the [...]
In: Companies
13 Oct 2008What do we know about Nigerians? That they are one of the poorest nations in the world. Nigerian GDP per capita is only about 4% of what US has. But one certainly can’t say that Nigerians aren’t smart. Defrauding, for example an iPhone or a laptop from some naive and not-too-smart European is piece of cake for some [...]
In: Companies
9 Oct 2008There’s an almost unobserved but large scale Internet business being run from Estonia. It’s called Fotki. Happy tenth birthday to them! Many people, especially from US, Canada and UK, but also Estonia, Lithuania and Iceland are familiar with the site Fotki.com. The founder Dmitri Don calls it photo-sharing, photo-printing, photo-selling and blogging website. I call it photo-oriented [...]
In: Companies
6 Oct 2008I was glad to be invited to Finland, where mobile giant Nokia gave some hints about “the way we will live next”. They introduced their visions for 2015 and allowed to test some upcoming cool services, fresh from the labs. An idea Nokia researchers are exited about is what they call “sensing and aggregating data” [...]
In: Companies
3 Oct 2008Estonian Internet-based IT equipment procurement company MarkIT, that already operates in eight Scandinavian and Eastern European markets, enters Sweden, Slovenia, Austria and Spain. The company aims to conquer whole Europe in the long run. The idea behind MarkIT is connecting numerous local IT distributors’ stock into one online purchasing system with an immediate overview of availability and [...]