TigerPrises.com has taken a roundtrip in Tartu, visiting different promising Estonian technology companies. Here’s the first example, but stay tuned for more! 

Mobile application developer Nutiteq from Tartu, Estonia signed a cooperation agreement with the leading Mobile Java developer Enough Software from Germany.

Now Nutiteq’s flagship mobile mapping product (MGMaps Lib SDK) will be integrated into the Enough’s toolset (J2MEPolish Pro), which is probably the most popular mobile application development environment, with over 1 million downloads!

Jaak Laineste, the CEO of Nutiteq says this will give the best possible market reach to mobile developer community and it has already bought new major commercial deals to Nutiteq.

5 guys experimenting

“Hidden” in Tartu, Nutiteq is a very small company with only five developers – four Estonians and one Romanian.  They experiment with open source solutions for mobile phones.

If you want to use Nutiteq’s soft yourself, it’s free. If you plan to develop services based on it and make money, you have to buy the license. That’s how the business works. 

From Estonia, to US and Lebanon

Who uses Nutiteq software? First of all the clients of Estonian leading telecom EMT, when they do mobile positioning or look at maps.
Then there’s a company in far-away Lebanon, also providing mobile mapping service on Nutiteq’s platform.

Three clients are located in the US, they develop mainly social mapping services. One is called Trapster – they use Nutiteq platform for their Blackberry and Java ME (Symbian) mobile mapping clients.

Trapster is a speed trap sharing system, where users can share locations of mark speed cameras, police traps and other items to be careful about on the roads. You get the warning alert when you are approaching one of these. The service has over 100.000 active users all over the world – mainly in US, but also Canada and The Netherlands.

No friend-finding!

What will be the future of mobile positioning? For example Nokia thinks everybody will start locating their friends with mobile. Laineste argues this will not be happening – who’d want to locate their friends via mobile anyway?

Instead people will increasingly want to position their family members and assets (cars, cargo etc). Mobile applications present one convenient way to do that. Laineste seems happy: there’s a line-up of work and orders behind the door of Nutiteq. I wish them luck!