A former Elion employee Ardi Kristovald (pictured) has founded a startup called GlobeMarket that plans to create an interentrepreneurial data exchange platform – in essence, syncing up very different business software programs (SAP, Oracle, MS, Erply et al).

Kristovald says the solution would be geared above all to manufacturers and distributors/resellers. The goal is to bring about a situation where all parts of the supply chain from manufacturer to retailer have the latest information on their partners’ manufacturing and warehouse inventories.

The end result: improved availability of goods (maybe even lower prices) for consumers and smoother communications between distributors, resellers and manufacturers. Manufacturers could track movements of product throughout the supply chain, allowing smarter decisions to be made.

Some Facebook principles

GlobeMarket’s service platform would tap into some principles that are well-known from Facebook. Users could accept companies as partners (verifying what information on warehouse inventories reaches them) and from that moment on these partners would see that user’s warehouse inventory and product and price information.

The need for such a platform arose and Kristovald came up with the concept when he was working in sales of top-of-the-line audio and video equipment after leaving Elion. He noticed that information on product compatibility and inventory levels moved very slowly – via e-mail or in the best case scenario, via Skype.

Development in Romania

Developing such a new platform is a labour-intensive job. Kristovald tried to find programmers from Estonian universities to whom a stake or option in the new company could be offered. But the services of programmers studying in Estonian universities are generally already engaged by other companies. GlobeMarket is thus currently being developed in Romania while the person in charge of marketing is from Spain.

Kristovald says the company is in dire need of capital. He has made attempts to find funding from the Estonian market but to no avail. The belief is that GlobeMarket’s ambition to become a market leader in audio and video is unrealistic. There are doubts as to whether it is wise to pursue a global networking-based, real-time software development project for integrating European and North American markets if these are two completely different things.