Estonian start-up stories by Toivo Tänavsuu
It’s something that a number of people have thought of. But in February, a group of people met at the Garage48 public services design competition and actually did it – visualized the Republic of Estonia’s budget. Coloured spheres that open on MeieRaha.eu shows the structure and proportion of the revenue and expenditures in the state budget. [...]
Born and bred in Estonia, the British start-up Transferwise exchanges pounds and euros at a rate a cut better than that of banks. Dubbed the “Skype of currency exchange”, the company is now trying to make inroads on the US market, where the US dollar, still the world’s favourite safe haven, promises to increase business [...]
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 [...]
HomeViewSolutions, a start-up that evolved out of the Ajujaht 2010 competition, is developing a service that will make it much easier and faster to buy furniture for the home and office. A question that potential buyers always face in such cases is whether the item will fit. One way is to use measuring tape and [...]
One day I started thinking: why is it that Estonia’s tech sector is teeming with start-ups? Everybody is the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, everyone travels to Silicon Valley for networking, everyone has hopes of being the second coming of Facebook or Microsoft. Where do these aspiring entrepreneurs and “smart money” get their unshakeable [...]
A number of companies in Estonia are developing services for the über-popular gadgets iPhone and iPad. Head and shoulders above the rest is former Skype employee Mikael Suvi (pictured with his wife), whose company CandyCane earned 140,000 euros of net profit in 2009 and has enjoyed good sales in 2010 as well. Suvi, who currently [...]
Beware, clairvoyants and fortune-tellers! Meet a young man named Timo Sulg (pictured) who predicts the future using algorithms. Timo Sulg is usually, like most IT people, anything but flamboyant. He studies at Tallinn University of Technology and will graduate in two years. What is unusual about him is the fact that whereas students at his [...]
Yet to be officially registered startup Defolio, built over a weekend and developing a collaborative design tool for freelancers and small creative agencies, was the winner of Garage48 event in Tartu. A group of eight people, among them Ahti Heinla – a founding engineer of Skype, Siim Teller – a well-known blogger and Tõnu Runnel [...]
Yesterday Eesti Ekspress published my interview with Priit Alamäe (pictured), the Co-Founder of Webmedia – one of the front ranking Estonian IT companies and the author of about one third of Estonian e-government services. The interview was dedicated to the recent 7 Million EUR investment that the company received from Polish venture capital firm Enterprise Investors. [...]