Estonian start-up stories by Toivo Tänavsuu
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 [...]
”Due to regular maintenance, there may be disruption to electronic Internet bank channels tonight” – Estonian banks treat their customers to such announcements on quite a frequent basis. But if their development teams adopt use of the new tool from Zeroturnaround, LiveRebel, they won’t be a need for downtime during maintenance. Zeroturnaround evolved out of [...]
It is quite possible that Estonians have come up with the world’s most user-friendly and lowest-cost tool for setting up online stores. The e-store creation platform created by the start-up Pipfrog is so simple and idiot-proof that CEO Bruno Lill says it could even be used by retirees who don’t know anything about computers. But [...]
One of Webmedia’s latest products, the company’s workforce optimization and work schedule planning software StaffLogic, appears so promising that Webmedia is considering launching a separate start-up for this business area. StaffLogic is a tool that will make life much easier for the people responsible for one of the most tiresome jobs – drawing up work [...]
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. [...]
In: Companies
28 Jan 2009An Estonian entrepreneur Jaanus Vihand (pictuted) has come up with a clever idea – he wants to blend the best features of Wikipedia, Google Earth and computer games. And establish a fun, entertaining and interactive historical online-environment called Histrodamus. One of the ideas is to popularise history among fun-loving teenagers and students. Although the history is often considered dull and overloaded with facts, it [...]
In: Companies
12 Jan 2009For typical software houses like Webmedia, Nordic and Baltic markets are not at all flattering. They’re boring and congested. “Everything is in place here,” Priit Alamäe, CEO of Webmedia bewails. Webmedia is one of the biggest software houses in the Baltics and, to large extent the architect of Estonian banking, telecom and public IT services infrastructure as we [...]
In: Companies
19 Sep 2008Last week I posted a story about Estonian start-up Programeter, that develops a programmer performance measuring software. But there’s another great tool, made in Estonia, that could give a fair boost of productivity for software developers. I am talking about ZeroTurnaround – a trademark of Webmedia Ltd. ZeroTurnaround focuses on improving developer productivity. Its flagship product JavaRebel [...]