Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on December 6, 2008 – 8:51 pm
Toivo Tänavsuu, Next Web Estonian Web Tipr & founder of TigerPrises.com
Estonian instant website creator Edicy will participate in this year’s Le Web start-up competition in Paris.
Among 30 companies from 18 countries Edicy (Fraktal), founded by Tõnu Runnel and financed by Toivo Annus, founder of Skype, is the only company from Estonia.
Edicy is a platform enabling to create professionally designed websites quickly and easily, without any specific knowledge required. Their slogan says: “Everyone can create a website.“ Even you!
Estonian representation in Paris
Runnel, who has promised every Le Web finalist one Edicy website as a present, is extremely thrilled about the remarkable milestone for the company. “Le Web is one of the biggest tech start-up events in the world,” he says. “The fact that we were chosen from hundreds of companies around the world, is a serious appreciation for our work and potential.”
At Le Web the start-ups are given seven minutes to prove what they offer is the hottest. That’s not easy, but Runnel is already happy with the media coverage and all.
24.000 websites created
Since July 2008 over 24.000 websites have been created with Edicy. Estonia and China used to be the dominating markets, in China over 6000 websites use Edicy platform. Lately the Western Europe and US are booming markets for the promising company.
Runnel says that non-English markets are the primary ones, where to achieve the leading position. English markets are just full of different tools already. Edicy uses many different languages and people say it provides significantly nicer website design than many of its competitors are offering.
Freemium model
Edicy is mostly used by SMEs, non-profit organizations and private individuals. It’s basically a free service, but you have to pay for some extra services, like registration of the domain. Runnel’s goal is to reach 100 000 Edicy created websites by the end of the year, about one percent of them using Edicy Pro – the paid service.
A fight with Lepp
There’s only one thing frustrating Runnel – a dispute with his former colleague Mattias Lepp. Runnel used to work for Lepp, but now Lepp is accusing Runnel of stealing the intellectual property. Lepp claims that Runnel left his company with some critical knowledge, used it to establish Edicy and now enjoys the glory and success. Lepp charges Runnel over 2 million euros for the damage. Runnel feels no guilt, he sees Lepp just being covetous.
I hope you like that post!
The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not just the Valley), exciting new technologies and inspiring entrepreneurs. If you're new here, you may want to read our '
About' page and subscribe to our
RSS feed.
Do you have a start-up that we should write about?
Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!
Written on November 21, 2008 – 1:25 pm
Toivo Tänavsuu, Next Web Estonian Web Tipr & founder of TigerPrises.com
Founder of Rate.ee, the most successful Estonian internet project thus far, Andrei Korobeinik (pictured) aims to reiterate the success in Europe with Rate clones and a brand new social networking platform.
Despite the serious doubts if there is something left to surprise with in the field of social networking, Korobeinik is going forward with a new ambitious project idea.
Depending on the market, is it The Baltics, Russia or The Balkans, his new social networking platform will use the domains MinuElu.ee (My Life), Classter.ru, Znanci.com and ClassPeople.com.
With MinuElu Korobeinik targets folks aged 20+. Similarly to what famous Russian site Odnoklassniki.ru and its US counterpart Classmates.com is trying to do, Korobeinik aims to reunite former school-, army- and workmates.
Like he says, MinuElu and other sites should become “the mirrors of our Internet life” and channels for social communication with our friends. We can import stuff from our YouTube, Flickr, Orkut, Blogger and other accounts to our MinuElu accounts, for these to become our “business cards” in the Internet.
Korobeinik aims to monetize MinuElu by selling targeted ads and services.
He sold Rate.ee couple of years ago to EMT, the biggest Estonian mobile operator, receiving 2,5 million euros. Ever since Korobeinik has focused on launching and operating Rate clones with different domains in over 20 European countries together with Estonian venture capital firm MartinsonTrigon. The joint company for the clones is called Rate Solutions.
Although Rate’s clone Karike.com is fairly popular in Serbia, and the results are not too bad in Romania, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Montenegro either, none of the clones have gained any success comparable to glory of Rate.ee in Estonia. From Estonian population 1,4 million almost one-fourth are registered users of Rate.ee!
The goal of Rate Soultions is to become the leading European virtual social network by 2009.
Well, the only problem seems to be that Europe is already sick of social networks. Everyone (and their granny’s) has one.
Written on November 20, 2008 – 9:13 am
Toivo Tänavsuu, Next Web Estonian Web Tipr & founder of TigerPrises.com
Estonian NOW! Innovations and US start-up StreetSmart Technology launched a new and innovative mobile parking service in city of Decatur near Atlanta, Georgia.
From 20th of October, the citizens of Decatur are having an unique opportunity to pay for parking by using their mobile phones, while the parking lot is being monitored by detectors inside the blacktop. The parking meter receives information about the payment and will then activate just as if coins would be used.
The solution makes controlling very easy. The idea of blacktop detectors is to monitor the status of every parking space during enforcement hours and alert the parking lot manager about possible violations.
At first stage there are about 100 parking spaces in the center of Decatur incorporated into the Estonian-US joint innovation project, says Arho Anttila, the Managing Director of NOW! Innovations. He adds: “If Europeans are OK with paying for parking via SMS, then people from US prefer using automated voice-services. Because for an average American parking via SMS is psychological unacceptable and difficult.”
For NOW! Innovations, the digital permitting company from Tallinn, Decatur is the first commercial step in grand US market. The company has targeted US (especially New York and New Jersey) and Latin America (Ecuador and Brazil) for a while already, but have so far made progress mainly in Europe. Thanks to NOW! mobile parking is available, for example, in Antwerp (Belgium), Kiev (Ukraine) and Skopje (Macedonia).
Besides Decatur, Estonian m-parking solutions are also being tested in Albany - the capital of The State of New York. Anttila believes this could give the company certain advantage when the city plans to go ahead with commercializing the solution in 2009.
NOW! is aspired to become “a big player” in US market, where mobile parking is doing its first steps. “Well-working mobile parking solution sells by itself. We are like a benign cancer - when we put things to work in one city, it will eventually spread into other cities as well,” claims Anttila, who believes mobile parking is an effective and cost-efficient solution for problems caused by urbanizing.
Today you can park by using your mobile phone one way or the other in about 30 US cities, the only metropolitan being Miami. Estonia was the first country in the world where mobile parking was introduced back in 2000 by EMT.
NOW! Innovations is part of Estonian Helmes group, founded by entrepreneur Jaan Pillesaar.
Written on November 19, 2008 – 1:39 pm
Toivo Tänavsuu, Next Web Estonian Web Tipr & founder of TigerPrises.com
This week it was announced that Estonia’s most innovative person of 2008 is Rainer Nõlvak (pictured) – entrepreneur and visionary, who came up with the idea of a nationwide cleanup campaign titled Let’s Do It! 2008.
About 10.000 tons of illegal waste was lying around all over Estonia, but Nõlvak and Co had this outrageous plan to clean it all up on one day! So on the 3rd of May this year more than 50.000 volunteers – about 3% of Estonian population - came out to clean up forests, roadsides and other public areas.
More than 40 waste management companies supported the initiative with necessary containers and garbage transportation vehicles. The initiative aimed to recycle up to 80 percent of the collected waste, making it the first massive recycling project in Estonia. The usual amount of garbage recycled in Estonia is 10 percent, so this is eight times more than the average.
But there was also a technological angle. Let’s Do It! 2008 was backed by one of the founders of Skype, Ahti Heinla. He helped taking care of digital geo-mapping of the waste.
Before the actual cleanup work started, the campaigners used special software based on Google Earth, positioning software for mobile phones and mobile phones with GPS to map and photograph 11.000 illegal garbage dumps across all 45.227 square kilometers of Estonia. The soft can be used in much larger and dirtier countries, such as India.
Lets Do it! 2008 attracted a lot of attention globally - Reuters, BBC, AFP … you name it!
Nõlvak is the Founder of Microlink. After selling the company he moved to Florida, thinking about never working again. But then he realized: “To do just nothing turned out to be really hard. It’s like becoming an alcoholic - it simply ruins your health. And then suddenly I felt in Florida that I am ridiculous.” So he returned to Estonia and established a research institution Curonia Research. Nõlvak is also involved with Celecure - developer of novel anticancer drugs.
Ahti Heinla is one of the founders of Skype. He is a partner in Estonia’s most famous venture capital firm Ambient Sound Investments. Top innovations were chosen by the InnoEurope center.
Written on October 14, 2008 – 3:08 pm
Toivo Tänavsuu, Next Web Estonian Web Tipr & founder of TigerPrises.com
I was glad to be invited to Finland recently, where mobile giant Nokia gave some hints about “the way we 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” to have “a world of highly tailored and proactive information”.
Bob Iannucci, Head of Nokia Research Center predicts that in about seven years time the world is full of sensors. For each mobile phone, there’ll be ten wireless connected private sensors - one in your car, one in your clothes, one in your house etc - all “bridged” with your mobile phone. The sensors cost almost nothing, because the technology already exists.
What are the consequences?
Iannucci explains that Nokia is able to take your location data and aggregate it with your diary, your calendar and your user history, since your phone learns from your behavior.
Imagine sitting in a meeting, having subscribed to a traffic feed. Your phone recognizes that the route you are about to take is congested and “says” to you: “I see that you got to be on Mark’s birthday at 15:00. But the route that you usually take is congested, so you better leave early! And how would you like me to plan another route?”
Disease control
Or another example: disease control. Iannucci says that the granularity of US disease control system, for example, is so poor, that it is even hard to say how many people are infected in particular county. So why can’t our phones be able to recognize our health conditions or body temperature?
Weather sensors
Our Nokias could also be our personal “weather sensors”. Iannucci talks about thousands of existing weather sensors located in places like mountain tops and airports, where no one really lives. How about using our phones and their wireless data delivery capabilities to sense weather and with the help of hundreds of millions of weather sensors like that provide climate data, with maximum possible accuracy.
Cool new services of Nokia
Here’s an overview of some of the new services Nokia is “baking”:
- Indoor Positioning. Provides a positioning and location-based service inside a building. Users can add new buildings and can contribute measurement data and context information. Indoor maps are enhanced by user-created Point-of-Interests. The indoor positioning platform respects privacy. There’s a demo project going on in Helsingi Kamppi Center.
- Local Interaction takes social-networking and location-based services indoors: find your friends based on indoor positioning, browse nearby places on indoor maps, add media and comments to indoor places. All of this is easy to access on your web-enabled phone.
- Point & Find enables people on the move to access information and services on the Internet, simply by pointing a camera phone at real-world objects. In the first beta version of Point & Find to be released in the near future in US and UK, users can instantly watch the film trailer, read the review, or find the closest cinema to buy tickets, simply by pointing a camera phone at a poster for a new movie.
- The Morph concept device, launched alongside The Museum of Modern Art “Design and The Elastic Mind” exhibition, showcases some revolutionary leaps being explored by Nokia Research Center in collaboration with the Cambridge Nanoscience Centre in United Kingdom. The nanoscale technologies that will potentially create a world of radically different devices open up an entirely new spectrum of possibilities.
The full list of Nokia service demos is here.
Written on October 13, 2008 – 12:20 pm
Toivo Tänavsuu, Next Web Estonian Web Tipr & founder of TigerPrises.com
What do we know about Nigeria? That it’s 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 of them.
Forget about chain letters, and spam, where someone unknown desperately begs you to send just a bit of money to his account, so that he could “buy out” a huge unexpected heritage from passed away relative. And split it 50:50 with you afterwards, of course. That’s an old way of cheating people online. And it’s history.
In 2008 swindlers use considerably more sophisticated, yet very simple scams. And surprise-surprise, they gave a fling on me!
I had an iPhone. Bought it in the US, brought it to Estonia, unlocked it and used it for a while. But about four months was enough for me to realize: this “superstar” gadget is not worth all this buzz around it. If you want to know why I think that, please stay tuned, there will be a follow-up on that from me.
But today I want to discuss the fraud attempt of some Nigerians. Here’s how they wanted to fool me:
Juliet Malcos from Liverpool wants my iPhone
I had just put my iPhone for sale in local Estonian commercial announcements website Soov.ee, when I received a surprising purchase request via Gmail. Apparently from a lady named Juliet Malcos, according to her Yahoo e-mail address. She was claiming to live in Liverpool, UK (that’s 3000 kilometers from where I live) and she was interested in “immediate purchase” of my item. Her desperate cry for my abandoned iPhone was so loud, that she offered me 600 euros for the piece (175 euro more than I wanted at first place), plus recoup of the shipment costs.
We exchanged several e-mails. But here’s the funniest part: She said the phone was needed for her daughter’s school project. Her daughter was about to leave from Heathrow airport to Nigeria for this project.
So I had to hurry up. ”The British lady” asked for my account number, but more importantly, she asked me to send the phone via DHL or FedEx over to address “Temitope Johnson, 1 Balogun Street, Mokola, Ibadan city, Oyo State, 23402 Nigeria”, while she would “rush” into her bank for money transaction.
Confirmations from Citibank
The next day an email pops into my Gmail-box, letter with some copy-paste logos from CitiBank:
Sender: CitiBank Service citibanktransfer@citigroupservice.com
Subject: ***FURTHER UPDATES FOR SHIPMENT REQUIRED***DO NOT REPLY***
Message: Transfer money between your Citi and non-Citi accounts.
ONLINE TRANSFER OF FUNDS.
Dear Valued Customer:Toivo Tanavsuu,
We have received the order for the transfer of the full payment of EUR 600.00€ from our client,the buyer of your item Mrs Juliet Malcos.
We have authorized the immediate transfer of the full payment to your bank details provided below.
We have concluded the procedure for the transfer of the full payment to your account with authorization code: 401-280190-1-59-0
Estimated Date Of Transfer : Thursday,09th of October ,2008
19:23:12 %2B4000 (EDT)
Based on our security measures for the protection of our customers,the payment transfer has been encrypted with a password prior to the receiver of the proof of shipment by our client.
We will send you the password for the release of the money to your accounts after you have sent the scanned receipt of shipment to Mrs Juliet Malcos. Alternatively you can send it to our account section with the contacts provided below.
This is the new directive from our Risk Management Team.
You can go ahead now to ship out the item to Mrs Juliet Malcos.
The CITIBANK MANAGEMENT will send you the password to activate your bank account within the next 72 hours of your sending the evidence of shipment to your buyer.
THIS IS AN AUTOMATED MESSAGE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL ADDRESS
Tell:+447024079092
Tell:+447024096947
Tell:+447024096951
Tell:+447737063918
Fax:+448704783490
e-mail : Citi-Bank Correspondent:citibanktransfer@citigroupservice.com
Tell?
So what she wanted me to do was to send my iPhone over to Nigeria. Only after I have made the shipment and sent the shipment verification number to the so-called Citibank, they would be able to complete the transfer of my 600 euros. But we all know that the abbreviation for word “telephone” is not “tell”, but “tel”..
Anyway, only few hours later I received another e-mail from “CitiBank Service” saying the payment of Mrs. Malcos had been processed successfully and that it could take 24 to 72 hours till my bank would confirm this. That is, whenever the shipment was verified.
Some people actually fall for it
Well, eventually I had to disappoint my “Nigerian pal” Juliet. Didn’t send the phone to Africa. I guess there’s no need to say that I saw no 600 euros in my account either. She underestimated me big time!
People, please warn your naive friends about this! Some offers are too good to be true. And I am not the only one targeted with breath-taking offers “from UK”.
Estonian daily Eesti Päevaleht published a story about an Estonian, how he was selling his smartphone, just as I did sell mine. Apparently “Mary Jones“ from UK contacted him and wanted to purchase the piece for her friend who lives in Nigeria.
DHL wants you to think twice
The exact same story: just send the piece over to Nigeria please, via DHL and you will have 500 wasy euros in your account! Confirmation e-mails from “CitiBank Service” and everything. The guy was also lucky, because he saw this through as well. But played along for a while.
But unfortunately some of us, Estonians, haven’t been that fortunate. I was speaking with DHL Estonian representatives and they told me that one other guy fell for the scam. He sent his laptop over to Nigeria, believing all these nice promises coming from UK. The fraudulent pilgrimage of his laptop was stopped by DHL in Nigeria, but poor guy had to pay several hundred dollars for the shipment forth and back, before the item was returned to him.
So from now on, every time somebody wants to send something from Estonia over to Nigeria, DHL asks to double-think. They say from their wide experience that Nigerian con men are also pretty active in environments like eBay.
Where things stand between me and Juliet iss hard to tell, because the situations is bizarre. She is still writing me e-mails asking for the shipment receipt.
Written on October 10, 2008 – 1:41 pm
Toivo Tänavsuu, Next Web Estonian Web Tipr & founder of TigerPrises.com
There’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’d call it image-oriented social network. One that’s pretty good-looking.
Last year the site was recognized by CNET as one of the best Web 2.0 applications in the world, side by side with success stories like YouTube and MySpace.
Dmitri Don, who claims he never had to go to school to learn programming, says Fotki.com has more than half a million unique visitors and about 25+ million unique people who they serve images from their cluster. These are daily figures.
“We power the world”
But Fotki, as Don point out, is not just a website, but also web service. “We power the world, but nobody knows much about this!” Don says. The Estonian company is licensing photo-sharing software and providing hosting and storage services for digital content for huge global companies, with annual turnover over $50 billion.
One of them is Telecom Italia, the giant operator that’s active in seven European and Latin-American markets. Alice.it, its multifunctional web portal is powered by Fotki photo engine.
US clients
Another big guy Fotki serves is US retailer Sears, that operates more than 3800 shops. Sears’s home management and services portal ManageMyHome.com is run by Fotki’s photo engine. Don hurls names of US clients, one after the other - vacation organizer Mark Travel, media group Vegas.com, turism company Funjet.com etc.
Exceptional team in Estonia
Fotki was founded ten years ago in New York by Don and his wife Katrin Lilleoks (both pictured). By accident that was the exact same day some other guys founded Google! Fotki’s back-office and development team is in Estonia, Tallinn. This team is kind of exceptional, because it consists of 25 Russian-speaking Estonians, lead by Russian citizen Pavel Merdin.
“East Coast not a good place for Internet business”
This year Fotki moved its US office from New York to Silicon Valley. “The East Coast is not a good place for Internet business. People there don’t know much about the Internet. They ask stupid questions, like why do people want to upload their photos online?” Don claims.
An East Coast bank refused to open an account for Fotki in 2001. That’s because Don had said to the banker that he is running an Internet business. Don: “People from East Coast think that Internet business is porn, gambling, stealing and dirty money!”.
Fotki will raise some venture capital from Europe very soon. “Stay tuned!” says Don.
Written on October 7, 2008 – 10:58 am
Toivo Tänavsuu, Next Web Estonian Web Tipr & founder of TigerPrises.com
Estonian 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 prices. It facilitates one-click centralized ordering from different IT wholesale distribution warehouses with deliveries to your doorstep usually within one business day.
There are 20 large warehouses with over quarter of a million different products avalible in MarkIT’s „catalog“, at least 50 000 -100 000 items in one country.
Quite a success story, uh?
The system is used by more than 15 000 companies already. They no longer have to ask for multiple offers from different resellers, when in need for IT equipment. MarkIT gives a good online overview of not only what is available, but also when is avalible.
In the end of 2007 MarkIT conducted a short survey in The Baltics. More than 50 companies - among others Skype Technolgies, Tele2, Estonian Energy, Swedbank, Ernst&Young, Electrolux, PriceWaterhouseCoopers etc – were asked “Do you believe that MarkIT helps to save time and money on IT purchasing in your company?” The answer, on the scale of 1-10, was 8,99.
MarkIT is growing like crazy – last year’s turnover of about 20 million EUR will be exceeded by about 7 million EUR this year. The amount of frequenters has increased by 30 percent in one year. New annual sales target is set for 60-70 million EUR (1 billion EEK).
No competitors? Oh, come on…
When asking Margus Pahtma, the marketing manager of MarkIT about the European IT stuff market, he says that despite the fact there are many resellers, he doesn’t know of any other Internet-based players with such a large scale business as MarkIT. If you know any competitors, let us know bt commenting the post.
MarkIT is a portfolio company of Ambient Sound Investments (The Skype founders) and JPF Holdings (Jaan Pillesaar, owner of Helmes).
Written on September 30, 2008 – 2:02 pm
Toivo Tänavsuu, Next Web Estonian Web Tipr & founder of TigerPrises.com
A remarkable “Oh Shit” campaign has launched in Estonia, aimed at educating ordinary computer users.
Many of you probably remember Estonia survived what has been called the world’s first Cyber War last year. It was launched by Russians and made headlines around the world. Thanks to The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) Estonia, led by the chief security officer Hillar Aarelaid, Estonia was successful in defending itself against the so called DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks.
A couple of weeks ago, Aarelaid’s team launched a somewhat controversial campaign in Estonia, aimed at educating the computer users in Estonia. The campaign is called “AssaPauk”, which can be translated in English as “What a hell?” or “Oh Shit”! There’s a good chance this is your first emotion after discovering that you are in some sort of a criminal “cyber mess.”
The campaign, that should guide people how to use the Internet safely, is focused on three lessons: which links are OK to click and which are not? What kind of passwords to use? And how to avoid an unpleasant identity theft.
“I am a pedophile! How about you?”
Actors telling real stories are used to get the lessons across. For example, there’s a guy who says that he was made a pedophile inadvertently. He used short easy-to-memorize password (his wife’s name) for many different Internet applications. When suddenly finding that someone had guessed the password and uploaded nasty porn images into his weblog. (Take a look at his YouTube video, the poster below is saying “I am a pedophile! How about you?”)
“I am a thief! How about you?”
Or there’s a woman claiming that she had made a thief against her will. She clicked on an unknown link and apparently a virus downloaded into her computer. So her computer was used to steal credit card data of other people. And now she has become a suspect of serious crime. (YouTube video, the poster above is saying “I am a thief! How about you?”)
Member of an international gang
Another woman received an e-mail saying that she should update her Internet banking passwords immediately or they will expire. For doing that she was asked to fill in her existing passwords and sent them to “the bank”. She ended up sending her passwords to strangers, who used her bank account for transferring stolen money. So without knowing it, she became member of a international thief gang. (YouTube video)
CERT gives many different hints to avoid such unpleasantness. Hillar Aarelaid says that the days where viruses only harmed files are over. Today criminals are infecting people’s computers to take control over them and use them for criminal purposes, while remaining undetected.
If you understand Estonian, take a look at how Estonia educates its people, by clicking here.
Written on September 8, 2008 – 1:07 pm
Toivo Tänavsuu, Next Web Estonian Web Tipr & founder of TigerPrises.com
The Estonians who brought world wide fame to the Internet telephone Skype are working on a new and interesting software solution enabling free video calls via television.
The project, currently named InkSpin1, hatching in the Ambient Sound Investments (ASI) investment group’s incubator, incorporates the development of the user interface utilized in the Skype Internet phone for LCD televisions. This development would enable video calls to be conducted not on small cell phone screens or even computer screens but on gigantic TV screens.
Just turn on the tube
InkSpin1 leader Martin Villig says the objective of the described solution is to make video calls as simple and convenient as possible and thus introduce an even larger user base.
Today, free Skype video calls are available to computer users, all you need in addition is a web cam. “Today, we have a solution for computer users. Yet, for an average home user, video calling is too difficult and thus they are not taking advantage of the opportunity. Our goal here is to make such calls equally easy for kids as well as parents. So that if people know how to turn on the TV and change channels, they would know how to make video calls,” Villig explains.
According to Villig, the company already has the first TV-video phone (or VTV solution) prototypes up and running and they are doing so efficiently. At the moment, additional services are being developed and they are making contact with television manufacturers, with a view to integrating the software device into television sets. Those unwilling to change their TV sets can, in the future, purchase a digibox-like supplementary device.
Backed by Chinese developers
Product development for the Skype founders’ new technological gadget is carried out in Estonia, its software development, however, takes place in Beijing, China. Villig lists two reasons behind this. First, through China, it is easier to cooperate with Asian television producers, contacts with some of whom have already been established. Second, it is more difficult in Estonia than in China to find suitable software developers in required numbers. The Chinese unit of InkSpin1 is managed by Jussi Nyfelt, a Finn who has been promoting Nokia in China for years.
But first, some research
So as to find out what the relevant user expectations are and whether or not users would be willing to pay a bit more for video-cal enabled TV sets, InkSpin1 will conduct preliminary studies in a number of countries; monetary support for this will be applied for with Enterprise Estonia. The TV-video phone could be on the market in a year or two, notes Villig. In addition to everything else, the solution is still awaiting a catchy name.
ASI, which has invested in tens of technology companies is owned by Skype founders Toivo Annus, Jaan Tallinn, Ahti Heinla and Priit Kasesalu. When eBay purchased Skype in 2005 for 2,6 billion USD, the Estonians received a significant amount in their bank accounts.
This is a guest post by Toivo Tänavsuu, editor and founder of TigerPrises.com
Runnel, who has promised every Le Web finalist one Edicy website as a present, is extremely thrilled about the remarkable milestone for the company. “Le Web is one of the biggest tech start-up events in the world,” he says. “The fact that we were chosen from hundreds of companies around the world, is a serious appreciation for our work and potential.”
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=60565974-4cec-45cc-b351-4ea325b12784)
Email
Facebook
Netlog
Linkedin
Twitter
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
