Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 22nd January 2009
11 COMMENTS 
Toivo Tänavsuu, Next Web Estonian Web Tipr & founder of TigerPrises.com
The Estonian tech-visionaries, led by Ahti Heinla – one of the Founders of Skype, and Rainer Nõlvak are developing what they call “predictive content personalization technology”.
They plan to debut this technology in a project called DailyPerfect. That is a news site that predicts your interests through an automated semantic analysis of information publicly available on you on the web.
DailyPerfect’s site is meant for everyone reading news online and wishing to find interesting stuff easily. They don’t tell too much about this, since the project is at the moment in closed beta-stage. But will be launched publicly at the beginning of next year.
DailyPerfect was initiated by Ambient Sound Investments and Curonia Research. The team is led by Asko Seeba – the former Engineering Manager at Skype, and Ahti Heinla – a partner at Ambient Sound Investments and the former Lead Architect at Skype.
Read more about DailyPerfect here.
Written on 19th November 2008
5 COMMENTS
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 30th June 2008
7 COMMENTS
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Alarmclock:euro is reporting that Wahanda has raised seed funding from Ambient Sound Investments, an Estonian venture capital firm set up by four of Skype’s founding engineers, the investors behind last.fm and a former top executive of Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts.
Wahanda, a Native American word for “great spirit and creator”, is an online health and wellness community plus e-commerce marketplace where local spa and wellness businesses, pros and consumers come together. The London-based company was founded by Salim Mitha, former Senior European Director – Search & Social Search at Yahoo! and Lopo Champalimaud, ex-Managing Director European Lifestyle at lastminute.com. According to the company blog, the website opened up to the public today.
I’m not really a spa person, but from the looks of it, the site seems to cater well to its audience with the standard bag of tricks: Wahanda has an exhaustive network of spas, salons, fitness centres and therapists and a slew of community features like user-generated reviews, ratings, Google Maps integration, social bookmarking buttons, etc. The site also sports a genuine calm look, clear navigation and enough ways for visitors to interact with the content.
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