Father of Estonian Social Networking Aims to Conquer Europe
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.
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