Ututi is a start-up from Lithuania that has built an online portal for university students to share course and study materials. Every 10th Lithuanian student uses it and the service's Polish version has attracted plenty of interest too. I interviewed Jaro Šatkevič, one of the founders, who revelaed that the team is now working on an international version of the service - Ututi.com. 'After many talks with universities we realized that they need another Ututi. They wanted to have studies-oriented social networks for university community, i.e. discussions, file sharing between students and teachers, teachers' personal pages etc. That's how new concept of Ututi was started. Official beta version is planned in the end of February' - states Jaro.

When comparing Ututi with similar tools for creating social networks like Ning, Elgg or Yammer, Jaro comments: 'Those services are not made for educational needs, that means teachers have no possibility to publish course materials or make a discussion between students and teachers. Differently from others, Ututi is an educational tool for university community with social network elements.' Students who'd ever had to use BSCW or Moodle (or both for the same course) can probably agree that a better, more intuitive and user-friendly tool is needed to manage course materials.

The team behind Ututi has been working with software for education for some time now. Company's CTO Ignas Mikalajūnas has previously worked on Schooltool, an administrative software provider for schools, and Jaro Šatkevič has been helping Lithuanian Educational Ministry with sotfware and database management. On top of that, Jaro has some experience running a start-up - he was one of the founders of a local event website Toostis.

When it comes to running a start-up in Lithuania, here's what Jaro has to say. 'Unfortunately Lithuania is not a startup-friendly country. For a startup it is very important to have a good home market. As Lithuania is a small country, home market is also small. European countries are too different from each other and too separated. That's why for example USA has much better climate for startups. Although government tries to help startupers, only non-governmental organizations (like startups.lt or OpenCoffee club Lithuania) give real benefit.' In addition, Jaro shared that Lithuania is lacking active investors. 'It is quite easy to get an investment of 30 000€, but almost impossible for much bigger amount. I don't know any startup given more than 100 000€ investment.'

Nevertheless, Lithuanian entrepreneurship scene is very lively. Last year many cool events like Startup weekend, StartupJam, Mentoring Day and AppCamp took place. Half of those were supported by participants and organizers from Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Finland. It cannot be denied, though, that running a start-up in Lithuania is a tough business. All the more respect and good luck to services like Ututi!