Estonian startup NOW! Innovations, founded in 2003, will reportedly start cooperating with a US startup StreetSmart Technology. StreetSmart Technology will offer its customers an integrated total solution for automatic mobile parking service system.

The service includes automatic managing of parking lots and mobile payment option for the end-users. The parking spaces are being monitored automatically by sensors under the paving. The parking meter will know whether the space has been paid for or not. Should there be any violations, the parking lot manager will be automatically notified. NOW! Innovations provides the platform for the provisioning of mobile digital tickets.

The service is planned to launch on Monday October 20th in the city of Decatur near Atlanta, Georgia. The payment method will be based on automatic voice service instead of SMS. As Arho Anttila, the Managing Director of NOW! Innovations argues, for the average American to use SMS for parking would be “psychologicaly unacceptable and difficult.”

NOW! Innovations has targeted the US (esp. New York and New Jersey) and Latin America (Ecuador and Brazil) for some time, but this new initiative will be the firm’s main bridgehead in the US. The company has previously been involved in launching mobile parking payment systems in Belgium, Estonia, and Slovenia. The company also offers mobile ticketing systems for public transport, and different metering and monitoring solutions.

Half of NOW! Innovations is owned by Helmes, the largest software development company in Estonia, that is supporting the firm’s strong international growth.

[Via Toivo Tänavsuu's TigerPrises.com]

ZeroTurnaround JavaRebel is a product by Webmedia Ltd, an Estonian firm, which has been the fastest growing software development company in the Baltics.

ZeroTurnaround JavaRebel improves developer productivity by reducing the “turnaround” time it takes for the programmers to see the changes made to the code in action. Turnaround time refers to the time it takes to build, deploy, and initialize changes in web development to see the actual result in running application. With web development it might take several minutes, or more, for the programmers to see the changes made to the service. Big software development teams having many deployments per hour are wasting a lot of time and money with developers waiting for the deployment process to finish. The people may have hard time concentrating, and the overall productivity may be low. With JavaRebel the deployment process is claimed to take maximum 1-2 seconds. The company also offers JSP Weaver product, which interprets the JSP files used in web site development on-the-fly and thus reduces the time taken to reload a JSP up to 50 times down to milliseconds.

Webmedia recently announced that LinkedIn Corp. has licensed JavaRebel for all its Java engineers. According to Ivo Mägi, Chief Development Officer of Webmedia, JavaRebel has currently more than 10 000 users worldwide, and it is the first step in conquering enterprise Java development market.

The company offers JavaRebel as open source for “qualified Open Source projects” and with commercial licenses.

[Via Toivo Tänavsuu's TigerPrises.com]

3D Technologies R&D, an Estonian Tartu-based startup founded in 2006, is developing an ultralight XML-like standard for better showing interactive 3D and 2D content on the web than is possible with HTML. The cross-platform standard is called 3DMLW – Three Dimensional Markup Language for Web, which is licensed under GPL. The company also provides also an independent plug-in for web browsers to display 3DMLW.

The mission of the company is nothing less ambitious than to create de facto standard for displaying 3D-content on the web. The stated goals are 1) to offer at least as good 2-dimensional content and animation presentation as Macromedia Flash does; 2) to let users easily develop dynamic content and use 3DMLW in different content management systems and web portals; and 3) to support most common 3D-model formats, videos, music and animation.

The firm has completed beta version of the 3DMLW editor Quantum Hog, which is now available for download. With the editor one should be able to create 3D models and animations as easily as creating HTML documents.

3D Technologies R&D belives in the future more than 50 % of the web content will be shown in three dimensional format, as also virtual communities are getting more and more popular. In the near future 3D Technologies R&D is planning to introduce a possibility for other companies to make their virtual worlds even more interesting and interactive for their customers by using 3D content.

According to TigerPrises.com, Owner Kaspar Koov comments it will be easy to integrate the content with other systems like CMS’s, forum-scripts, news portals, and even CRM, and Business Intelligence tools or other applications. Users won’t have to know how to create 3D models, but can just take the existing models and use them on the web. The company has created a virtual office for Fujitsu Services Estonia. In essence that is a virtual intranet, connected with other company systems, allowing the users to walk around, communicate with colleagues, and see what tasks they are working on.

3D Technologies R&D is targeting the global market, seeing the US, Germany, and China as the three main regions of interest currently. 3D Technologies R&D is looking for venture capital from the US to make the expansion possible.

[Via Toivo Tänavsuu's TigerPrises.com]

[Via Toivo Tänavsuu's TigerPrises.com]

Estonian company Poohtech has launched a service called Cmart (.swf link) in Latvia that enables paying utility bills in 99 local Narvesen kiosks. Poohtech is an Estonian startup focusing on electronic ticketing and payment solutions. Toivo Annus, the former lead engineer of Skype, has reportedly invested in the firm. Poohtech has earlier provided electronic ticketing for in public transportation in Tallinn, Estonia.

The Cmart service enables Latvians to pay their bills at local newsstand chain Narvesen. The barcodes of bills from different service providers (including telecom, security, energy , etc.), are scanned in and paid on the spot.

The value statement Cmart makes is letting people to pay their bills on the go makes their life much easier. Toivo Tänavsuu comments at least in Estonia most of the people pay their bills online (similarly in Finland), and probably in Latvia also, but on the other hand the service could be very valuable for elderly people.

Poohtech is aiming for international markets with Cmart, and mention they would like to hear from potential partners.

As part of our expanded focus, we are now looking for Contributors to act as our eyes and ears in all of the Baltic and Nordic countries, as well as Moscow and St. Petersburg, helping us to spot and report on interesting startups and events. In return for tips we offer link love and visibility on all continents. We will connect your name with each post we write about that is based on your tipping. Naturally, you will also get your profile on our Team page.

If you are enthusiastic, have exceptional industry insight, and can write, we may also be interested in publishing your analysis as a guest blogger. If you are interested in this opportunity we would like to see some sample post from you.

To join our passionate network, drop a mail at miikka [at] arcticstartup [com] and tell us what kind of cooperation you would like to do. Once a year we will also invite all the Contributors to Helsinki to dine and wine together with us and many of the startups we’ve together written about.

Finally, I would also like to take this opportunity to introduce our two new Estonian Contributors, Toivo Tänavsuu and Märt Ridala, check out their profiles on the Team page. Welcome aboard Toivo and Märt, and thanks in advance!