Here’s an interview with Sten Tamkivi who’s the Chief Evangelist at Skype. We did the interview in co-operation with Toivo Tänavsuu from Tigerprises. Tamkivi will reveal for example what Skype is looking to do next, thing or two about alternative revenue streams for Skype and much more. See for yourself. Tamkivi will also be our panelist this week at the ArcticEvening.
Interview with Sten Tamkivi from Skype from Toivo Tänavsuu on Vimeo.
A new Estonian startup, Daily Perfect, founded by Skype co-founder Ahti Heinla hopes to filter the noise from the web with their new innovation. They call it “predictive content personalization technology”, which should solve one of the most pressing issues for the Internet users that’s threatening to explode in the near future, namely finding relevant content in the web and filter out garbage and content that is not relevant to the user. DailyPerfect is currently in closed-beta.
The founders tell us that the company will debut this technology on a news site that “predicts users’ interests through an automated semantic analysis of information publicly available on the web.”
ArcticStartup Contributor Toivo Tänavsuu of Tigerprises, An Estonian blog, reports that Asko Seeba ,DailyPerfect CEO, explains that “the technology will create telepathic effect, because having done an analysis on you, it knows what you want to read without you having to define it. Well, of course, if you want, you can define your topics of interest, like people do in Google Reader, for example. But it’s not a must, and that’s the uniqueness of DailyPerfect.”
DailyPerfect is trying to do what for example Twitter, FriendFeed, Twine and RSS Readers have increasingly tried to do, which is to filter out only what is relevant content to the user from the wast amount of information that is daily created in the web. Where FriendFeed and Twitter, among others, are trying to do this by aggregating content from the people close to you or pulling interesting feeds from the people or sites that you’re interested in, DailyPerfect functions based on semantic analysis and is likely to use advanced microformats-like method to filter the data.
The DailyPerfect project has its roots at Ambient Sound Investments (ASI) and at Curonia Research. ASI is naturally also an investor and the service is currently being developed at the ASI Incubator in Tallinn.
The team is led by Co-Founder and CEO Asko Seeba, the former Engineering Manager at Skype; and Co-Founder and CTO Ahti Heinla — a partner at Ambient Sound Investments, and the former Lead Architect at Skype.
The witty guys at DailyPerfect have also figured out rather innovative way to filter out those who don’t quite have what it takes to work at the company by using ROT 13 substitution cipher. The chars (ascii codes of them) are increased by the hitchhiker’s number 42, which let’s you to encrypt their jobs section and be able to make sense of it (here).
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!
Toivo Tänavsuu has posted a blog post at The NextWeb site about a video telephoning solution being backed by Skype founders. The project is being run under the name of Inkspin1. The service itself is trying to bring free online telephony to the everyday life of people through television. Inkspin1 is currently being hatched in the Ambient Sound Investments incubator.
The goal of the project is to make the service as simple to use as possible. “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,” Martin Villig, the leader of the project explains.
The product development is carried out in Estonia, but the software development is being worked on in Beijing, China.Villig says that the amount of coders needed for a job this wide are more plentiful in China than in Estonia. Also in China they are closer to the vendor manufacturers that are expected to partner with Inkspin1 to integrate the necessary devices to their televisions to enable Television Video Telephony. The unit in China is being run by a Finn, Jussi Nyfelt, who has been working for Nokia in China.
Inkspin1 is still very much at a design stage as Villig states that the service is expected to be up and running in one to two years. Inkspin1 is currently recruiting lots of different talents.
It’s interesting to see ASI working hard on bringing a consumer service to the masses through better usability. The idea itself is nothing new, but then again it’s all in the execution. I’m guessing there are tons of ideas like this waiting to be improved. Yet further proof that you don’t always have to come up with a new idea to become an entrepreneur.
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