Just a quick note for the readers – as some of you have probably noticed already, my blog is now partly bilingual.
Some (not all) of the latest posts are available in English, as well as in Estonia. There’s a button below the title (when you click on a title), where you can switch between languages.
That’s because:
- I see great potential to increase Estonian readership. But at the same time the foreign readers from over 70 countries worldwide are just as important.
- I am writing significant share of my articles and posts in Estonian anyway, they are published in innovation magazines HEI and Inseneeria and translated into English.
- My cooperation with Enterprise Estonia in electrifying and motivating Estonian companies to become more innovative is deepening.
Despite all the talk of unemployment, there are still lots of unfilled job vacancies in Estonia. The managers of three Estonian start-up companies describe how they are desperately looking for people and how all this can be a real headache.
LESSON ONE
“The best candidates: morgue vehicle driver and sex shop salesperson”
Heikki Haldre (pictured) is the founder of start-up company Massi Miliano (Fits.me) which has received several awards. This company is developing technology for virtual fitting rooms and robot mannequins, and plans to hire several new employees this year.
“In the autumn we were looking for an employee from Estonia – we were expecting an ability to learn but not expert knowledge of our narrow field. The position was advertised as ‘assistant’. Of course we placed ads on the Estonian CV web portals; we also advertised on Facebook and had a nice big advertisement in the Äripäev newspaper as well.
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Estonian start-up GrabCAD plans to attract if not all, then at least the lion’s share of the world’s engineers to Estonia. This may sound rather utopian, but it’s not entirely impossible.
The company, set up by two young technology specialists and entrepreneurs – Indrek Narusk and Hardi Meybaum – is developing an all-in-one online environment, which the engineers, designers and design artists of the future will find difficult to manage without. It will be both a necessary tool and a key professional discussion space for them.
The enthusiastic founders of GrabCAD want to use their engineering network to eliminate several bottlenecks, as these cause problems for just over seven million of the world’s engineering graduates every day (according to UNESCO figures).
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Cupoco, a mobile couponing system from Estonian start-up GEOVoucher will announce tonight a marketing campaign, where you can win an iPhone 3GS simply by promoting Cupoco in the social web. There will be a raffle on their website starting from 18 pm tonight.
Cupoco application platform is aimed for smartphone users, merchants and service providers. The idea is simple: to bring them together.
Service provider, for example a restaurant, hotel or publishing house etc can easily (in five minutes) create e-coupons, bonus cards, recommendations or hot deals that the smartphone owners could use. These are distributed directly to the mobile phones of target customers and redeemed with a virtual barcode. Service provider can easily track the feedback.
Marc Böhret from GEOVoucher says that Cupoco will first be launched in Germany, although the service is developed mostly in Estonia. Talks are ongoing with several different companies, but these are yet to be disclosed. Böhret believes there’s an enormous market potential of e-coupons in Germany and Estonia as well.
TigerPrises spoke with Peep Laja (pictured), a “self-made” Estonian entrepreneur, living mostly in US and developing Traindom.com - the site that allows you to monetize your valuable wisdom with ease.
Peep, what is Traindom?
Traindom is an online platform for monetizing knowledge. It’s an all-in-one solution for creating e-courses, e-trainings, membership sites – any kind of information products. Once the training product is created, you can sell access to the content and make money.
Traidom is created by a team of 5 top experts in their field.
Whom is it meant for?
Traindom is meant for trainers, experts and consultants who want to monetize their knowledge and start an information marketing business. Anyone who knows a lot about something can teach other people and make money on the way.
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Allow me to introduce you to an entrepreneur Noel Guinane.
He has just moved to Estonia from Middle East with his wife and five children to establish a small programming studio of mobile games and apps in Tallinn.
Here’s my e-mail conversation with Noel from last week.
Tell me more about your company, what sort of development are you guys planning?
We are newly based in Tallinn and looking to hire an Objective C programmer and graphic designer for mobile games and apps, mainly on iPhone. Before we hired programmers in Russia, but would now prefer to work directly with local talent in Tallinn. I read about Reval Mob in Narva and Indilo Wireless in Tartu on your weblog.
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Last year Estonian venture capital firms joined forces by founding the Estonian Ventur Capital Association (EstVCA). Who are the players on the market today?
Here’s a short overview which shows that:
- the Estonian venture capital market is expanding, VC culture is developing
- there are several new investors who have transferred from the field of real estate and are now looking for potential growth companies in the Baltic and eastern European countries
- there are no women as VC’s in Estonia, all men
- some of the VC’s are yet to set their pipelines and ways, they have made no significant investments yet
- money is no problem in Estonia, instead there’s lack of ideas and projects
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Tags: Ambient Sound Investments, Askembla, Astrec Invest, Baltcap, Celecure, Cresco, Estonian Development Fund, Evikon, Fits.me, Hanseatic Capital, IPC, MarkIT, Massi Miliano, MTVP, Neoqi, Oskando, Pioneer Engineering Group, Quattromed, Redgate Capital, Skype, United Dogs & Cats, Unitree Group, WNB Project
Companies, Venture Capitalists | 
Comments (10)
I don’t think it is somehow indecorous to wish other people a Happy New Year after 6th of January. So that’s my wish to You, dear readers of TigerPrises.
The blog that I started one and a half year ago has now covered way over 100 Estonian start-ups and tech companies. Last month it had readers from 74 countries (TOP 6: Estonia, US, UK, Germany, Finland, India).
2010 will bring some interesting challenges and opportunities for me and my blog. The work of covering Estonian start-ups and tech market goes on definately, the improvement of the content, as well as appearance of the blog continues. There’s even a Grand Plan for longer period of time for this blog on the table. This will be developed further.
However, there are some evident needs.
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Unbelievable as it might first sound, but there’s actually at least one IT start-up established in Narva – third biggest Estonian city next to Russian border. On the Estonian rapid IT development ride, Narva has clearly stayed at the back seat.
In fact, I have written stories about Narva-born hackers, but I am not sure if anything prosperous and good have come from Narva’s IT sector.
But low and behold, an entrepreneur Roman Grigorjev (pictured) introduced me a new start-up from Narva – Revel Mob (they don’t have a website yet), focusing on development of iPhone and Android applications.
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An Estonian company ZEV Motors is striving to develop one of the most efficient electric cars in Europe and to sell at least 50-100 of them in Europe over the next couple of years. The arrival of the so-called “e-cars” is only a matter of time according to the enthusiastic owners of ZEV, Teet Randma and Meelis Merilo.
“It’s difficult to make a breakthrough with electric cars in Estonia, because to Estonians the car is a status symbol, and not the most economical means of transportation,” Randma says. “But in a few years the price of a litre of petrol will be 2 euros – then attitudes will change!”
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