In Tartu Science Park, there is a company that can be referred to as the most competent Apple and Android platform services developer in the Baltic States. This company is Indilo Wireless. 

Elver Loho (pictured), CEO of Indilo Wireless claims that iPhone, the globally successful cult gadget, is used by more than 30,000 people in Estonia, a number that is constantly increasing. All in all, there are more than 40 million iPhone users worldwide.

In the latest smartphones, calling is far from being the main function. More and more, mobile phones are becoming entertainment devices and substitutes for PCs or laptops. But what is it that Indilo has to offer that can genuinely impress the owners of iPhone?

Eight sexy apps

Loho lists eight exciting applications, some of which are already being used and some waiting to be launched in the near future.

• First on the list is X-Tallinn – a free service that can already be accessed today and which enables iPhone users to view the real time camera feeds of the cameras located at the main intersections in Tallinn in order to locate traffic jams.
• Second is the “quirky” Tetris – a slightly modified version of the well-known original game, the actual name of which Indilo is keeping a secret until the game is introduced to the public. One of the bizarre features of the game is that the Tetris blocks “stick” to all the sides of the mobile phone display.
• Third is the FleetTracker – a service being developed in co-operation with Nutiteq, a company belonging to mobile services developer Jaak Laineste – which enables iPhone users to identify the location and follow the daily route of their (or their company’s) vehicle(s) on their mobile phones. The users will be able to get an overview of the speed of the vehicle(s) as well as the location and duration of the stops made on the way. This summer, the same service was used in following the journey of the torch of the 25th Estonian Song Celebration.
• Fourth on the list is a super exciting solution called GEOVoucher – a service being developed on the initiative of Ben Schönle and Marc Böhret, two German entrepreneurs operating in Estonia – which should be launched in Tallinn later this year. Basically, what this service will do is that the owners of iPhones will receive the e-vouchers of special offers or “two for the price of one” offers on their mobile phones, which can later be retrieved when the phone is shown to the relevant merchant.
• The fifth solution has to do with Estonian literature – iPhone users will soon be able to read Estonian books through their mobile phones; the first books made available will most likely be works by Kaur and Heiti Kender and Olavi Ruitlane. The service includes audio reviews or introductions of the books recorded by the authors themselves.

• The sixth service is called Estonian Sun and is already available as a free download in Apple’s webstore. The data on the level of UV radiation collected by the observatory in Tõravere is displayed on the phone. Indilo is also planning to develop a multi-faceted weather application in co-operation with one of the most well known weather forecast service providers.
• The seventh service involves vector graphics – the idea of creating an interactive vector graphics development platform for iPhone – which would primarily be used for making the compiling and reading of mobile maps significantly easier than it has been up to now. The project was initiated and is financed by two cousins, Yrjö and Rait Ojasaar.
• And the last on the list is the web version of the Estonian grammar dictionary entitled ÕS for short, which, at this stage is actually yesterday’s news. It was put up for sale in Apple’s webstore in the middle of August at a price of 4.99 euros (78 Estonian kroons).
  According to Loho, the shelf price of a paper version of ÕS is 602 Estonian kroons and the book “is as big as a miniature fridge”. And new Estonian words (such as the word skaipimine, the Estonian equivalent of Skyping) that cannot be added to the printed version until the next edition of the dictionary is published in 2013 are added to the service developed for iPhones in every couple of months.

This represents a fraction of the numerous services that originate from the Indilo “factory”. Most development projects are carried out in secret.
For months now, iPhone owners have been able to download an Estonian-English-Estonian dictionary to their mobiles. The digital versions of both the Estonian-English-Estonian dictionary and ÕS were completed in co-operation with the Institute of the Estonian Language.

The Indilo team finds the creating of various solutions for Apple’s platform to be extremely cool. Unlike Nokia, for whom the developer would have to negotiate their offer with a number of mobile network operators in order to reach the end user, the platform owned by Apple is global – all you need to do is upload your service after which you will automatically find yourself in a market with 40 million potential customers.

Becoming Apple developer is tough

Naturally, the first step is becoming an official Apple developer, which is quite a tough process to go through.

Elver Loho and his colleagues at Indilo, including Jaak Priiman, Senior Software Engineer; Harri Siirak, Software Engineer; and Jaana Metsamaa, Project Manager told us that it took them six months to complete all the necessary documents. The Apple Group must have had one single fax for receiving the large amounts of documents being sent to the company from all over the world!

During this almost six-month-long period, Indilo had to prove to the Americans that the company truly existed. In addition, all the solutions that Indilo finally gets to upload to Apple’s webstore are being thoroughly reviewed by the Group – for some reason or another, obscene words that could actually be found in the dictionaries uploaded by Indilo were not found – after which the developer sets the price it considers most suitable for the solutions. 

70% of the profit from sales goes to the developer who, in addition, needs to pay Apple 99 US dollars each year for the renewal of their licence.

It goes without saying that in order to develop new services for which the owners of Apple would be willing to pay, the original ideas must be good. However, the programmers also need to be highly skilled because sloppily designed projects tend to encounter constant errors.

“Starting off by sitting behind your laptop at home and thinking about doing something for iPhone is very hard,” says Priimann who has been living in the world of Mac for eight years now. “No other programming language has such a steep beginner’s learning curve than the one used by Mac. And it’s not taught at any universities.”

Such a cool thing 

Metsamaa adds that it is still all worth the while because iPhone is such a cool thing!

The employees of Indilo claim that they get the good ideas for their services from life itself. But, in this light, Apple’s promotional quote “There’s an App for That!” seems downright ironic as it suggests that everything (that may initially seem extremely cool and innovative) has already been invented.

Since most of the services developed by Indilo are available for free, it makes one wonder what the company’s money-making plan is, that is in case they even have one. According to Loho, development services are offered to everyone wishing to come up with something for iPhone.

The ÕS dictionary that was recently put up for sale is the first service uploaded by Indilo for the accessing of which the customers need to pay. The fact is that the 30,000 iPhone and iPod users in Estonia are people with more free funds; all you need to do is find the right partners and come up with useful services to sell.

For instance, Loho made a proposition to Hans H. Luik, the owner of the Ekspress Group, where they suggested making it possible for iPhone users to read Estonian newspapers via iPhone, just like it is possible to read the New York Times via the device. “In Estonia, iPhone is a fairly new phenomenon and many entrepreneurs simply can’t see its potential business opportunities just yet,” Loho says.

Consulted by a Google ex-worker

Indilo also tries to keep up with its competing service platform, the Google Android. But according to Loho, this platform is still falling far behind in development as well as encountering numerous technical problems.

“One might think that there should be no problem as there are so many very intelligent scientists with degrees working for Google, but the reality is that Android is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. There are so many errors in the applications that while the solutions offered might work on one mobile phone, they fail to do so on another, and so on,” he says.

Additional Android and iPhone development competence was brought to the company by Mattias Linnap who works in Indilo as a consultant and who once worked in the ranks of Google. Linnap, who has been involved in programming for twelve years, graduated from the speciality of informatics at the University of Cambridge this summer and will soon be starting his doctoral studies at the same elite university.

Linnap regards the perspectives of Indilo to be excellent. “The PC as a home appliance is on the verge of extinction,” he says confidently. “iPhone and future mobile phones that will start using Android will be able to cover 95% of people’s daily computer usage. Communications channels from e-mail to FaceBook and Orkut as well as games, news, and everything else will soon be available through mobile phones.” In the case of smartphones, calling is nothing but a secondary function!

During his doctoral studies at Cambridge, Linnap will start looking for the most efficient ways to collect information from millions and billions of sensors by using existing and new communications technologies. “To be honest, adjusting the software meant for personal computers for use in mobile phones is not as interesting as the new opportunities created by the always-on always-online computer,” he claims.

Indilo Wireless develops iPhone apps from Toivo Tänavsuu on Vimeo.