Suggestions welcome: what should the January Edition include?

And guess what – I believe it is all true! Estonians die young, work too hard, worry too much, spend too little time with their friends and families, drink and smoke too much (and die!), do not care about our beautiful nature and environment etc.

Many people in post-communist countries say that they were happier in soviet times. This is true for many of them, free fast-growing capitalist society does not equal happiness.

This is a good reality check to realign their priorities in life.

Everyone can now print out their Estonia-cert, which says: “This award is in recognition of the nation whose people have shown their dedication to making improvements in business and technology by demonstrating their skills, knowledge and abilities as well as representing the talent that lies within their region. Congratulations to Estonia!”

Back in 2000 or 2001 we promoted BB heavily at CV-Online resume database, integrating the whole BB system into ours, so the certs were linked to people’s CV’s. The whole BB service, including mailing you nice printed certs, was free, so people used it a lot. Not sure how many use the service nowadays.

Somewhere I have my own certs from that time as well, from areas like Master High IT Aptitude, Master Internet Security Specialist and Unix Adminitrator.

Estonians just love big and expensive cars. You see more of them on our streets than in any other European country. We just laugh when we go to France or Italy and see those tiny Fiats, Opels or Seats. In our country you must have a Toyota Land Cruiser, Mercedes S600, Audi A8 or BMW 7-series. F*ck fuel economy. F*ck the price. We use our last drop of money to buy a car, even before our real estate or other everyday needs. We take loans and leasings and take the most expensive car the bank allows us.

Hopefully every Estonian will have a Hummer one day. We need more Skype’s and Playtech’s for that, but we will get there. Dreams come true.

This morning I found a baloon with Skype jobs ad in front of our office quite near to the centre of Tallinn. Unfortunately it never took off, probably because there was no wind.

It is almost impossible to find any IT people in Estonia nowadays and Skype and some others are spending a lot on recruitment advertising. Full-page ads in newspapers and magazines as well as any other forms of marketing. Basically you have to headhunt quite agressively to get someone good, and pay them some extra. IT people here are not so cheap either.

If someone asks me nowadays, should they come and start an IT development centre in Estonia, I have to say no. The 10000 IT specialists we have in total is a small number and it is hard to grow bigger teams, you run into obstacles very soon. IT is not popular among university enrollments and the lack of people grows bigger and bigger each day. Which is sad considering Estonia’s current position on the world’s innovative IT solutions market.

One of the patent applications of Modesat shows a bit of what they are doing. Searching the web for Leonid Letounov shows some other related stuff.

Sharing what you read via RSS will be an important feature in the future. This means more and more feed readers will need to work on the server side of their solutions. It is easier to do this in web-pages readers and probably harder in Windows-based clients, many of which do not have much intelligence on central servers. It will be interesting how other readers act to this or what they add.

In a way this is del.icio.us or social bookmarking for RSS reading. Way cool in my opinion. It shows the strength of Google also in many other fields in the future, where you share more and more of the stuff you do or how you act.

After the successful exit Toivo Annus left Skype already in November, to concentrate on investing the cash the made from his and the three other founders shares in Skype.

The first investment (1.6 million EUR) for ASI was Clifton, an Estonian gallium arsenide semiconductor crystal research and manufacturing company.

Until I discovered allTunes, a new client for a legal music download service called allofmp3 based in Russia. Available to everyone in the world, using a good pricing mechanism based on downloaded file size and cheaper than Napster or iTunes. Whatever some might say, the company follows all local legal regulations. TechCrunch has a nice story on them as well.

Now should big music companies go after allMusic, and allofmp3 try to shut it down or change the pricing? No, they should learn from this company and try to follow it. This is the first music service with a task to serve their customers and use technology and practises that are right for the medium. You can not sell albums online at the price of plastic CDs, they must be cheaper. You can not cripple your music files with DRM or you will just frustrate your users.

I see no reason why anyone should continue using iTunes or Napster for their music downloads.
Try out the new service and show the big music companies the direction to follow.

Too bad, they lost one more customer. I suggest everyone to subscribe to Red Herring instead, they know, how to serve their international customers well.

edited: I do appreciate Business 2.0 Editor Josh Quittner posting an answer in my comments just hours after my posting. Thanks. Still the reasoning does not sound clear to me. I subscribe to many US magazines, many of them much smaller, many somewhat larger in circulation compared to B20. None of them are oriented at international audiences per se or have official circulation partners abroad, still they are all happy to accept international orders. B20 for me is the first case of a magazine not welcoming international orders. If I remember correctly, I also used to subscribe to B20 years ago, although the magazine was much different then and the Internet boom advertisers probably helped in keeping the worldwide subscriptions possible. Still I wish them good luck in their writing, which is great.

The largest Estonian shareholder and local founder Rain Kivistik had a 6,4% ownership in the company, which means he will make personally around 35 million euros – about the same, as all 4 of the Skype´s Estonian founders each made.

The implications for Estonia are the same as for Skype: having a big part of an internationally successful tech company here brings more know-how and experience about that field to us. As people from Skype and Playtech will move to other companies or found their own startups, they bring that experience with them. There will now be also more financing from the founders cash chest available for other startups.

Everything is built on first come first served principle, meaning hundreds of registrants will start spamming the central register at 11.00. At least some time ago the EURid official documents said that this will definitely create a system overload, but at the same time create a positive “randomizing effect.” That means basically it is a lottery. It will be interesting to follow EURid website to see who gets to grab what. I have bought some tickets as well

[edit] Like expected, the system grinded to a halt in first minutes, becoming either very slow or saying the system is unavailable. It was known in advance what kind of load there will be. It is neither rocket science nor prohibitively costly nowadays to build systems which can stand high peak loads.

Like the growth of the company and now the acquisition has shown, it is possible to grow world class technology companies out of Estonia. You must have the courage, hire the best people and think outside your region. But an important part is not to limit yourself to only Estonian employees, even if you are an Estonian startup, but look for best talent all over the world. And if needed, locate your management, sales and marketing where there are the best people for that, for example in US or UK.

True, you can say Skype is not Estonian per se, having its holding company in Luxembourg (tax reasons?) and big part of management and marketing in London. Still over 80% of the employees are located in Tallinn, and all of the product management and software development as well as other technical functions are done here in Estonia. Pretty good for a country with only 1,35 million employees and a total headcount of less than 5-8 thousand IT people in the country (my very rough estimate). Skype with its soon close to 200 people in Estonia has not yet been the one sucking in all the best people and currently the effect on the job market has been small. But there is definitely a risk for companies hiring tech people in Estonia of Skype getting your people, be it for higher salaries or just for being a cool place to work at.

Like my experience with CV-Online and CVO Group has shown, it is possible to expand internationally from Estonia. CVO now has offices in 9 countries and in addition to that single employees in places like Ljubljana, Slovenia and Nairobi, Kenya. In most of the countries it has managed to become one of the top online or offline recruitment companies in a market with very strong competition. Hiring the best people in each key market is important, then getting them to follow a joint vision, and then operating the business in their countries with a local touch.

Estonians and Eastern Europeans are very good at developing new innovative solutions, but we usually suck in things like sales and marketing, international business development. We can design and produce cool stuff, but rarely succeed in communicating and selling what we have abroad. Small, may be non-existant part of that is based on cultural differences (same applies to Scandinavians), us being somewhat slow, non-aggressive and quiet. Ross has written something regarding this as well. Mostly this is still based on just lacking the skillsets that you have developed in the Western world over tens and hundreds of years of free market economies and enterpreneurship.

The only solution for this that I see is hiring people from US or Western Europe into your management teams and for sales and marketing. Working next to them is the best education in this field you can have. Something you would learn by just doing it yourself in 5-10 years can that way accomplished in a year. One reason for CVO being successful in the CEE region has been hiring people from Western Europe and it really has helped us to get on the next level. Together with them we have also grown our local employees and they are now much more experienced compared to the competitors consisting of just local skills.

So Estonians, go out there and do what Skype did, thinking and hiring internationally. Develop products and services that people really need and like, and you might be the next Estonian multi-billion dollars startup.

Podcasting probably is a thing that will remain a niche app, but it might be regional to US. Americans are much more accustomed to audiobooks, which are somewhat similar to podcasts (limited edition audiobooks). Europeans just listen to music CD’s and radio.

On desktop search, everyone has been talking if Google or Microsoft will solve this first. I have installed Google Desktop 2 a few days ago and I still have no idea what the fuss is about. I have found no good ideas why I actually need it, as most people actually only quite rarely use a search on their documents, be it text, photos or some other format. But I have now software that shows some irrelevant links, US weather and already viewed photos thumbnails as a sidebar. Good enough, it might be good for seeding random number generators.

P2P and VoIP are already here to stay, and have been for a while, both as Kazaa and Skype.

Corporate blogs seem interesting. Let’s see if I can get other members of my management team to start one up at MicroLink.

Wikis – again, pass for me, but I might not be the target group for one of those.

SOA has never lived up to the hype it generated a few years ago. As a concept it is good, but when you actually think of everyday IT, there is not so much it actually revolutionises.

I was hoping there might be some good ideas where to look next, unfortunately this time Gartner was more analyzing past and current, not the future.