i/o ventures (San Francisco, CA, USA): March 1

Y Combinator (Mountain View, CA, USA): March 3

Morpheus (India): March 10

Startl (Philadelphia, PA, USA): March 15

Tech Wildcatters (Dallas, TX, USA): March 19

Techstars Boulder (Boulder, CO, USA): March 22

DreamIt Ventures (Philadelphia, PA, USA): March 22

Betaspring (Providence, RI, USA): March 22

Tetuan Valley (Madrid & Barcelona, Spain): March 23

SproutBox (Bloomington, IN, USA), March 28

iVentures10 (Champaign, IL, USA): March 31

Capital Factory (Austin, TX, USA): April 2

True Entrepreneur Corps (San Francisco, CA, USA): April 2

Excelerate Labs (Chicago, IL, USA): April 2

NextStart (Greenville, SC, USA): April 5

AlphaLab (Pittsburgh, PA, USA): April 8

Shotput Ventures (Atlanta, GA, USA): April 10

Lightspeed Summer Fellowship (Menlo Park, CA, USA): April 15

Startup Bootcamp (Copenhagen, Denmark): April 30

LaunchBox (Washington, DC, USA): May 31.

Techstars Seattle (Seattle, WA, USA): June 1

Extreme University (Toronto, Canada): June 12

Currently not open, coming up later this year:

Seedcamp (London, UK) – with Mini Seedcamp’s across Europe open until July

The Difference Engine (NE England, UK)

Bootup Labs (Vancouver)

Bizdom U (Detroit, USA)

Seed Accelerator (Australia & Singapore)

Past deadlines:

NYC Seedstart (New York City, USA): February 28

The Openfund (Athens, Greece): February 28

Please add any other in comments and I’ll update the list.

Automatically collected structured recommendations and top lists from friends. How often have you wished to know, what your friends read, listen to, watch? Until we have to manually rate or like stuff, it will not work. More data must be collected and processed automatically, transparently.

Personalized content selection. How old-fashioned is it to present all readers of a newspaper with the same news and articles?  Time to grow up and present everyone with their own newspaper, TV channel and mobile portal. Static stuff is dying. Google personalized search results is a step in right direction.

Better social grouping. Saying “friends” in paragraphs above might bring disastrous results. Let’s be frank, we all have nutcases and axe murderers hiding in our social network friend lists. Hoping they all read just intellectual stuff and watch arty movies might not work. Instead you might end up with Dan Brown and Steven Seagal. So we need API-accessible lists and grouping based more on similarities of people, akin Twitter lists. Manual lists might not work, so some automation and algorithm based stuff might be needed.

Cutting out the old middlemen. There are still many intermediaries in all sectors of life, that can be cut off. Based on previous, newspapers and schedule-based TV channels are prime examples: in some parts they are replaced with personalized, search and recommendations based solutions. For other content, many other current portals, destination sites can be replaced with people finding bits and pieces of content or functional small services directly. Two clicks are always better than 3 or 4. This will also erode many current business models, so as a start-up, see where you can bring the current price down or make stuff just simpler to use.

TV add-ons and Internet-enabling. TV is great as a screen and entertainment device, but it needs an Internet connection and real-time action possibilities. These might be either built into the TV set, into set-top boxes, USB add-ons, remote devices, mobile or tablets.

Wearables and mobile phone add-ons. As mobile processor power grows, we should put it to better use via add-ons. Might be health and movement related or just for fun. People love fun!

Health & medical 2.0 and life guidance. Not just software, but also hardware. Just have a gut feeling, there is something boiling. As a biomedical engineering & electronics drop-out, I am fascinated what next years will bring. Even if it takes years for good human-computer interfaces and electronic eye display lenses to go mass market. Then you’ll get your augmented reality.

Multi-channel solutions. Part browser, part mobile, part tablet, part TV – stuff hanging somewhere between them. Some new services will be successful if you use at least 2 of those channels in parallel or in succession.

Anything location-based. We have no idea today where Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp etc will develop. There is a lot of room for others. Be creative.

Social gaming / education. It will be hard to draw a line where entertainment ends and learning begins. It will be a mash of fun, education, socializing, networking, doing business. Just don’t think that business and learning must be serious or that fun and games is a waste of time.

Modern enterprise IT. Let’s be frank, consumer technology is light-years ahead of solutions used in corporate environments. We need more social, more user-generated, more real-time in enterprise.

Saving money. Kind of no-brainer and probably a childish suggestion, but always a good starting point to brainstorm startup ideas. Study what private people and companies spend their money on, list it, analyze it, see if there is something where technology can lower the costs. Also: saving time – analyze, for what we use our personal and employee time.

Please add your ideas, problems, wishes and thoughts in comments. I might be also editing this post as I remember more stuff.

Currently probably over 90% of services and content online is ad-supported, but it can not stay that way. In print, advertising vs subscriptions + newsstand income has varied in different markets and niches, but has been more toward 50/50% or 60/40%. I don’t see a way for online subscription models to grow to cover the gap from 90% to 40-50%, which is now missing. And no, neither smart nor stupid VC’s and angels will cover that, which they unfortunately or fortunately have been doing until now. That’s I believe today the biggest startup opportunity: which business models and processes will be there to cover the revenue gap in business models. At least 40-50% of online business income does not exist yet. What is your solution going to be? Which income sources will there be in addition to current ones?

The latest research regarding subscriptions is not promising. Forrester research says 80% would just find another service and just 20% would pay. PaidContent research showed just 5% of readers would be willing to pay. For most online services, conversion rates fluctuate between 1-5%, making it viable only for services with millions of users. I have been a fan of paid services for quite some time and still believe we will see more of them over the years to come. Still we must agree with the simple fact: most people won’t pay for anything online any time soon.

Mobile will be huge in coming years. We will see better monetization via app and in-app purchases there. Mobile does not mean just small handsets. It means netbooks, tablets, e-readers, special 6-10 inch access screens, car terminals etc – all with wifi and 3G/4G access. We will be sligthly more willing to pay on those devices, just because of habits. Unfortunately the amounts paid per person per month will not be huge, probably around 5-15 EUR. People have their limits. Also still most won’t pay. That means the revenues even compared to current ad revenues will be somewhat marginal. For mobile we will also see even less advertising. The screen space is limited – no space for ads. Our time on mobile will be limited – not full office days, but 1-2 hours per day max. Most people will also opt for only a few top sites and apps on mobile, much less than on PC’s. Mobile should grow to 10-20% of income streams. For startups – both intermediaries and consumer facing businesses – this will be a great sector to focus on from now on, but it does not solve fully the revenue gap problems for most service and content providers.

In advertising we continue to have many problems. Last ad models favor few selected sites (most notably search engines) and neglect the others in earlier stages of the marketing tunnel. Most ad models are oriented on direct response models, forgetting about the attention and interest generation stages of marketing models. Direct response models (like search ads) again work for just a few, but are not a solution for most marketing budgets to come online for branding and awareness generation. Currently no good news on that front, until all sides come back to basic understanding of the larger marketing management process. It will take time.

Sponsored income stream marketplaces

People hate ads. People hate to pay. They still want content and services. Just someone else should pay. But who?

Companies and marketers have budgets online and these will be increasing. The biggest problem today is not the direct response / click & action oriented field, which already works quite well. One of the questions is mass market marketing, reaching a lot of non-customers, just getting the word out, fast and to big audiences. While display ads still work for many – even without the clicks – other marketing models must emerge. New methods like everything around social marketing is also oriented towards the end of marketing process tunnel, and it’s also not the fastest marketing action out there.

Advertising in general is companies paying for services consumers use. Why not make that more clear to the people and have them their action part in it?

How about having companies who do not fit the direct response, social marketing and display advertising models just pay for content and online services of private consumers in exchange for getting their name, brands and products in front of people? The main question is having a very strong connection between getting the service and understanding of it being paid for you by a selected company. Soft sponsorships, logos, display ads just won’t make a difference in comparision with current display ads.

One way to do this is sponsorship markets, where people in a way receive favors, almost like gift cards, from a marketplace of sponsors. It’s not just one company paying for content or services or subscriptions, but consumers having a choice who their sponsor is. Think Facebook fan pages meet offers and affiliates. There are huge problems with scam schemes to work out there and it won’t be easy. Still it’s worth to explore it further. Facebook might do this, but so could smaller startups. Initially it will be more between parties which are well established, so there are less risks for scams. As time advances, more smaller companies can join to receive money from large sponsors to cover their costs in exchange for promotion to their subscribers.

One caveat is, it won’t work purely trying to do it the direct response way, with sponsors being paid on a CPC/CPA basis or getting registration data of the subscribers. There must be a way to bring the marketing tunnel/model first stage dollars, not the last stage money into this.

This has been done in a way of sponsorships in some cases today, but it has been inefficient until now. It’s not automated, transparent or measurable. These are the parts that must be worked into the model.

In addition to that or instead of it, what is your suggestion to cover the current income gaps for startups and media?

For more information join our Facebook group (343 members as of today) and event information.

You can find background information on the international OpenCoffee Club page.

First there was the Mayan Queen IV:

The 92m Blohm + Voss manufactured displaces 4200 tonnes of water. Sure, she’s no 17 on world’s superyachts list. But you know what that means: 16 people in the world laughing at your face when you show up. The front deck is small. Yes you can park your helicopter there, but what about friends ones? And for this trip, someone had ejected a huge lamppost on the front deck, a sure way to break your ‘copter – a practical joke? Don’t get me even started on the back deck, no real room for good size RIB’s. Poor mexican, who owns it. I hope he gets it sold quickly.

Then checked out the P&O Cruises Ventura.

She’s the largest ever British superliner, at 290 meters and 113000 metric tons. Fair enough. Ample room for your 3090 friends and loads of stuff. Then again, to get from your room to go diving takes you ages. And 5 pools, who needs that, for training? For gods sake, you have the sea all around you and you build pools. Argh! I don’t even want to know, what are the circus skills training school, bungee trampolines and rock school listed in the specification. It’s a dive ship, for gods sake!

Had a quick look at Cunard Queen Victoria as well. “Think fireworks, patriotic (British) song and oodles of pageantry — including the former Camilla Parker Bowles, now known as the Duchess of Cornwall, oh-so-royally pushing the button that sent a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne crashing toward the ship’s bow, presided over by England’s Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla. Alas, there was one hitch: The bottle didn’t break.” Sure in hell am I gonna buy a boat with such a curse!

Must be the recession. No good stuff on the market, all the junk brought to Baltic waters.

Back to RIB diving.

If someone would like to hear more about Baltic startup web and product development opportunities, feel free to get back to me. Besides our company there are tens of great software development companies, small and large, and hundreds of great private developers available.

Thanks to all participants, it was a great event. Hopefully we will have a Techcrunch event in Estonia soon, keep your fingers crossed!

My Background

I’m a very old man, in Internet years that is. I started with web development and online marketing 15 years ago, back in 94, designing the first commercial websites in Estonia.

Since then, half of the years I have been working focused on the local market of my home country, half regionally either across the 3 Baltic states or 10 countries in Central and Eastern Europe.

Half of the time I have been dealing with boring old enterprise IT services, pure corporate & B2B stuff, half with consumer-oriented online services.

Corporate vs Consumer – not presented at the event

One thing I have learned is that for startups, depending on what type of person you are, this is a choice each founder and startup has to make: what type of business you want to run.

Servicing the corporate clients has its advantages. In many cases the target groups and customers are easier to identify, market and sell to. The business model and revenue side are easier to be defined, and that can turn into significant revenues already from smaller number of customers. Then again, it does not have the sexiness of telling your friends what you do, having each of them use your services, being well-known on the market, having hundreds of thousands or millions of customers.

For those sexy consumer services, the revenue formula can be non-existant – well, may be not in these times anymore – and target groups hard to market to, as they are just too big. At the same time, many founders do have the urge to service consumers and absolutely hate serving the corporate customers.

Trust your inner feelings and act accordingly. You might be married to your startup for 5-10 years and you don’t want to be doing things you don’t enjoy, at least most of the day

While many B2B or corporate tech services can be sustainable in smaller countries – not huge, but profitable – it is not so for most consumer services. The markets and revenue streams are just too small. Which brings us to the Baltics.

The Small Baltics

To describe the Baltic attitude, we have to look at what the Baltics are.

Our total population for 3 countries together is just 7m people, a bit less than Sweden and more than Finland. But each of the countries on its own has a population of just 1-3 million people, which is tiny.

The total GDP of the largest Baltic country, Lithuania, is third of Finland, and even the total GDP for 3 of us is less than in Finland. Besides, the business cultures, nationalities and economies are pretty diverse.

That makes it quite hard for smart people to realise their dreams in our countries, just because of size.

Looking at online advertising markets in Baltic countries, these are near 10 million euros per year per country, 90% of which goes to large stagnant media companies, newspapers, leaving very little in online advertising revenues for the startups. The ad networks market share is tiny as well, most of the money going from top brand advertisers to a few top5 sites.

The Baltic Success

At the same time, looking at the technology startup scene, we have done pretty well, especially if you measure the success by exits.

We have had a few large international exits, where the local founding or very early shareholders have made sums of over 50 million dollars each. Most notably these have been two companies, Skype and one of world’s leading casino and online gambling software developers Playtech. I will talk about their models of success and connection to our countries later.

And we have had a multitude of local exits in the range of 10-50 million euros, mostly to Scandinavian media companies in the field of classifieds, car, real estate and job ads or auctions.

How so?

The Good

The Baltic countries, and that applies to most of Eastern Europe, has a long history of strong real sciences, cybernetics and electronics. Our educational system in these areas has been pretty good, especially in fundamentals like mathematics and physics, which has turned out great for technological problem solving skills.

This is the advantage of the Baltics and Central & Eastern Europe: having IT people and software developers with strong creative skills, coming up with new solutions, innovating. Especially when faced with well defined problems, the Baltic tech people take a very strong role in how to solve any problem. You define the problem or goal – our people find new or uncharted ways to solve them. That’s the key difference with for example many Asian outsourced software developers, where quite often you have to very clearly tell them, how to solve the problem. This is no selling of programmng hours.

Our creative and imaginitive designers, analysts and developers are our greatest asset. So what’s the problem?

The Bad and the Ugly

Let’s say your car engine breaks down. How many of you know, how to fix it? Or you have a piece of land and you have to build a house, stone by stone, wood on wood. How long would it take, until you learn it?

Each one of us can learn to fix car engines or build a house. The problem is, it takes time, you make mistakes and you learn much faster among people who have fixed cars or built houses. Doing it on your own, only learning from mistakes, can take years and not turn out a very good result. And if there is competition with existing skills, you fail.

Baltic and Eastern European missing skills are the international sales and marketing skills. We build great products. Exceptional products, in many cases. The thing is, we have no idea, how to sell or market them outside our home country, especially in US and Western Europe. Learning international sales and marketing is a cultural and emotional thing and can take years to master. Because of Soviet heritage, we have none of those skills. Our Estonian top marketing people who have moved from Estonia to run UK or US to run marketing programs for tech companies say, that they have had to learn everything basically from zero. In sales and marketing, we are in a situation like you would need to build a house or fix a car, but have to start learning only from your own mistakes.

This double’s our problems. Our own countries are too small to do anything significant. And going outside is hard, very hard – especially if you have no sales and marketing culture (in addition to no existing contacts) to do that.

Expansion

One of our topics here today is local markets vs international expansion. We all want to go international, not just from the Baltics, but also from the Nordics. But it is very hard to market outside one’s home country.

Back in 2000 I tried to expand my online recruitment company in Estonia simultaneously to around 10 countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Big mistake! The idea was great, the execution sucked. It is so easy to stretch yourself thin and lose focus. I would have been much better off and actually making something by choosing 2-3 key markets and dealt with them. An European country, either small or big, needs a huge amount of focus for an online startup. In many cases you have to do local marketing, local face to face sales, partnerships, customise the product etc. There are only a few exceptions, which can be managed from a distance with little local physical presence. That’s the reason we have very little regional online service chains in Europe.

There’s also a question, where to expand. In Europe you might be much better off risk wise to choose a few EU countries instead of world dominance. Decreasing risks at the same time decreases rewards.

Cooperation model

How can Baltic and Eastern European startups be successful on world markets? One thing: cooperation with Westerners from day one. We doing product development, people from Western Europe or US handling the sales, marketing and business development side of things.

This has been the model to most success stories in our region: Skype, Playtech, Indextools (acquired by Yahoo), LogMeIn in Hungary, various others. One joint feature for them: East/West partnership from almost day one, both local developers and Western (or Israeli) managers shareholders from very early stage.

For tech startups, remember what I said earlier about the role of developers in our region. This is no outsourced software development. People in our region are the product, in many cases they are the ones defining the product or service with just a little help on defining the customer problem, goals and targets. You all use Skype and I am pretty sure most are happy with an Estonian product.

Here today, I urge all of you to consider this. We need to join forces, taking best bits from each country. Product people go and employ good Nordic sales and marketing people, with internationl experience. Those people at the same time should come to the Baltics to develop their products.

Baltic VC’s and Investors

From financing side, I would say the Baltics are in good shape. Our key tech investor is Ambient Sound Investments, the 4 Estonian Skype founding engineers, now having over 100 million euros of their own money to invest. We also have MTVP/MartinsonTrigon, with 3 exited and 6 existing portfolio companies. Most of this activity is focused in Estonia, with also over 50% of Baltic startups coming from Estonia.

There are also organisations nurturing and connecting startups and entrepreneurs, like Connect Estonia (I am a board member). Both Tallinn and Vilnius have OpenCoffee Club networks.

Baltic Startups

Estonia

Fits.me – biorobotics for fashion, allowing you to take a picture of yourself and a webshop will show a real clothes fit on a biorobot for you – no more ill-fitting clothes! They won the Itechlaw.org pitch contest in Estonia yesterday.

Fortumo – mobile payments, allowing anyone to launch revenue-generating SMS services in 5 minutes in many countries, being also well developed in Scandinavia.

Programeter - analytical information and report automation for controlling and managing software projects.

The whole ASI portfolio.

Please also check out Tigerprises, a blog covering Estonian startups.

Latvia

Relenta - business collaboration Saas or even research chemicals Molport.

Lithuania

GetJar - the world’s most popular mobile application distribution and developer community, funded by Accel Partners.

Conclusion

To sum it up: our product development and financing are well in shape, if we would know how to sell and market, we would be in heaven!

Visit us, talk to us, let’s do things together!

1. In alignment with the Second Annual Tallinn Conference organized by The International Technology Law Association in collaboration with Enterprise Estonia, ArcticStartup is cooperating to organize an Elevator Pitch Business Plan Contest with support from Connect Estonia. The contest is held in Tallinn, Estonia on May 26, 2009.

The deadline for pitch applications is now extended to May 13th, so 2 days to go. Please have a look at the ArcticStartup page.

2. TechCrunch Europe is putting together a round-table event in Stockholm on May 27. TechCrunchTalk Nordic will be an afternoon of panel discussions and presentations followed by a networking reception. We’ll be bringing together the startup, Angel and VC communities together to debate the next phase of the startup world in Scandinavia, Finland and the Baltic countries – which should make for a lively discussion.

More information at the TechCrunch Europe page.

• tube radios and short, medium and long wave broadcasts
• vinyl LP’s
• cassette recorders and reel-to-reel tape decks
• rotary dial and analogue telephones (incl analogue mobiles)
• black and white TV’s
• film cameras
• VHS
• glass milk bottles

Here’s a list of things I will see die or become marginalized rather sooner than later:

• tube displays
• print newspapers
• petrol and diesel car’s and other internal combustion engines
• cassette camcorders
• analogue TV
• scheduled TV except for real-time broadcasts
• CD’s, DVD’s, blue-ray and other discs
• many that currently have a cable attached instead of wireless

The cool thing is, in any of these cases, it is just the form that becomes extinct, not the content or basic human need. We’ll still have journalism and news, music, transport, moving pictures. We’ll even have milk.

In many cases firms die with changes and development in format. Companies are too attached to form. Focus on content and function helps.

Sure, web services are closed down all the time because of non-existant revenue models, bad management, small traction or other reasons. When that happens, many say, no big deal. What is different this time and the months and years to come is we will see closure of many good, popular, loved sites which have become part of our life.

Many consumers consider it self-evident, that we can use free web services, not thinking who pays for developing and running them. We do forget, that companies are giving us expensive gifts and not getting much back. “$0.00 is the future of business,” wrote Chris Anderson for Wired. At the same time Google kept developing and running close to 50 services, which bring them nothing more than fame and losses.

What Google under their new CFO has done is effectively saying: “You were not paying for what you got, we were making losses, it was not fair to us, so that’s the end of it”. Sure, closing Google Notebook or Jaiku might not matter to many. Pulling the plug on Youtube, Picasa, Orkut or hundreds of other top services, still loss-making, either from Google or others is a different matter. But these things will happen to some of them.

It was fun, while VC money was pouring down the skies. Free was sexy. During the recession, now that CFO’s rule and profitability will be the key, nobody cares about sexy. You make losses – you either restructure or you kill it.

Sure, investors and enterpreneurs will suffer. The bigger problem is that the consumers will suffer. The only reason to that is being used to the “Church of the Free”. We’d rather see things we love going down the drain than being willing to find the $1, $10 or $100 to pay for what we consume. After all, The Church said the right price is $0.00 and someone else should pay, the mystic Advertisers.

The solution? I am not sure, but I do believe we have to start paying more for what we as consumers use and charge more for what we as web startups provide. The payment systems have to evolve, either in micro-payments or subscription models. Our mentality must change in being willing to pay.

The question is not just about startups and more mature companies surviving or profiting. It’s all about continuing innovation, creating value by people who get paid and find motivation to do something. It’s about media investing into journalists, photographers, videographers and us as citizens having quality news sources, based on deep research, in addition to yellow entertainment news snippets produced cheaply by cut-down media organisations under the pressure of decreasing ad revenues.

Free will not disappear and everything will not become paid. But unless there is drastic change in the current online advertising models and mechanisms, what we have become used to in the last few years will not be sustainable. Seeing that innovation in online marketing is something we should wish for, both as web enterpreneurs as well as private consumers. Until that day, follow the news of your loved ones biting the dust.

Together between ArcticStartup, Connect Estonia and OpenCoffee Tallinn we are organising a kick-ass tech startup event: ArcticEvening on January 28th in Tallinn.

The evening will include pitches from 2 Estonian and 2 Finnish startups, a panel between Sten Tamkivi from Skype, Allan Martinson from MTVP and a special Finnish guest, followed by drinks and networking.

From the interest people both from Finland and Estonia have shown, it promises to be a great event. Feel free to join us either a participant or submit your startup pitch to be among the 4 lucky starups to promote yourself there. You’ll meet an international bunch of enterpreneurs, tech people, VC’s and others. And it’s all free!

The number of seats is limited to 100, and in half a day half of these are already “sold out” so to join us, register on the event page already now – we might be full in a few days!

See you in Tallinn!

1. Downturn makes you think. Management of a startup often feels like being a “rat on a wheel.” Now is a good time to sit back, relax, look into the ceiling and think some deep thoughts. What could be changed? Where are the inefficiencies? What are we doing wrong? What could be done better? Taking some dedicated time to (re)think on these issues you can come up with new ideas and solutions that you can then use to take your startup to the next level. Many people need this push from the external environment to take the time for this kind of thinking.

2. Good M&A opportunities. Most of startups still have cash or are in a good operational situation. Why not use these times to see which other startups to buy or merge. Even if they are also just starting, have just a few employees or only tens of thousands of visitors, they could be a good addition to your team, product or service. And don’t think badly of mergers even if you are a smaller party. Having a small piece of a great company can be great fun. At least much better than going out of business or not reaching your dreams.

3. Availability of great people. Hiring will not stop, even when there are layoffs. Letting unproductive people go is something that happens at all companies and that should be often done even in good times, now it is just much more visible. At the same time there are many great people available on the market, so go out and have them join your team. Today they might be even much more reasonable about their terms, willing to take more in shares than in cash or looking more at the long term perspective.

4. Focus on sales. As a CEO, founder or just an employee, today is the day to think how to get 50% more out of your sales actions. Reach out more to potential customers. Use your network, even friends and relatives to get new potential customers. If your main revenue source is advertising, consider having more special one-off solutions that you can propose to your customers in addition to standard banner and text ad spaces. Talk to customers 50% more than yesterday, ask them more about their needs and desires and urge all of your people to do the same.

5. Creative marketing. Now is a good time to save money and at the same time achieve more. A dream come true for any marketer. Use less standard solutions. Experiment. Try out new things, both online as well as offline. Partner with service providers that are also startups, hungry for business and willing to go that extra mile to do something innovative for you. Measure. Kill things that do not work.

6. Focus on long-term product development. This comes back to the “rat in a wheel” and short-term plans and execution. While in some areas like sales and marketing there is now more urgency to achieve more in less time, in product and service development you could dedicate more time now into things that have to be “ready” or reach maturity only after 1-3 years. Of course this means you have strong enough warchest or are already profitable. If yes, focusing on bigger long-term projects can mean much bigger rewards when the economy gets better after a few years.

7. Strong get stronger. Less clutter on the market makes good companies like yours stand out more. Do the right things. Stay alive and show your usefulness to your customers. Darwin knew his business. There is a reason in nature why the weak and stupid die.

8. The money is out there. The funding is still there. Angels still have their money, ask for it before they spend it all on yachts and space travel. VC funds still have their money. Stupid ideas get less funding. More is left for you, your good ideas and perfect execution.

9. Companies built to last. Forget exits for a while, this should not be your goal (although you can let the investors think it is). Take a view of where you want to be in 3-5 years. Try to be cash-flow positive, grow from your revenues, from the money you get from customers, not investors. Build a strong company, where you would want to stay for years to come and not even want to sell.

10. New startup opportunities. If you still have a dayjob at an established company, this might be the best time to leave that and follow your dreams. You might be ready to market just when customers are ready to buy what you have to offer. If you already are at a startup, try to come up with some innovations or new ideas that could be put into action there.

Probably you can add many reasons and potential actions yourself. Feel free to add them to comments.

We have good Baltic examples of great companies coming out from the last downturn as well. One of the best examples is the biggest Baltic social networking company One.lt (Forticom), which was basically bankrupt back in the beginning of the century. Now it is valued at hundreds of millions of euros thanks to perseverance of its founders and management. A job well done in tough times.

If you are good, you should be positive and full of optimism. I am. Times have never been better.

The best way to get event notifications is to join our Facebook group here – we have 207 members now.

The next events are scheduled on November 6th, December 4th and January 8th. I would bet that a 9 AM event on January 1st would not be too popular, unless some drinks are involved.

The guys from ArcticStartup will also be soon in Tallinn for the Nordic Mobile Media Conference and are looking to organise an event here, hopefully that will work out.

Opencoffee Club Tallinn events are usually attended by 20-50 persons from all areas of startups and technology, a bunch of great people.

Our official event announcements are posted on our Facebook Group (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6854479626) which as of today has over 130 members. Feel free to join to have the event invitations sent to you each month.

Everyone active on the technology scene is welcome, like always, just show up any time between 9-11 AM, grab a cup of coffee, introduce yourself to others and just let it flow from there. The first event in Tallinn was a blast, with around 40 people from various fields (startups, VC’s, academia, government etc) showing up.

The deal size is announced as “up to 8.9 mEUR.” 75% of the company is being sold now and the buyers have an option to buy the remaining 25% by January 1st, 2010. “Up to” probably means being dependent on next 3 years results.

CV Market 2007 is forecasting revenues of 1.9 mEUR and a profit (not sure if net profit or EBITDA) of ~0.38-0.45 mEUR. That means a valuation of 4.7 times current year revenue estimates and 20-23 times profit estimates.

The biggest share of revenues for CV Market comes from Estonia, where it operates under the name CV Keskus, followed by the Latvian and Lithuanian subsidiaries.

Earlier this year Tiger Global acquired a 30% share in one of largest Romanian jobboards eJobs.ro, with a valuation of 32 times EBITDA.

The acquiring companies also hold interest in Headhunter.ru, a Russian online recruitment company.

Disclaimer: The author of this post is a co-founder, ex-employee, current small shareholder and supervisory board member of CVO Group, a partially competing regional integrated recruitment services network.

Back in March we raised 100k EUR in seed financing from Moonfish Media, a Baltic online media group active mostly in the field of real estate and job classifieds as well as online auctions.

9 months after we launched, here are the key stats for Nagi:

• 850 thousand photos and 18 thousand albums have been uploaded
• 10 thousand users have registered
• 35-45 thousand visitors come to the site each week
• 25th-30th position in the TNS Metrix official stats for Estonian websites
• 31% of users in age group 18-24 and 29% 25-34

3 weeks ago we also bought the largest youth photo site Fotoalbum.ee, which will be kept separately for younger audience. Here are the numbers for Fotoalbum.ee:

• 2,4 million photos and 58 thousand albums have been uploaded
• 26 thousand users have registered
• 45-50 thousand visitors come to the site each week
• ~25th position in the TNS Metrix official stats for Estonian websites
• 40% of users in age group 18-24 and 46% up to 18 years of age

Since we launched Nagi we knew, that we want to target more mature (above 20-22) audience and that younger (up to 20-22) people need something different. The quality and content of the photos depend a lot on your age. And the community aspects are different. So we had the option of either to start a special youth site next to Nagi or buy some market share, and we chose the latter.

We are quite happy with the numbers, considering our sites are purely in local language for the Estonian market of 750 thousand Internet users.

While we are happy with the statistics, we have not yet actively started ad sales. Hopefully with an audience of 90 thousand weekly users for the two sites we will be now more attractive for the large advertisers and media agencies (through which most of Internet advertising money in Estonia goes).

Over the next months there is a lot to do to improve Fotoalbum.ee software, transfer it to Nagi back-end and improve the user interface and functionality. That is our focus for coming weeks and months – as well as starting the ad sales, so we can grow our team further and reach break-even as soon as possible.

The expansion is supported by 1 mEUR investment from Estonian-Finnish VC MTVP, which seems more like an amount for not more than 1-2 new countries. Also the marketing team is very thin for now. The company will put a lot of hope on viral marketing and organic growth, keeping the costs low that way. We will see how far that investment will take them and if they have some results in the new countries during next 6-12 months to support new investment rounds.

The .fi/.nl/.be sites are up and running, with only around hundred or a few hundred users and photos for now (and some latest photos pages giving errors, hopefully to be fixed soon). They must be still in testing mode. Also many of the registered users there are their own people and friends from Estonia.

In Netherlands they compete with existing large players like Hyves, CU2 and Superdudes/Sugababes. Not sure what the situation in Belgium is? None of European markets are empty, so there must be something to outcompete the existing players.

Rate in Estonia is the largest website, having over 330 thousand registered users and 120 thousand daily visitors (out of country’s population of 1.35 million) mainly in youth segment. Last year Rate sold 51% of the Estonian site to the largest local mobile operator EMT for around EUR 2.5 million. Still being no 1 in one of the smallest European countries has a lot been based on luck and being in the right place in right time.

Rate also runs Face in Latvia (92 thousand users), Limpa in Russia (88 thousand users, although a lot of the Russians from Estonia and other Baltic countries) and Point in Lithuania (46 thousand users).

Time will tell, how good their people, marketing skills and management expertise will be in going to new uncharted markets. Like all of us know, technology plays only a tiny part in this kind of business, it is all about people and users perception.

Good luck for the founders, investors and management team in making this a success!

Many people have asked us, why should anyone use a local photo site as opposed to something like Flickr. Many reasons. Localisation does not mean just translation. You also have things like integration with other local services, for example ordering photo prints. Nagi works with 4 local companies in this sphere, while Flickr at best just gives you an error message about being in unspported country. Being in Europe, local is always faster, even with Google’s, Yahoo’s and other shared data centres. But it is also a local feeling, local places, local people being part of the service. Photo services or communities in general in many European countries have shown they need to be local.

During the first 2 months around 3000 users have registered, we have over 20 thousand unique visitors and about 1 million pageviews per week. This weekend we also exceeded a milestone of having 100 thousand photos uploaded. Again, to compare with Flickr or other international services – there are only a few hundred Estonians on each of them, and that is not a community, while our’s already is. Same for things like tagged photos, you can find a lot about local places, nature and people on Nagi, but not in other countries.

We did Nagi as a team of 4 persons: 2 software developers and 1 user interface developer in addition to me. All of us have previously worked on developing what today is known CV-Online / CVO Group, the largest online recruitment company in Central and Eastern Europe. Knowing and trusting each other helps in this phase.

We are bootstrapping for now, using our own finances (mostly for servers, storage, data centre services etc). The biggest investment of course is doing all the work for free. Hopefully we can start generating some advertising revenues soon, to delay external financing as far as possible or not doing it at all for at least our plans in Estonia. Nagi generates some tiny revenues already now from photo prints and pro packages with more disk space, but that is insignificant and probably will be so in a small country also in the future. Still we have big bets put on online advertising market, living and growing off from that. As for talking to angels and VC’s, we do that if someone shares our vision and is interested, as there could be advantages in raising some financing now, but we are not actively going out doing that for now.

Since we expanded CV-Online across the region, everyone is asking if we will do that with Nagi as well. And I am really not sure. Nagi can be very successful and profitable even if it stays only in Estonia, and we want to focus on that only for at least 6 months. After that, nobody knows.