Media echo

Tigerprises.com TigerBriefs: Estonian start-up Fortumo, that offers possibilities to create your own mobile service in 5 minutes and earn money with it, is expanding rapidly.

Thus far the service has been very popular in Nordic countries, Eastern Europe and Asia. But now Fortumo “fever” is drifting towards Western Europe.

The company has entered French, Spanish and Portugese markets and promises to expand into neighbouring countries shortly. “France, Spain and Portugal are mobile-loving countries where SIM penetration exceeds population. At the same time, they are relatively well developed countries, creating good opportunities for internet businesses,” the Marketing Director of Fortumo, Martin Koppel says.

Reminding once again the fascinating qualities of Fortumo: no startup fee, no monthly fee, no need for any skills.

Over 65 000 SMS services has been created with Fortumo thus far and you can see from the following maps where.

Tigerprises.com: Estonian e-health software developer Raintree is anticipating what will be the outcome of Barack Obama’s plan to invest 17 billion dollars into electronic health information technology and records under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Raintree’s software is already related to over one million patients in US and used by over 14 000 medical doctors. The company is present in 49 US states and can rightfully call itself one of the market leaders.

Among market leaders

Contentedly said – the sales continue growing, Raintree is very well known among physiotherapists, but majority of the recent new customers are bariarics surgery clinics, that cure overweightness. Recently Raintree entered into oncology software market and now develops a tool for defining chemotherapy doses. 

“We can’t yet say that our sales are projecting Obama’s iniciatives, since the officials are specifying the terms regarding how the Act money will be allocated,” CEO of Raintree Estonia, Aleksei Udachny says.

“But it sure does make me proud if I enter a clinic in San Francisco or New York, Manhattan and see our software running in a computer!”

No marketing costs!

Meanwhile the company continues to work with existing and new clients and develop its software, presicely the patient’s web portal, automatic file administration and e-receipt solution. It’s kind of wonderful that Raintree doesn’t even have to bury money into marketing – one doctor advises another to buy the software, the product is are marketing itself. Believe it or not, but a study made last year showed that only about 4 percent of USA doctors use electronic patient databases, other 96 percent have adherenced themself to the old and already tried paper and pencil.

Terminator terminated the plan

In 2004 Raintree faced some bad luck when the “Terminator” bulldozered over their US ambitions. Raintree was about to have huge stake in the medicin system of California, after winning the procurement for building medicin insurance software that would cover 27 Californian counties. But Arnold Schwarzenegger acceded to become the Governor and conducted a sharp cutback in costs. As for result, Raintree’s mega deal was flushed down the toilet. “One political decision crossed out everything,” Udachny remembers.

Tigerprises.com TigerBriefs: Estonian start-up iComTV has launched it’s next Out-Of-Home (OOH) Media solution – iN-Store TV.

iN-Store TV channel is available in Swedbank offices across Estonia. Swedbank clients are entertained with specially created silent short movies, information and advertising clips. iComTV has provided the technical solution and manages the network and content updates.

Marco Rüütel, the Founder of iCom TV says that the widespread consumer use of digital video and photography has created a false impression that in-store TV could be easily created by regular office personnel. In reality making the right and cost effective choices regarding technical platform and video production requires plenty of professional expertise and experience. That’s the basis of iComTV products and services. “We don’t expect the client to invest into in-house know-how about OOH media and video, that really isn’t their main line of business,” he says.

Read more about iCom TV from this TigerPrises.com post.

BBN: Morningstar, Inc. aprovider of independent investment research, today launched a new Web site to bring free investment funddata and analysis to investors in Estonia, the company announced.

The new Web site, available at www.morningstarestonia.com, offers investors an unparalleled resource for data and analysis on more than 900 open-ended investment funds domiciled or
available for sale in Estonia. The site also includes access to quantitative and qualitative fund ratings assigned by a team of experienced Morningstar fund analysts, and a number of free online tools to make the searching and screening of funds for data and ratings easy and efficient.

“Our continued goal is to provide investors with the data and analysis they need to make betterinformed investment decisions,” said Ketil Myhrvold, chief executive officer for Morningstar Norway. “Our dynamic fund data, coupled with detailed funds analysis from Morningstar teams worldwide, deliver a real advantage to Estonian investors as they tackle their investment decisions. We trust investors will find the new site useful, and we invite their feedback at any time.”

Tigerprises.com: Last week I talk to the founders of Smartdust Solutions - an Estonian technology company that specializes in wireless sensor networks.

Jaanus Tamm, Jürgo Preden and Tauri Tuubel founded the company in 2006 and have worked the it up from a startup to a stabile business.

"Smart dust motes" (one is pictured above) are the building blocks of a wireless sensor network - a network of small devices that can communicate with each other through wireless medium and that may have one or more sensors for measuring physical phenomenon.

These can include temperature, humidity, pressure or movement. With a network of such units you can measure processes in a factory, measure road conditions, build burglar alarms for large areas. The possible list of applications is long.

Growing business

They say their business is growing. Seven engineers employed today and are looking for more. So if you are an embedded systems engineer looking for a job then they are hiring!

The company has built a number of solutions and has many customers. The most interesting one is probably the Estonian Border Guard with whom they are building a border monitoring system.

Until now Smartdust has concentrated on developing, building and installing customer specific solutions. This involves both hardware integration and software development. Smardust Solutions is developing their own networking platform - a loosely synchronized sensor network superior to what the competition can offer.

No big "IBM"s

This would pave the way for a breakthrough in the whole industry as today the industry can be best described to be like the computer industry in the 70s - not standardized, a lot of hardware and software is in the experimental phase and there are no big "IBM-s" offering "smartdust in a box". So a standardized turnkey solution would be an improvement like an Ethernet network or a standardized PC in the beginning of 80-s.

One of the most challenging problems to work on in the smartdust industry is the energy efficiency of the network units - the motes. As a future networks can consists of tens, hundreds or even thousands of units that cover a big area then changing their batteries is not something you want to do on daily basis.

Some experience to share

SmartDust guys are giving us a piece of advice.

If you plan to develop a technology product then do get experience with real-life solutions. Building real-world customer specific solutions and getting the experience is a must before you are able to make products that will be useful for the end-customers and that actually also work. So it is wise to start as a project based business, gain experience from customer needs and address the technical problems before beginning to develop your own product.

Smartdust has a principle of talking AFTER they have accomplished something.  This is actually quite unusual in the technology sector and might be sometimes even boring for the general public, but makes a reliable image for the customers.

On the other hand beware that most technology and IT companies of the world do not follow this principle and advertise their products that are still in the testing phase. So if you plan to use cutting edge technology don't believe the media, but rather test it thoroughly.

And lastly - to be successful you have to work hard and learn a lot.

Märt Ridala is a new Author in TigerPrises.com

Arctic Startup: Edicy, the Estonian startup that enables people to create their own websites without knowing any technical issues affiliated with website design. I first met Tõnu Runnel in Le Web Paris last year and interviewed them regarding the product. He was also pitching their company in the startup track among other European startups.

At the end of July, Edicy turned one years old. Back in December in the decent weather of Paris, I was somewhat doubtful if the world needed another homepage company. After all, there are a lot of them. I’m glad to say that since then they have grown immensely, globally and now celebrate their birthday with the 85 000 sites that have been created with their service. They have a map tool showing where the 50 recent sites have been created from and it confirms that they are global. Interestingly enough there are no new sites from North nor South America.

Since December, Edicy has also added some ways of cashing in on the service. They have added a pro plan, where you can get your own domain name (as opposed to one of their default ones). For this you have to pay anywhere fro 6€ to 10€ a month depending on the length of the contract. According to Tõnu in one of his blog posts, more and more people are signing up for the paid plan. What I’d like to see in the commercial version is some other advantages as well. Perhaps some more designs or simple e-commerce possibilities. Through these I’d believe more people would sign-up for the paid version, furthermore Edicy could partner with an e-commerce solution provider to tackle this.

The Baltic Course: The minister of economic affairs and communications of Estonia Juhan Parts signed the regulation that will increase the amount paid as subsidies for start-up and growing enterprises, expending the range of activities to be supported and expenses eligible for aid and will decrease the amount of own financing required, writes Postimees Online/LETA.

The maximum amount of start-up subsidies will grow from 50,000 kroons to 100,000 kroons and the rate of required own financing will fall from 25% to 20%.

The maximum amount of expansion subsidies will be 500,000 kroons instead of 200,000 kroons and the own financing rate fall to 35% from 50%.

For the first time, enterprises registered in Tallinn can also apply for start-up and development subsidies.

The change in the regulation was caused by the changed economic environment where measures that have been developed earlier for supporting business needed to be simplified and supplemented to improve the access of entrepreneurs to additional capital.

The budget planned for the measure during the budgetary perspective of 2007-2013 is 117.6 million kroons. The changes will make it easier to faster direct EU structural funds' resources to the business sector.

TigerPrises.com:

Heikki Haldre, Founder of Massi Miliano, that  received in total 4,85 million EEK from the fund for its virtual fitting-room project Fits.me:

“Thanks to Estonian Development Fund we have received an advantage considering our further development. Preferably the investor needs to provide more than just money, he needs to support defining strategy and he also needs to have knowhow regarding upcoming exit or next investment round. Private investors or the investors without active approach to portfolio companies fail to provide all that. Yet Estonian Development Fund is among few professional VC funds in Estonia.”

Ragnar Sass, head of United Dogs & Cats, social network of pets. Received a VC investment in total 3,75 million EEK :

“We have chosen Estonian Development Fund because they invest into companies located in Eastern Europe. Many other VCs claimed that they are unable to do that.
Also, the negotiations with Estonian Development Fund were less complex than they would have been with a typical VC. Time was another crucial factor – we both had strong will to close the deal quickly.”

TigerPrises.com: Not too long ago I wrote a post about an entertaining Estonian start-up called Pledgehammer.com. Now there's another amusing project called Mangaforme.com.

It allows you to upload a picture of you or any of your friends and receive a pencil-drawn manga image in few days. It will cost you only 69,99USD, no expenses for delivery. 

One of founders of Mangaforme.com, Tanel Ainla says that they offer service of professional Estonian cartoon artists.

"Our goal is to make art ordering process as simple and easy as possible. For example, if you want to become a japanese animation style cartoon character you just have to upload your photo and describe yourself with a couple of words. In a few days you will recieve a stylish drawing of You. Simple! " he says.

They promise to take care of quality and deadlines (which could be a real headache with creative people sometimes). 

Ainla says they have two groups of target costumers:

• Japanese anime fans who's lifestyle is the art they like to create
• Publishing and advertising companies, who sometimes need the service of clipart artists and character/mascot designers.

"We currently have 3 freelancer artists working part-time for our little company and we are focused on finding international partners to bring Estonian art potential to the World!"

MangaForMe.com is a startup that belongs to the portfolio of Teadusmosaiik - Estonia's youngest science bureau (meaning that physicians and IT students working there are very young).

BNS: The Enterprise Estonia Foundation gave 315 million kroons (EUR 20 mln) support to technology investments of 39 industrial companies.

Nearly 170 companies filed applications in the second round of technology investment subsidies, applying for a total subsidy of 900 million kroons.

Enterprise Estonia gave the biggest sum of investments, more than a hundred million kroons, to engineering companies, which accounted for nearly one third of the applications.

Enterprise Estonia invested more than twenty million kroons into printing, wood processing, food industry and rubber and plastic products manufacturing.