Märt Ridala's thoughts

I had the privilege to attend the Arctic15 conference in Helsinki yesterday. It was a great event and I would like the organizers from Arctic Startup for organizing it and getting so many interesting presenters together. I think we have a great startup movement going on in the Nordic and Baltic region. Looking at the finalists and presenters it seems to me that there is one important thing that the startup community should now focus on! It is time to take the next step. It is time to focus more on solutions that help the non-IT economy. Currently we have many startups creating economically rather irrelevant services like solutions for publishing posts on Twitter, LinkedIN and Facebook simultaneously, social networks running on other social networks, all kinds of games and so on. We should consider this as the training that has refined the skills of the specialists and now start serious work. The real value IT can create is not in the IT or internet sector. It is in making the non-I...

The global economic situation has been gloomy in the last months and the newspapers are full of economic misery coming mostly from Greece and Italy. But things are not all bad! In Estonia we have had many great economic developments overall and especially in the IT and technology sector lately. Here is a list of some of them: The Seedcamp event in London was overwhelmed by "the Estonian Maffia", with 4 out of 20 participants and 2 out of 3 winners coming from Estonia . Fortumo, the mobile payment provider, was selected as the best Estonian company by Enteprise Estonia. This marks a significant shift of focus to young and innovative startups by the society and government. The delegation from Brussels is looking for premises for the European IT agency in Tallinn. We hope to have many European IT specialists and decision makers moving to Tallinn. (Tallinn is a nice town with a pretty Old Town so why not.) Flybe, Utair and Estonian Air have opened many new flightroutes t...