life in estonia (spring 2014 issue)

SPRING I 2014

SPECIAL! Government

Leading Innovation

land & people I state & society I economy & business I technology & innovation I culture & entertainment I tourism

The e-Tiger Continues To Growl

Taavi Kotka:Estonia Moves Into

The Cloud

Hot #EstonianMafia

Start-UpsArvo Pärt's Music Emanates Love

Cleantech Innovation Estonia Aims

For Real Time Economy

Estonians are e-believers. We are proud to be pioneers and leaders in e-government. We have developed and implemented innovative

solutions that improve the lives of millions, and we intend to develop more.

COVERTaavi Kotka

Photo by: Tiina-Liina Uudam

Executive publisherPositive ProjectsPärnu mnt 69, 10134 Tallinn, [email protected]

EditorReet [email protected]

TranslationIngrid HübscherAmbassador Translation Agency

Language editorRichard Adang

Design & LayoutPositive Design

Partner

SPRING 2014 I LIFE IN ESTONIA 3

In Estonia we can see a version of the in-

terconnected and computerized future

that is inextricably a part of the funda-

mental operations of society: 25% of the

electorate votes online, nearly 100% of

prescriptions and tax returns are done on-

line, as is almost all banking. Estonians have

given 140 million digital signatures, and last

December, Estonian and Finnish PMs signed

the first international treaty digitally. Add-

ing to this near 100% broadband coverage

and countrywide Wi-Fi, Estonia is one of the

most wired countries in the world.

As a country so dependent on digital solu-

tions, the whole of ICT infrastructure must

be regarded as an “ecosystem” in which

everything is interconnected. It functions as

a whole, thus it needs to be defended as a

whole. The more digitized we are, the more

vulnerable we are. It is therefore crucial to un-

derstand that cyber security is not just a matter

of blocking the bad things a cyber attack can

do; it is one of protecting all the good things

that cyber insecurity can prevent us from do-

ing – in other words, cyber security should not

be seen as an additional cost but as an enabler,

guarding our entire digital way of life.

However, even though we cannot take security

issues lightly, they cannot be used as an excuse

to limit freedom of expression. Freedom and

security need not contradict each other: on the

contrary, secure online interactions, enabled by

a secure online identity, is a precondition for full

internet freedom.

The freedoms we value are equally valid online as

well as offline. Those of us, for whom democratic

values are important, want to find a balance be-

tween security, privacy and free flow of informa-

tion. An encouraging example is Estonia, where

all residents are provided with a secure e-services

system while Estonia has also been ranked as the

first or one of the first in Internet freedom for sev-

eral years in a row.

Cooperation has been the guiding principle of our

IT success. As we prepare for the new opportunities

and challenges that will arise in the coming years,

we recognize that cooperation with and among

the Baltic Sea states and in transatlantic and inter-

national forums will be crucial to our success. We

are stronger and our reach is wider when we work

together and combine our efforts in pursuit of our

common goals.

I am glad that the Estonian ICT Week 2014 will

seek to demonstrate the interconnection between

innovation and the culture of start-up companies,

the awareness of net neutrality issues and the ca-

pability to implement IT solutions within states and

over state borders.

Toomas Hendrik Ilves

President of the Republic of Estonia

Estonians are e-believers. We are proud to be pioneers and leaders in e-government. We have developed and implemented innovative

solutions that improve the lives of millions, and we intend to develop more.

6 Where To Go This Season? Life In Estonia Recommends

8 News

10 EventsThe two most important international events to be hosted in Tallinn

are the international information and communications technology week

“Estonian ICT Week 2014”, from 23-30 April and the FinanceEstonia

International Forum 2014, from 17-18 June.

16 Estonia As A Country Moves Into The Cloud And Expands All Over The World!

Taavi Kotka, the Estonian government CIO, talks about taking the al-

ready successful e-state onto a totally new level: Estonia has an ambi-

tious plan of moving the state into a data cloud spread all over the

world. In addition, with the help of ICT, there can well be ten million

Estonians by 2020 instead of the current one million.

20 Estonia: The Little Country With A Start-Up Mindset

Sten Tamkivi, now an EIR at Andreessen Horowitz, who became known

as the Chief Evangelist of Skype, tells the story of Estonia’s IT success.

23 Estonian Tax Board 2.0 Presents: Real Time Economy

The famous Estonian e-Tax Board has been admired and set as an ex-

ample all around the world. Where else can you submit your tax return

in just a few clicks and all declarations online without spending days on

end filling out paper forms? Marek Helm, Head of the Estonian Tax and

Customs Board, claims that although our e-Tax Board is admired all over

the world, the time is ripe for some qualitative changes.

26 What To Do With Legacy? Implement No-legacy Policy

Estonia wants to introduce a no-legacy principle, which would require

us to renew all the state IT systems and technologies after a certain

amount of time, to keep in line with the ever-changing environment

and development of technology. Aet Rahe, Head of State Information

Systems Department, Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communica-

tions, introduces the policy.

28 The Estonian Government Is About To Boost Seed Investments In Estonia In 2014

EstBAN is an umbrella organisation for business angels and business

angel groups seeking investment opportunities in Estonia and its neigh-

bouring regions with an aim to grow the quantity and quality of local

seed stage investments. Signe Viimsalu, CEO of EstBAN, gives an over-

view of the main goals in 2014.

30 VitalFields Helps Farmers Be More Efficient

The Estonian start-up VitalFields, which offers web-based services for

farm management, accurate weather and plant disease forecasting,

challenges the outdated view that farmers are remote from technology

and somewhat wary of it. The CEO of VitalFields, Martin Rand, says that

agricultural enterprises are in fact very open to new solutions.

32 The Success Story Of ZeroTurnaround

Having to date financed its rapid expansion with sales profits, Zero-

Turnaround announced at the beginning of March that it has attracted

six million dollars of growth capital.

34 Pipedrive – Estonian Company in Shaq O’Neal’s Investment Portfolio

The Estonian company Pipedrive has developed valued customer man-

agement software which provides wise and practical help to any sales-

man. Recently, the Silicon Valley technology guru Vivek Ranadive and the

former star basketball player Shaquille O’Neal invested in the company.

36 Estonia Can Change The World, Will It?Carl Pucci of Datel Ovela, the subsidiary of Datel AS, acknowledges

Estonian ICT technologies, many of which would be an excellent fit for

the global market.

I CONTENT

SPRING_2014

LIFE IN ESTONIA I 2014 SPRING4

51 Portfolio – Marko Mäetamm

From the moment he entered the Estonian arts scene, Marko Mäetamm

has amazed audiences with his productivity and overflowing sense of

fun, which may border on the provocative or reach painful integrity. He

never tires of surprising the audience and, quite possibly, himself.

62 Sounds Emanating LoveAt the turn of May and June, four concerts of Arvo Pärt’s music will be

performed in Washington D.C. and New York. The Estonian Philhar-

monic Chamber Choir and orchestra will fly over the ocean, the recent

Grammy-winner Tõnu Kaljuste will conduct and the composer himself

has helped to put the programme together. What is the secret behind

the music of the most well-known Estonian? Life in Estonia tries to find

the answer.

68 Jazzkaar – More Than Just A FestivalThe biggest Estonian jazz festival – Jazzkaar - will celebrate its 25th an-

niversary this year, marking an important cultural milestone. Let’s cast a

look at the history of the festival.

70 Estonian Song And Dance Celebration Touches Hearts

The Estonian Song and Dance Celebration is a unique event that brings

together a giant choir of 25,000 people every five years for a weekend

in July. More than 100,000 people enjoy the concerts and sing along

with the most popular songs. This summer the theme of the Song and

Dance Celebration on 4-6 July is “Touched by Time. The Time to Touch.”

73 Lottemaa Welcomes Visitors Beginning In July

There is Walt Disney’s original theme park Disneyland in southern Cali-

fornia in the USA, and in Paris in Europe, and Astrid Lindgren’s World

in Sweden. Finland, our neighbour, has Moomin World. In July, Lotte,

a cartoon character cherished by Estonian children, will spring to life

in the theme park Lottemaa, built at the site of a former Soviet missile

base near Pärnu.

77 Estonia In Brief

78 Practical Information For Visitors

38 Next Silicon Valleys: Small Estonia Has Big IdeasNigel Cassidy from BBC visited Estonia for innovative start-ups and, among

other things, found the Stigo scooter. He saw it, drove it, and liked it.

41 Nordic Cleantech OpenThe third edition of the Nordic Cleantech Open competition saw a re-

cord-breaking 107 cleantech companies applying. An international jury

of more than 50 influential representatives of multinational companies

and venture capital firms selected the top 25. Out of the 11 impressive

Estonian cleantech start-up companies which entered the competition,

Cityntel and Stigo both made it to the top 25.

43 Startup Wise Guys On The Hunt For B2B Start-upsThe Estonia-based start-up accelerator Startup Wise Guys is about to

commence its new programme, Business Tech. For the first time, they

are looking specifically for B2B start-ups only. Life in Estonia met with

Mike Reiner, the co-founder and managing director of Startup Wise

Guys to find out more about the guys.

46 GameFounders: We Believe In The Gaming Industry

GameFounders is the first European business accelerator exclusively

working with game studios. The accelerator was started in 2012 and,

in the past two years, it has become a considerable player in the game

industry.

47 How Do We Fix Maths Education?

“I hated maths”– this is something we often hear from former school

leavers. The problem is not unique to Estonia. The British educational vi-

sionary Conrad Wolfram has developed a programme called Computer-

Based Math, and Estonia is the first country in the world to implement

this programme in schools.

49 ProgeTiger, Lego Robots And Computer-based Math Conquer Schools

“We need a smarter workforce,” says Ave Lauringson, ICT skills coordina-

tor at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications. Life in Esto-

nia asked her to give an overview of smart initiatives in Estonian schools.



I WHERE TO GO THIS SEASON

Friday, 4 July 20146 p.m. The first performance of the 19th dance celebration Puudutus (The Touch). Tallinn, Kalev Central Stadium.

Saturday 5th of July 201411 a.m. The second performance of the 19th dance celebration Puudutus (The Touch). 2 p.m. Procession.8 p.m. The first concert of the 26th song celebration Aja puudutus (Touched by Time). Tallinn, Song Festival Grounds.

Sunday 6th of July 201411 a.m. The third performance of the 19th dance celebration Puudutus (The Touch). 12 a.m. The second concert of the 26th song celebration Puudutuse aeg (The Time to Touch).

Tickets are available at Piletilevi for 4 – 50 Euros.2014.laulupidu.ee/en/

MEDEA / Ballet by Gianluca Schiavoni /

Music: Igor Stravinsky, Alfred Schnittke and Dead Can Dance

Libretto by Marco Gandini

World premIere aT THe esTonIan naTIonal opera

on 13 marcH 2014

Conductor: Vello pähn

Choreographer and Stage Director: Gianluca schiavoni (Italy)

Set Designers: maria rossi Franchi (Italy) and andrea Tocchio (Italy)

Costume Designer: simona morresi (Italy)

Medea, a sensual and powerful princess of mythical Colchide (a region

corresponding to present Georgia), is a seductive sorceress, who aban-

dons her country and her family for her love of a strong and beautiful

man called Jason. Yet he is not only interested in Medea’s love, but also

in getting hold of the Golden Fleece, a symbol for power. Medea gains

Jason’s love by giving him this symbol of power. Soon she gives birth to

two boys. Once she realises that Jason is betraying her with the King

of Corinth’s daughter, Glauce, she decides to take revenge by killing

Glauce and her own children.

Medea

Phot

o: C

hris

Män

nik


L’ELISIR D’AMORE / Opera by Gaetano Donizetti /

premIere aT THe esTonIan naTIonal opera on 15 may 2014

Conductors: Vello pähn and risto Joost

Stage Director: Georg malvius (Sweden)

Designer: ellen cairns (Scotland)

In leading roles: Kristel pärtna, Kadri Kipper,

oliver Kuusik, merūnas Vitulskis (Lithuania)

“l’elisir d’amore” is one of the most frequently performed Donizetti’s

operas together with “Lucia di Lammermoor” and “Don Pasquale”. It

combines a touching love story and a hilarious comedy with lightness,

sparkling wit and beautiful music, including the well-loved tenor aria

“Una furtiva lagrima”. Its premiere in Milan in 1832 was a triumph and

secured Donizetti’s place as one of the leading Italian opera composers

of his day. “L’elisir d’amore” relies on the traditions of the 18th century

opera buffa and offers an ear-tickling delight for all lovers of 19th cen-

tury Italian bel canto.

Georg Malvius has directed more that 60 plays, 70 musicals and 20 ope-

ras in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Germany, England, Holland,

Italy, Luxembourg Austria, Monaco, Hungary and elsewhere. In Estonia,

Malvius has staged 14 musical and drama productions.

www.opera.ee

May 15 at 7 pmEstonia Concert HallMay 16 at 7 pm Jõhvi Concert Hall

Tickets from Eesti Kontsert, Piletimaailm and PiletileviIn cooperation with Tallinn Philharmonic Society

Akiko Suwanai violin, Japan

Tallinn Chamber OrchestraConductor Kristiina Poska

Season Closing Concert

conc er t . ee

Eesti Kontserdisuurtoetaja

Ametlik autopartner

hooaja peatoetaja

JULY 20–27 2014

Presenting the Ukrainian National Opera!

Verdi “DON CARLOS“Lysenko “NATALKA POLTAVKA“

Bellini “NORMA“OPRERA GALA

CHILDREN GALA

Artistic director of the festival: Arne Mikk

saaremaaopera.eufacebook.com/saaremaaopera

Vello Pähn

Phot

o: S

uira

dO

Phot

os: L

inda

Uld

rich


The estonian start-up cognuse has beaten tough competition

to be included in the reputable Us business accelerator dreamIt

Health. cognuse develops and distributes innovative evaluation

and therapy solutions meant for cognitive rehabilitation patients.

A total of 120 companies applied to be accepted into the DreamIt

Health accelerator and only the nine strongest were selected. “With

the help of DreamIt Health, Cognuse is taking significant steps closer to

health insurance and medical care suppliers in its sector. It also enables

us to get access to research and development institutions and larger

investments which are necessary for growth,” explained Andres Mellik,

one of the founders of Cognuse. Currently the main focus of the com-

pany is product development and implementing business models. “We

are focusing on the US, Scandinavian, Japanese and Estonian markets,

and the training programme developed by us is already being used by

20 hospitals and more than 100 private patients,” added Mellik.

Cognuse was founded in 2010, and in 2013 it participated in Acceler-

ace Life, an accelerator of the Tallinn Tehnopol Science Park targeting

health technology companies. The main activity of Cognuse is the de-

velopment of training programmes for cognitive rehabilitation and the

adjustment of those programmes for various devices, such as iPads and

smart phones. In addition, the company has developed different appli-

ances for the use of rehabilitation programmes. Cognuse products are

meant for medical institutions and private patients.

enterprise estonia announced that the estonian national booth

and Garry Kasparov’s simultaneous chess event attracted

heightened attention at the world’s largest mobile trade fair,

mobile World congress 2014, which took place in Barcelona

from 24 – 27 February.

According to Martin Hirvoja, Member of the Management Board of En-

terprise Estonia, the fair in Barcelona clearly demonstrated that partici-

pating in large trade fairs with a national booth is beneficial for Estonian

entrepreneurs in finding useful contacts, as well as for increasing aware-

ness of Estonia as a country.

“It is great news that Regio is the first Estonian company to win a Global

Mobile Award prize, with the Reach-U solution Demograft. This respect-

ed award demonstrates that Estonian exporters need such support,”

added Hirvoja.

Enterprise Estonia also used the fair to hold a networking event, with

Garry Kasparov as its magnet. A few lucky people were chosen to play

chess with the legendary chess player. Kasparov’s simultaneous chess

event turned out to be one of the magnets of the entire fair and at-

tracted representatives from IBM, Tata Consultancy Services, Deutsche

Telekom and many others to the event.

Kasparov has always had good relations with Estonians and he chose

Estonia to be the first country to launch his project of teaching chess

at schools. The Kasparov Chess Foundation Europe programme started

in 2012 and has become very popular. Also, Kasparov announced his

candidacy for the 2014 FIDE Presidential Elections in Tallinn, Estonia.

“Garry Kasparov’s simultaneous chess event with leaders of companies

was an innovative way to introduce Estonia to large international ICT

corporations. The event organised by Enterprise Estonia significantly

helped Estonia to stand out and receive positive attention. It is usually

extremely difficult to stand out from others at large trade fairs, and

therefore we definitely ought to organise similar events in the future,”

said Andrei Korobeinik, President of the Estonian Chess Federation,

who moderated the event.

According to Tony Rivshin, the owner of Topconnect – one of the larg-

est Estonian exporters – the special event with Kasparov was the most

interesting occasion at the entire trade fair.

Nearly 100,000 visitors came to Mobile World Congress this year. Par-

ticipants in the joint Estonian booth included software development

companies and IT service providers.

Garry Kasparov helps to promote Estonia

Estonian start-up develops training programmes for cognitive reha-bilitation at an American business accelerator

I NEWS

Andrei Korobeinik and Garry Kasparov

Phot

os: L

inda

Uld

rich


Crossing the Estonian border from Russia, an external EU border, was

once a time-consuming, uncertain wrangle lasting days and resulting

in bribery, illegal sales of spots in queues, pollution, traffic safety issues

and losses for freight carriers.

The GoSwift Queue Management Service for motor vehicles allows driv-

ers to book a time to cross the border, thereby creating a more efficient

system, as drivers do not have to wait in long queues. Using the GoSwift

system, trucks and cars can now drive to the border just before the

registered border crossing time. Drivers can wait at designated waiting

areas where toilets, showers, dining areas and free WIFI are available,

proceeding as scheduled to cross the border easily and on time. By al-

locating a specific time and date for the applicant to cross the border

online, GoSwift has created minimum waiting times, cleaner surround-

ings near border crossing points and considerably more movement of

cars and trucks due to online efficiency.

The service has been implemented on the borders of Estonia, Lithuania

and Russia. The system saves Estonian road transportation companies

four million euros a year. According to Hannes Plinte, CEO of GoSwift,

drivers have already got used to the convenience of the online reserva-

tion system for border crossing, which has been in operation for two

and a half years. Nobody has to queue for long hours any more, and the

average border crossing time now is one hour.

In 2013, GoSwift won the World Summit Award (WSA) in the category

of e-Government & Open Data. According to Ken-Marti Vaher, the Es-

tonian Minister of the Interior, it took a bold and demanding client, as

well as a result-oriented developer to create such a good e-solution. “It

is a great honour to see the high standard of e-solutions being created

by Estonia and for one of our projects to receive recognition from inter-

national experts within the UN and the World Summit Award,” he said.

The GoSwift Queue Management Service has been used to queue vehi-

cles at the Estonian-Russian road border since 2011. In 2012 the service

was launched in Russia and in the summer of 2013 was also opened in

Lithuania. Besides border crossings, GoSwift can also be used at tourism

sites and to manage ferry queues: basically wher-

ever there are queues. Since June 2013, GoSwift

service has also been used at the Tallinn TV Tower

pilet.teletorn.ee, where customers can book a

time to enter the tower online instead of having to

queue outside.

Weekdone, an estonian start-up which

aims to become the #1 app for managers

to monitor and manage their teams, won

the slush pitching competition and raised

$200k in new fundin from a group of in-

vestors led by KIma Ventures.

Weekdone, launched in 2013, is an easy yet

powerful tool for managers to track what’s

happening in their teams and an opportunity

to give immediate feedback to their employ-

ees. In essence, it is a hassle-free weekly em-

ployee status report, dashboard and feedback

system. In November 2013, the company won

the Slush Pitching Competition in Finland

among 1,300 start-ups, 400 of whom had ap-

plied to pitch. According to the winning pitch,

the best part of this tool is that it is suitable

and easy-to-use for both managers and em-

ployees, making life easier for managers and

teams more productive.

At the end of 2013, Weekdone also closed

their next investment round of $200k. It was

led by Jérémie Berrebi’s and Xavier Niel’s KIMA

Ventures, one of the world’s most active an-

gel investors. The round also included exist-

ing investors: Skype/Kazaa founding engineer

and chief architect Ahti Heinla, the Rubylight

venture fund, and Taavi Lepmets, a former

backer of Odnoklassniki, Russia’s largest social

network. The round brings the total raised by

Weekdone to $290k.

“I have managed and I am still managing many

companies,” said Jérémie Berrebi of KIMA Ven-

tures’ investment in the Estonian company. “I

really think weekly reporting is the most impor-

tant thing a manager needs to request from his

team. It’s not always easy, but with a tool like

Weekdone, it’s becoming fun for everyone.”

Recently, Weekdone grew its team from three

to six people and set up an office in New York

City. These moves follow a recent ramp-up in

sales: almost a third of Weekdone’s paying cus-

tomers started their subscriptions in October.

Weekdone has seen a lot of new uptake on

mobile platforms, with iPhone and iPad be-

ing available for some months. “We believe

that the future of many communication tools

is mobile, moving with you wherever you go.

Both leaders and team members are giving up

PCs and switching to mobiles for many tasks.

We already get many more registrations from

mobile devices than from web browsers and

PCs,” said Kaljundi.

This year Weekdone launched their real-time

Buzz timeline activity feed, which is now used

for internal daily communications among many

users. “Weekdone is not just about manage-

rial reporting, but also about employee-to-em-

ployee communications and making sure your

co-workers know what you are doing and are

able to help you,” said Kaljundi. “Checking

Buzz helps you to keep up to date on the pulse

of your company.”

weekdone.com

GoSwift – online reservation system for border crossing

Estonian Start-up Weekdone Announces $200K Investment

Photo: Sami Heiskanen

Estonian ICT Week 2014

LIFE IN ESTONIA I 2014 SPRING

I EVENTS

10

The main idea behind “Change, Quick!”, an international business trans-

formation conference, is well expressed by Gartner, the world´s leading

technology research company, whose Vice President, stephen prentice,

will deliver the conference´s keynote presentation. We now live in a world

where “Every budget is an IT budget. Every company is an IT company.

Every business leader is becoming a digital leader.”

ICT is an integral part of virtually everything that we do nowadays; it is

visibly changing how people behave, think and do business. The main

question for more and more entrepreneurs from all walks of life is how to

make use of the opportunities provided by contemporary technology and

not lag behind. This is exactly what “Change, Quick!” is about.

The conference focuses on using ICT to transform business models in

other sectors so that they become more efficient, and meet the needs

of the changing world and increasingly tech-savvy clients. A large part

of the conference day is dedicated to insightful case studies from a wide

range of sectors, particularly “traditional” ones. Although at first sight it´s

maybe not clear what ICT has to do with wooden floors or growing ce-

real, ICT can be the key component. For example, the Estonian company

Bolefloor is the world’s first industrial-scale manufacturer of hardwood

flooring with naturally curved lengths that follow a tree’s natural growth.

This is achieved by combining wood scanning systems, tailor-made CAD/

CAM developments, and innovative optimization algorithms. Before Bole-

floor, such floors could only be produced by an extremely limited number

of dedicated craftsmen. Another company, Trigon agri, is able to control

virtually everything that goes on in their vast cereal fields in Poland with-

out having to physically leave Estonia: ICT allows them to work smarter

and lower costs considerably.

“If you want to become a big player on a global scale, it is important to

see ICT as an investment not as an expense”, says Jüri Jõema, the CEO of

the Estonian Association of Information Technology and Telecommunica-

tions (ITL), the main organiser of the conference. “On the other hand, ICT

is not something-in-itself and this is precisely why we talk about business

models in this conference. You have to think about your entire business

process before you make an investment.” What “Change, Quick!” aims

for, therefore, is to support better decision-making and, in most cases,

this doesn’t mean buying the most expensive solution available.

The other highlights of the conference day include:

The Gartner keynote offers participants an opportunity to benefit

from the very best in terms of the world´s technology research and to

find out where ICT´s influence on other sectors is likely to take us in

the coming years; An on-stage development takes place throughout

the day, engaging participants in a real change process: a dream team

of business and tech experts, led by yrjö ojasaar (Solon Partners) and

marko Kokla (Virtuaalettevõte), will work on finding a solution to one

company´s real business problem; More case studies offering guests

both inspiration and knowledge, including the Estonian Mafia´s Startup

Superstars: guests can step into Fits.me’s virtual fitting room for online

retailers based on shift-shaping robots, learn how TransferWise has

managed to revolutionise international money transfers and what has

made Fortumo’s mobile payments a huge success in 79 countries. Joni

lehtonen, Tieto’s Vice President, will focus on state-of-the-art Indus-

trial Internet based-on-use cases in Field Engineering and at the service

level. The conference’s demo area is the place for practical demos and

hands-on access to novel technologies and the newest gadgets; The

executive evening at the Estonian National Opera will offer some seri-

ous networking, kick-started by an opening discussion by special guests.

The moderators of the event are Jarmo eskelinen (Forum Virium Hel-

sinki, CEO and Chair of the European Network of Living Labs) and yrjö

ojasaar. “Change, Quick!” is co-organised by ITL and the Baltic Innova-

tion Agency.

Nature in combination with leading technologyBolefloor´s unique hardwood flooring continues to impress the world. Their floors can be found in the showrooms of noted fashion designers, as well as in the residences of Apple executives in San Francisco.

CHANGE, QUICK!24 april / 2014 @ Tallinn University

www.ictconfestonia.com

From 23-30 April, Tallinn will host the international

information and communications technology week

“Estonian ICT Week 2014”, held on the initiative

of the Enterprise Estonia Foundation (EAS), which

will focus on entrepreneurship in technology as

well as topics relating to the public sector. Further-

more, the week will be filled with receptions and

meetings designed for guests of ICT Week, aimed

at contributing to cooperation both in Estonia and

worldwide.

Estonian ICT Week aspires to become an annual top

event in the field of ICT in the Baltic and Nordic area

and hopes to attract opinion leaders in the field,

entrepreneurs, risk investors, major foreign officials

and representatives of international organisations.

24.04ICT Week

The first Nordic Digital Agendas Day – dedicated to innovations and fu-

ture plans in the field of the information society, focusing especially on

e-government – will bring together government CIOs and experts from

all over the Nordics. They will be sharing their main lines of activities and

will introduce ambitious plans for the next 10 years.

Just as Singapore and South Korea are featured at every international

ICT event in Asia, the Nordics have been the main trend-setters in Eu-

rope. Northern European countries are implementing more and more

incredible IT solutions that completely change their citizens’ interactions

with their countries, and Estonia has been showing the way to the rest

of the world. Estonia is known for having the first e-government and

first successful implementation of the digital signature, and Denmark

for its successful e-invoicing system.

At this forum, each country will introduce their crazy yet necessary ide-

as that deal with real challenges of today, ideas which could prove to

be valuable for others. The moderator for the event, siim sikkut, ICT

Policy Adviser at the Government Office of Estonia, and Taavi Kotka,

Estonian government CIO, provide previews of what Estonia’s message

is going to be at the event:

Global Information Society Institute (GISI)

Strength lies in cooperation. Technological and human readiness to

adopt new solutions has been the foundation for the GISI, which will

launch in 2014, and which, in addition to addresses by specialists and

politicians, will provide opportunities to offer scientific information and

ideas in the field of information societies.

Digital market across countries

It’s true that success breeds success, and this is why successful and

ground-breaking solutions from Estonia keep on coming. We have al-

ready started cooperation with Finland in cross-border digital signatures

and e-services, i.e., we’ve created an actual unified digital market. The

intention is to extend this cooperation to other countries.

No-legacy principle and Real Time Economy

Estonia has set the goal of replacing many of the existing e-services

with new and improved ones. Estonia wants to introduce a no-legacy

principle, which would require the rebuilding of all state IT systems and

technologies after a certain amount of time, to keep up with the ever-

changing environment and development of technology. Estonians can

already file their taxes in a couple of minutes through a web interface,

but we intend to radically reform and automate the whole tax collection

system. The Real Time Economy is a new trend in the world, with Esto-

nia still leading the way.

Education and healthcare

Two areas of public services have particularly big plans for changes.

In education, the goal is to use technology to make every class more

interesting and personalised for each student.

In the healthcare field, the main objective is to make services more pre-

ventive, accessible and directed towards specific groups. Estonia wants

to introduce remote services, such as telemedicine and care, to reduce

the need for physical interaction and make it possible to use services

from a distance.

Another idea that is being bounced around is how to make the e-

health information system a platform where a person can gather in-

formation about herself with all kinds of devices, apps and solutions,

enabling doctors to use this information for medical, especially preven-

tive, purposes.

What happens to the Internet?

President Toomas Hendrik Ilves was recently appointed by The Internet

Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to serve as the chairman

for the group figuring out what Internet governance should look like in

the future. Estonia’s goal is to help create and apply solutions that guar-

antee a free and open Internet, including a better multi-stakeholder

model.

Country without territory

Since most of the crucial services in Estonia can function digitally, there

are talks of a new concept: a country without a territory. This means

that the Estonian services landscape – especially critical public services

and systems – can in emergency cases function in the cloud, without a

physical territory.

An ambitious idea that will be discussed at the ICT Week is the concept

of e-residency. “For the rest of the world to be able to benefit from our

e-solutions, we want to provide the opportunity for all foreigners to

get an ID-card and Estonian e-identity in the near future,” says Kotka.

In addition to the topics mentioned above, Nordic Digital Agendas Day

will bring many more to the table. Which of the ideas are held in com-

mon by several countries and where the best cooperation opportunities

lie will be revealed at the conference.

Nordic Digital Agendas Day25 april / 2014 @ Swissôtel Tallinn

Organised by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications


25.04

ICT Week


I EVENTS

eHealth & Wellness hackathon25-27 april / 2014 @ Tehnopol Mustamäe

Garage48 is a 48-hour event, with the goal of building technological

prototypes in just two days and nights. The event is organised by the

Garage48 Foundation, launched by six start-up entrepreneurs who met

thanks to the Estonian Start-up Leaders Club. The idea is to give hands-

on experience in how it feels to build a start-up with a team. Garage

48’s main goal is to promote entrepreneurship and inspire more people

to try to create their own start-ups. The aim is to lighten the burden of

turning an idea into a working prototype, and bringing it to the market

for customer feedback.

Founded in 2010, in Estonia, arguably the most tech-savvy country in

the world, Garage48 events provide an opportunity for people with dif-

ferent skills to pitch ideas, gather teams and build working tech product

prototypes during a weekend. So far 33 events have taken place in 12

countries, from South Africa to Finland, with 2,500 participants, more

than 800 ideas pitched and nearly 400 prototypes built. Nine teams

created in those events have successfully raised venture capital while

many more met their future co-founders or partners. One of the most

successful Estonian start-ups born in Garage48 is VitalFields: their prod-

uct vitalfield.com is the modern farmer’s best friend, in a pocket tool for

farm management, and accurate weather and plant disease forecast.

With the backing of 750,000 euros in a venture capital investment, the

VitalFields team now is on the way to making farming more efficient

globally.

With the globally rising importance of technology, more and more peo-

ple are daring to exchange safe jobs with guaranteed pay cheques for

the roller-coaster start-up life, aiming to build corporations of their own.

Garage48 aims to prove that a working prototype is a much better start

for a successful business than 1000 slides.

Garage48 co-founder priit salumaa says: “We have been doing Ga-

rage48 hackathons in order to boost local start-up scenes by bringing

the Silicon Valley attitude to Estonia, to Eastern Europe and to other

developing markets. We wanted to show that a small team with a kick-

ass attitude can achieve amazing things on a lean budget in a very short

time: you can start with an idea and its first prototype without waiting

for a white boat with an investor on it!” In recent years, developing

new technologies has become cheaper: what previously took years and

millions of euros can now be done almost for free and in a short time.

“There are millions of apps out there, yet we see that there is still huge

potential for ITC and hardware products that solve big challenges in

particular industries, such as healthcare. Therefore, the 35th Garage48

hackathon is devoted to e-health and wellness solutions,” noted Ga-

rage48 co-founder ragnar sass. As Estonia has positioned itself as a

hub for pioneering new technologies for state-wide adoption, including

e-health solutions, such events are definitely worth keeping an eye on

for great ideas that might improve the world.

Does walking around with head-itching ideas for a long time sound familiar to you? That is where Garage48 hackathons come in.

ICT Week

25.0426.0427.04


Blocking and filtering content, passing laws that oppress government

critics and deliberately making Internet or mobile access slower, are just

a few scary examples of censorship on the Net. How to keep such dark

scenarios from happening and how to ensure the future of a free and

secure Internet will be the main topics of the Freedom Online Coalition’s

high-level conference in Estonia’s capital Tallinn.

In regard to Internet freedom, Estonia continues to enjoy one of the top

positions in the world. According to the Freedom House Freedom on

the Net report, it is in second place just after Iceland.

Supporting and protecting freedom online is a stance that Estonia

strives to promote worldwide and is dedicated to working closely with

all partners that stand for the same values. Estonia believes that virtual

freedom of expression is an inseparable part of human rights – sup-

porting and promoting freedom of expression on the Internet is just as

important as protecting all fundamental human rights. Unfortunately,

all countries do not share this view. According to the Freedom on the

Net report, 34 countries out of 60 that were evaluated experienced a

decline in Internet freedom. This shows that freedom online is not a

self-evident phenomenon, but rather a sphere that needs constant sup-

port and maintenance.

Estonia is a founding member and the current chairman of the Freedom

Online Coalition – a group of governments committed to advancing

Internet freedom worldwide. That is to say free expression, association,

assembly, and privacy online.

The only way to ensure these freedoms is to have close cooperation be-

tween governments, civil society organisations and private sector. This is

precisely what the coalition’s meeting in Tallinn will focus on. It is one of

the year’s most relevant milestones in the discussion of Internet freedom

worldwide, bringing together foreign ministers, representatives of civil so-

ciety and business, as well as distinguished experts from all over the globe.

The outcome of the conference will be ”Recommendations for Free-

dom Online” – concrete solutions on how to keep the Internet free and

secure based on the multi-stakeholder model. The 22 Freedom Online

Coalition states have already shown their commitment to ensuring that

the development of the Internet will stay on a free, open and undivided

course. In addition, there is always room for new members, who value

the same principles.

For more information:

www.freedomonline.ee

The Freedom Online Coalition’s 4th annual high-level conference ”Free and Secure Internet for All”28-29 april / 2014 @ Swissôtel Tallinn

28.0429.04

ICT Week

Members of the Freedom Online Coalition: the 22 member states

are Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Costa Rica, Estonia,

Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Ireland, Kenya, Latvia,

the Republic of Maldives, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, the Neth-

erlands, Sweden, Tunisia, the United Kingdom, the United States

of America.

Who will participate? More than 200 leading Internet freedom

experts from all over the world, including foreign ministers, civil

society representatives and top entrepreneurs.

Key speakers include the President of Estonia Toomas Hendrik

Ilves, Vint Cerf of Google, the foreign ministers of the Nether-

lands, Sweden, Kenya and Mongolia, the Secretary General of

the Council of Europe Thorbjørn Jagland, and many others.

* This conference is a continuation of the annual conference organised by

EE and the International Technology Law Association, held for the first time in 2008.


Latitude59 conference “Welcome the Light!“28-29 april / 2014 @ MEKTORY

latitude59.ee

I EVENTS

The latitude59 conference, in its seventh year*, brings together in-

novators, entrepreneurs, venture capital partners, angel investors and

those who support the global expansion of innovative companies origi-

nating in countries three hundred kilometres either side of Latitude 59,

to understand and address the challenges of expansion into global mar-

kets. The speakers and panellists are all leaders in their respective fields,

with long experience and insight into the chasm facing young compa-

nies, which must look beyond their local markets if they are to fulfil

their dreams and ambitions of providing sustainable solutions to busi-

ness “pain points” and consumer demands. There will also be demo

rooms for Cleantech, IOT (Internet of Things), gaming and an authentic

sauna by Startupsauna.

The Latitude59 conference is held at the new Innovation and Busi-

ness centre mektory (founded in 2013), which is a part of the Tallinn

Tech University campus: a perfect place for meet-ups. Mektory was cre-

ated for scientists, students and entrepreneurs to solve practical product

development problems and generate new innovative ideas.

MEET THE PEOPLE

The two days of Latitude59 consist of a number of panel discussions

featuring the challenges of start-up growth & going global, term

sheets & valuations, talent acquisition strategies, finding follow-

on investors and preparing for exits, and discussions on how ac-

celerators and angel investors have supported the rapid globalisation of

the start-up community by removing the barriers to entry and providing

access to capital to start-ups not located in Silicon Valley.

The speakers include Vint cerf, Vice President of Google, one of the “Fa-

thers of the Internet” California), Tim draper, Founder & MD at Draper

Fisher Jurvetson & Founder of Draper University (Silicon Valley), micke

paqvalén, Founder and Operational Chairman at Kiosked (Finland), da-

vid Bizer, Partner at Talent Fountain, ex-Google & ex-Netscape recruiter

(Paris), Taavet Hinrikus, Co-founder of TransferWise (London), deborah

magid, IBM Venture Capital Group (Silicon Valley), and many others.

We expect around 300 participants, with a strong focus on invited ven-

ture capital and angel investors, as well as accelerator managers from

Europe and the USA.

PITCH CONTEST SILICON VALLEy STyLE

A highlight is the Latitude59 pitch contest, Silicon Valley style, powered

by the accelerator startup WiseGuys, introducing the most promising

start-ups in the Nordic and Baltic region.

Twenty preselected start-ups get dedicated workshops with VCs, a free

demo stand and can win 5,000 eUr cash from one of the pillars of the

Estonian start-up scene, skype, plus 5,000 EUR worth of services from

the reedsmith law Firm.

In recent history, the Latitude59 pitch contest has boosted such start-

ups as Fabulonia and VitalFields.

BALTIC-NORDIC START-UP ECOSySTEM

It has become a tradition that the investors and start-up community of

the Nordic Region get together in Tallinn in spring for Latitude59, and

every autumn they meet again in Helsinki during slush.

“The strength of the Baltic-Nordic start-up ecosystem lies not in single

countries, but in co-operation. United we are strong. Most top Estonian

start-ups visit the Slush conference, as Weekdone did when we won the

pitching competition. It’s a unique learning experience to hang out with

the best from the whole region. There are always plenty of Finnish start-

ups and investors at Latitude59, and this year we hope to see even more

of them in Estonia,” said Jüri Kaljundi, the co-founder of Weekdone

and the Garage48 Foundation.

THE GO-TO PLACE FOR THE NORDIC AND BALTIC START-UP SCENE IN THE SPRING!

28.0429.04

ICT Week

The Financeestonia International Forum 2014 will be hosted on

17-18 June in Tallinn, estonia. It will gather international senior

financial decision makers for a dialogue on flexible and efficient

finance support systems and tools, and the nordic finance land-

scape as a source of exciting new opportunities.

The event elaborates on the Estonian financial environment and pre-

sents aspects that lead to higher efficiency in Fund Administration,

Treasury and Shared Services, and in International Private Banking.

Companies showcase their best practices and guests get a chance to

meet and greet top level executives from business and politics. Besides

offering business contacts, the programme assists in getting acquainted

with Tallinn and Estonia.

The audience of the forum consists of senior level decision makers, who

consider outsourcing financial functions or fund administration make

investment or wealth management decisions (including private equity)

are looking for VC and Angel investment opportunities are interested

in understanding other business opportunities in Estonia, as altogether

nearly 300 participants will gather in Tallinn.

FinanceEstonia is a public-private cluster initiative formed in July 2011

with the aim of establishing Estonia as a vibrant and innovative location

for financial services. FinanceEstonia’s key activities encompass ensuring

an attractive and competitive environment, as well as creating and of-

fering opportunities for our members. The forum will be organised in a

joint effort with EstVCA and EstBAN.

The first day of the forum introduces the latest news in Estonian and

European economics and finance. Fund Administration, Treasury and

Shared Services, FinTech and Private Banking will be covered in lively,

detailed discussions with experts and practitioners. Among the speakers

and panellists, high-level European financial institution representatives,

and Estonian and European business leaders who have experience in

Estonia will be present.

The FinanceEstonia International Forum Gala Dinner will take place be-

tween the forum days on 17 June. Last year’s dinner was considered a

great success by the attendees. The location, programme and

dining all supported new business relationships. The Gala Dinner will

be memorable in terms of entertainment and business opportunities.

The second day encompasses best-practice presenta-

tions by Estonian and international leading vendors in

finance. It provides excellent opportunities for busi-

ness match-making and networking.

Additional information about

the forum can be found at

www.financeestonia.eu

Finance Estonia


THE GO-TO PLACE FOR THE NORDIC AND BALTIC START-UP SCENE IN THE SPRING!

Estonia As A Country Moves Into The Cloud And Expands All Over The World!

TAAVI KOTKA

Work:• GovernmentCIOsince2013

• ASWebmedia(nowNortal)

Partner and CEO (2005-2012):

the largest software development

company in the Baltic region

• Angelinvestororfounder

in many start-up companies:

ZeroTurnaround, Plumbr, etc.

Education:• softwareengineer,

University of Tartu

Honors:• 2009–2013Presidentof

the Estonian Association of

Information Technology and

Telecommunications (ITL):

ITL unites all major ICT players

in the Estonian market

• 2011Entrepreneurof

the Year in Estonia

By Toivo Tänavsuu

Photos by Tiina-Liina uuDaM and HELE-Mai aLaMaa

16 LIFE IN ESTONIA I 2014 SPRING

I COVER STORY

Taavi Kotka, the estonian government

cIo, talks about taking the already suc-

cessful e-state onto a totally new level.

namely, estonia has an ambitious plan

of moving the state into a data cloud

spread all over the world, which will,

in a sense, make occupying the country

pointless. In addition, with the help of

IcT, there can well be ten million es-

tonians by 2020 instead of the current

one million.

What is the essence of the cloud initiative?

The development of the e-government in

Estonia has reached a point where sever-

al vital registries of the state only exist in

digital form without any paper copies. For

example, the Land Register has become a

database of critical importance and the Es-

tonian state cannot afford to lose it or have

its data tampered.

In order to mitigate risks and ensure the pres-

ervation and integrity of data, relying on data

centres located in Estonia is not sufficient. That

is why we have maintained copies of Estonian

registries at our embassies abroad for years.

However, embassies are not really meant for

preserving large volumes of data and running

applications. In addition, Estonian legislation,

similar to that in other countries, establishes

that data vital for the functioning of the state

is to be maintained exclusively in the Estonian

territory.

With this in mind, we developed the concept

of the “Data Embassy”, whose principal idea is

that, in addition to its network of physical em-

bassies, Estonia needs to develop a network of

data embassies. In simple terms, data embas-

sies would be server rooms in the territories of

friendly partner states.

So, in addition to the physical embassy, would Estonia open a Data Embassy in Germany, for example?

Germany could be joined by other countries:

Canada, Australia, Sweden, Holland etc. We

would, in fact, sign a bilateral agreement with

a friendly state that would allocate to Estonia

a special physical or virtual room in the gov-

ernment cloud of that country, in some data

centre. In this room, the same rules would ap-

ply as in real embassies, meaning that the spe-

cific space would be the territory of Estonia,

with Estonian legislation in force. The part-

nering state would provide us with electricity,

cooling and an Internet connection, but other-

wise it would respect the diplomatic immunity

of the embassy.

What would be stored in such data embassies?

As the network of data embassies involves

a cyber security aspect, we plan to move

all data and information systems critical for

the functioning of the state to such private

clouds. As a result, there would be an addi-

tional global dimension to the government

cloud currently physically located in Estonia,

dispersing data and information systems all

over the world.

In principle, such a cloud should contain every-

thing necessary to run a state: from the Popu-

lation Register, Land Register and Business

Register to e-government, e-health, judicial

systems and so on.

What would be the impact of such a system?

Above all, there would be improved cyber se-

curity. Should Estonia become a target of a

massive cyber attack, it would be much more

difficult to “switch us off” as a state than, for

example, Georgia in August 2008. The state

would be able to provide e-services from Ger-

many, Sweden or Holland.

But let’s aim higher! Estonia could become

the first country in the world completely in a

cloud! In other words, the state together with

its citizens and services do not have to be tied

to a specific territory.

Estonians could live in Finland or London, be

deported to Siberia or whatever: we could

still elect our parliament, collect taxes etc.

Businesses would continue to operate, docu-

ments would be exchanged, addresses could

continually be changed in registers and new

citizens would be born. We could even send

our athletes to the Olympics, even if they did

their trial competitions in some other country.

This may sound like abstract bragging, but we

would actually be able to ensure the function-

ing of the state from the cloud!

What does that mean in the light of events in the Crimea?

The capacity to support the existence of our

state from the cloud would lead to a situa-

tion where—considering the recent events in

Crimea—it would be much more complicated

(i.e. expensive) to occupy Estonia. There would

be no point in conquering the country with

tanks, as the state would continue to function

from the cloud. In addition, considering that

Estonians have been voting over the Internet

for nearly ten years, it would be impossible to

organise a fake referendum. People would be

able to legitimately express their free will, us-

ing tested solutions. This means that in order

to occupy the state, all of our data embas-

sies all over the world would also have to be

occupied.

Can we say that investments in the army, cannons and tanks would become pointless?

No, Estonia should definitely maintain its ca-

pacity for physical and virtual defence and keep

fulfilling its tasks as a NATO member state. Be-

ing able to function from the cloud would just

offer us an additional security guarantee.

How was the idea of Cloud Estonia born?

The need for a data embassy was born about a

year ago. The follow-up idea of a country with-

out a territory, i.e. a state functioning from the

cloud, was born in the process of drafting the

Estonian Digital Society Strategy 2020.

President Toomas Hendrik Ilves read the draft

of the strategy and said it lacked ambition. I

then added this revolutionary idea to the doc-

ument’s foreword and asked: “Is it ambitious

enough now, Mr. President?”

What kind of reaction has the cloud idea provoked? At first it usually creates the wow effect. In the

context of cyber security, the topic of virtual

embassies is a hot one. Our approach is often

considered too futuristic, because even Inter-

net elections, so ordinary for Estonians, are

regarded as too revolutionary in many other

countries. Silicon Valley has also dreamt of a

similar cloud state.

By Toivo Tänavsuu

Photos by Tiina-Liina uuDaM and HELE-Mai aLaMaa


There is another wild idea in relation to the state in the cloud: start issuing Estonian e-identity to foreigners.

This idea came about when we were looking

at how to allow foreigners working in Estonia

on a temporary basis – for example university

professors and entrepreneurs – to benefit from

our digital society. In order to use Estonian e-

services, such as digital prescription, e-bank-

ing, digital signature etc., one needs digital

identity. Thus, we need to issue non-resident

ID cards and mobile-IDs to those working or

studying here temporarily.

At a certain point, we realised that the need

for such a card is much wider. For example,

the card could be used by businessmen who

do not reside in Estonia but who want to be in-

volved in daily business development as board

members. E-identities together with digital sig-

natures would make this possible.

So you can be from New Zealand, but do business in Europe without ever leaving home?

Precisely. You just need to get a non-resident

ID-card. In only 18 minutes over the Internet,

you can start a company in Estonia, open a

bank account and sign all necessary docu-

ments with a digital signature. In less than a

day, you have the capability of doing business

not just in Estonia, but in the whole European

Union. And you can do all that without leaving

your home.

“An operational company with a bank account

in the European Union in less than a day” is a

much-needed service for many EU citizens, as

well as people from other countries.

The non-resident ID-card is not the key issue.

There are more and more private businesses

all over the world offering e-identity services.

Estonia’s goal is, after all, to make its e-services

accessible to other countries. People having Es-

tonian e-identity would become “satellite citi-

zens”, who would develop some connection

with Estonia through those processes. In addi-

tion, having 10 million satellite citizens on top

of our 1.3 million permanent residents would

also serve as an additional security guarantee.

In reality we will not reach such numbers, but

dreaming is important. Virtual residence also

confirms the viability of our “state without ter-

ritory” concept.

What other innovations await the Estonian e-state?

I am personally most interested in the Real

Time Economy. Estonia is the most effective tax

collector in the whole world. This means that

per euro collected we spend much less in tax

collection in comparison to other states. We

have developed a fully automated system of

tax declarations and refunds. But there is still

room for improvement. The handling of taxes,

e.g. declaring and refunding taxes, has delays

and those delays, in fact, “hold up money”.

In the worst cases, businesses receive their

overpaid VAT back in two months, and citizens

receive their income tax returns once a year.

These periods could be shortened significantly.

The goal is to reach a situation in which the

economy, including taxes, and recalculations

thereof, function in real time. We are very

close to this in Estonia, and if we succeed in

strengthening the tax control systems, we will

be able to take another step closer to our aim.

The tax system is not the only field where such improvementsin systems and services are happening, right?

Indeed. For the next seven years, substantial

resources have been allocated for ICT invest-

ments. The aim is not only to create new solu-

tions, but to improve the functioning of the

existing system. Many systems, including es-

pecially the ones that are more than a decade

old, need to be re-engineered, since work pro-

cesses, legislation and especially technology

change significantly. Voice recognition, touch-

screen technology, cyber-security, big data etc.

– a decade ago we lived in another world and

there is no point in remaining stuck there. ICT

systems need to be modernised on a regular

basis. Thus, we have established a rule that no

vital information system in the Estonian public

sector can be more than 13 years old. We call

this the no-legacy policy.

Isn’t the no-legacy policy too expensive?

This is a very good question. It turns out that

the opposite is true. Our research and com-

parison with Scandinavian countries prove

that the continuous renewal and updating of

systems will be cheaper in the end than main-

taining legacy.

In addition, there has been a revolution in the

production and management of software and

the start-up culture has proven to the world

that huge ICT enterprises have been nourished

for no reason for decades. ICT is not as compli-

cated and costly as some believe.

The UK government’s ICT budget is 16 billion

pounds. The Estonian Government ICT budget

is about 40 million pounds: 400 times smaller.


ESTONIAN DATA EMBASSIES

I COVER STORY

But the United Kingdom is also a much larger state…

Yes, but not by four hundred times! Moreo-

ver, in the digital world the size of states does

not matter: the services that countries have

to provide to their citizens are similar in big

and small countries alike. Hospitals, banks, the

police: these are the same services. The differ-

ences are only in scale, but in the cloud age

this is no longer an issue.

In praise of the UK, it has to be said that they

have a great CTO, who has significantly man-

aged to cut ICT costs and continues to do

good work.

What is the main lesson that the rest of the world can learn from Estonia?

I would like it to be the no-legacy policy. I wish

that those coming to learn from our experi-

ence would get rid of their outdated systems

and pseudo-fears and start from scratch. Un-

fortunately this is just a dream.

Many people visit to learn from us and see

how we do things. Over 350 government-

level delegations come here to learn about our

e-government annually. Hence the e-Estonia

showroom (ICT Demo Center) has a special

role in telling e-stories.

This also points to a significant problem. Un-

til now we have focussed on developing new

solutions and approaches without having car-

ried out any research or impact analyses. What

are the real benefits of a whole society using

digital signatures? How do e-elections change

people’s understanding of elections and voting

procedures? Improving evidence-based policy-

making is another funding priority for us in the

coming years. This will be done in cooperation

with the world’s leading universities.

In addition, we have started negotiations with

Finland and the UK on the joint development

of basic ICT infrastructure: for example, e-elec-

tions, e-identity and the middleware X-road. In

some situations, it makes more sense to put

our brains and money together with other

states in order to together develop the corner-

stones of state ICT.

So, the Estonian e-tiger is not dead and continues to growl?

It’s very much alive. The economic crisis dem-

onstrated clearly that ICT can make public ad-

ministration, as well as the functioning of the

whole society, more cost-effective and user-

friendly. Furthermore, the image of Estonia as

an e-country continues to be an inseparable

part of Estonia’s identity, and our president,

who has a background in programming, con-

tinues to change the world through ICT.

Finding motivation is easy. Everything we do

today, and everything we do not manage to

complete, will affect future generations. I have

three children myself.


Estonia: The Little Country With A Start-Up Mindset

sten Tamkivi


I LAND AND PEOPLE

BEN HOROWITZ, co-founder and a partner of the venture

capital firm andreessen Horowitz: Being someone reasonably

well-known in technology, I have been getting a lot of questions lately

about healthcare.gov. People want to know why it cost between two

and four times as much money to create a broken website as to build

the original iPhone. This is an excellent question. However, in my

experience, understanding why a project went wrong tends to be far

less valuable than understanding why a project went right. So, rather

than explaining why paying anywhere between $300M and $600M to

build the first iteration of healthcare.gov was a bad idea, I would like

to focus attention on a model for software-enabled government that

works. In doing so, perhaps this will be a step toward a better under-

standing of how technology might make the US government better

and not worse.

Early in my career as a venture capitalist, we invested in a company

called Skype and I went on the board. One of the many interesting as-

pects of Skype was that it was based in Estonia, a small country with a

difficult history. Over the centuries, Estonia had been invaded and taken

over many times by many countries, including Denmark, Sweden, Ger-

many, and most recently the Soviet Union. Now independent, but well

aware of their history, the Estonian people were humble, pragmatic,

proud of their freedom, but dubious of overly optimistic forecasts. In

some ways, they had the ideal culture for technology adoption: hope-

ful, yet appropriately sceptical.

Supported by this culture, Estonia built the technology platform to serve

its citizens that everyone wishes we had here. Estonia developed an in-

frastructure that enabled its government to serve its people so well that

Estonians would like to see more, not fewer, government technology

projects. To explain how they did it, I’ve asked one of our Entrepreneurs

in Residence, the Estonian sten Tamkivi, to tell the story.

STEN TAMKIVI, eIr at andreessen Horowitz: Estonia might not

show up on the US radar very often. It is a tiny country in north-eastern

Europe, just next to Finland. It has the territory of the Netherlands, but

only a tenth of the population: 1.3 million inhabitants, comparable to

Hawaii. Estonia belongs to the European Union, Eurozone and NATO.

A friend from India recently quipped: “what is there to govern?”

What makes this tiny country interesting as a governance benchmark is

not just that the people can elect their parliament online or get their tax

returns in two days. It is also that this level of service for citizens did not

start with their government building a few web sites. Instead, Estonians

started by redesigning their entire information infrastructure from the

ground up, with openness, privacy, security and future-proofing in mind.

As the first building block of e-government, you need to be able to

tell your citizens apart. Sounds obvious, but sometimes referring to a

person by a social security number, then by a taxpayer number and at

other times by something else doesn’t cut it. Estonia uses a very simple,

unique ID methodology across all systems, from paper passport to bank

records to access to any government office or hospital. A citizen with

personal Id code 37501011234 is a male born in the 20th century (3),

on January 1st of year 1975, as baby #123 of that day. The number ends

with a computational checksum to easily detect typos.

For these identified citizens to transact with each other, Estonia passed

the digital signatures act back in 2000. The state standardized

through a national public-key Infrastructure (PKI), which binds citizen

identities to their cryptographic keys, and now it doesn’t matter if some

Tiit and Toivo (to use common Estonian names) sign a contract between

them in electronic form with certificates, or with plain ink on paper.

A signature is a signature in the eyes of the law.

As a quirky side-effect, that foundational law also forced all decen-

tralized government systems to become digital “by market demand”.

Namely, no part of the Estonian government can turn down a citizen’s

digitally signed request and ask for a paper copy. As citizens opt for con-

venience, bureaucrats see a higher inflow of digital forms and are self-

motivated to invest in systems that will help them manage the process.

Yet a social worker in a small village can still provide the same service

with no big investment by handling the small number of digitally signed

email attachments the office receives.

For future-proofing, the law did not lock in the technical nuances of

digital signatures. In fact, the implementation has changed over time.

Initially, Estonia equipped all traditional Id cards issued to all citizens

for identification and domestic travel inside the EU with microchips.

The chip carries two certificates: one for full legal signatures and one

for authenticating on any trusting web site or service (used widely,

from government services to Internet banks). As every person over 15

is required to have one, there are now over 1.2M cards active, close to

100% penetration of the population.

As mobile use in Estonia rapidly approached the current 144% (#3 in

Europe), the digital signatures adapted too. Instead of using smartcard

readers with their computers, users can now get mobile Id enabled

SIM cards from their telecom operators. Without installing any addition-

al hardware or software, they can access systems and give signatures by

just typing PIN codes into their mobile phones.

As of this writing, between ID cards and mobile phones, 1.3M Estonians

have authenticated 230M times and given 140M legally binding signa-

tures. Besides the now daily usage for commercial contracts and bank

transactions, the most high profile use case has been for elections: since be-

coming the first country in the world to allow e-voting for local elections

in 2005, the system has been used for both Estonian and European Parlia-

ment Elections, and in 2011 accounted for 24% of all votes. (Interestingly,

the citizens voted from 105 countries in total, where they just happened

to be physically at the time - like my own vote submitted from California).

Follow the leader is a title, theme, task Now you know, you don’t have to ask - Rakim, “Follow the Leader”


To further speed up this sort of innovation, the state tendered the build-

ing and securing of digital signature certificate systems to private parties,

namely a consortium led by local banks and telcos. And that’s not where

the public-private partnerships end: the way the data interchange in the

country works is that both public & private players can access the same

data exchange bus (dubbed X-road), enabling truly integrated e-services.

A prime example is the income tax declarations Estonians “fill in”. In-

verted commas are appropriate, because when an average Estonian

opens the form for submission once a year, it usually looks more like a

review wizard: “next -> next -> next -> submit”. This is because data

has been moving throughout the year: when employers report employ-

ment taxes every month, all the data entries are already linked into a

particular person’s tax records too. Non-profit reported charitable dona-

tions are recorded as deductions for the giver the same way. Tax deduc-

tions on mortgages come directly from data interchange with commer-

cial banks. And so forth. Not only is the income tax rate in the country

a flat 21%, after submitting this pre-populated form citizens actually

get any overpayment deposited into their bank accounts (digitally trans-

ferred, of course) on the second day!

This liquid movement of data between systems relies on a fundamental

principle to protect the privacy of citizens: without any question, it is al-

ways the citizen who owns their data. People have the right to control

access to their data. For example, in the case of fully digital health re-

cords and prescriptions, people can granularly assign access rights to

the general practitioners and specialized doctors of their choosing. And

in scenarios where the rule of law can’t allow them to block the state

from seeing their information, as with Estonian e-policemen using their

real time terminals in police cars or offices, they at least get a record of

who accessed their data and when. If an honest citizen finds any official

checking on their stuff without valid reason, they can file an inquiry and

get them fired.

Having everything online does generate security risks on not just the

personal, but also on the systematic and national levels. Estonia was

the target of the cyberwar of 2007, when well-coordinated botnet

attacks following some political street riots targeted government, media

and finance sites and effectively cut the country off from the Internet

abroad for several hours. But, as a result, Estonia has since become the

home of the naTo cyber defence center, and Estonian President

Toomas Hendrik Ilves has risen internationally to be one of the most

vocal advocates for cyber security among the world’s heads of states.

Even more interestingly, there is a flip-side to the fully digitized nature

of the Republic of Estonia: taken to the max, having the bureaucratic

machinery of a country humming in the cloud increases the cost of any

potential physical assault on the state. Imagine if a physical invasion of

this piece of Nordic land by anyone could not stop the government from

operating, but booted up a backup replica of the digital state, hosted

in some other friendly European territory. A democratic government

would be quickly re-elected, important decisions made, documents is-

sued, business & property records maintained, births and deaths regis-

tered and even taxes would flow for those citizens who still had access

to the Internet. This may sound futuristic, but this is exactly the kind of

world Estonia’s energetic CIO Taavi Kotka not only dreams about but is

actually beginning to implement, on the e-foundations the country has

already established.

ESTONIA IS A START-UP COUNTRy —not just as a life stage, but as a mindset

The circumstances of the Estonian story are special in many ways. The

country restored its independence after 50 unfortunate years of Soviet

occupation in 1991, having missed a lot of the technological legacy the

Western world had built up from the ‘60s to the ‘80s, such as cheque

books and mainframe computers, and jumped right into the mid-nine-

ties bandwagon of TCP-IP enabled web apps. During this social reset,

Estonians also decided to throw their former communist leaders over-

board and elected new leadership, with ministers in their late twenties

from whom the world could expect disruptive thinking.

But then again, all this was 20 years ago. Estonia has by many macro-

economic and political notions become more of “a boring European

state,” stable and predictable, although somewhat faster growing in

an attempt to close the gap with Old Europe from the time they were

behind the Iron Curtain. Twenty years, but you can still think of Estonia

as a start-up country, not just as a life stage, but as a mindset.

And this is what the United States, along with many other countries

struggling to develop the Internet and get their increasingly more mo-

bile citizens on it, could learn from Estonia: the mindset. The willingness

to ask fundamental questions and get the key infrastructure right, and

to continuously re-invent them. States can either build healthcare insur-

ance brokerage sites for innovation, or really look at what key compo-

nents need to exist for any service to be built: signatures, transactions,

legal frameworks etc.

Ultimately, the states that create pleasant environments will be those

where mobile citizens flock to live their lives. And by many measures,

tiny Estonia in 2014 is no worse positioned to be the destination than

New England was in 1814.


I LAND AND PEOPLE

Estonian Tax Board 2.0 Presents:

Real Time Economy

MarEk HELM, Head of the Estonian Tax and Customs Board


Estonian Tax Board 2.0 Presents:

Real Time Economy

The famous estonian e-Tax Board has been admired and set as an

example all around the world. Where else can you submit your

tax return in just a few clicks? Where else can entrepreneurs sub-

mit all declarations online without spending days on end filling

out paper forms? marek Helm, Head of the estonian Tax and

customs Board, claims that although our e-Tax Board is admired

all over the world, the time is ripe for some qualitative changes.

By HoLgEr roonEMaa / Photos by aLbErT TruuväärT


I ECONOMY AND BUSINESS

What is a Real Time Economy and what does it mean in the Estonian context?

We and our counterparts have not defined it

completely. Hence, the specific definition of

the term is still floating, in a good sense. The

way my colleagues and I see it, and how we re-

fer to it in our conversations with enthusiasts,

it denotes real-time information exchange in

a significantly higher quantity than we expe-

rience today. Despite the fact that currently

95-100% of tax declarations are filled in elec-

tronically, it is still not a Real Time Economy

(RTE). RTE means not only more comfortable

and faster services, but totally new services

from the point of view of the state and en-

trepreneurs, which would increase economic

competitiveness. New services help to man-

age cash-flow faster, and help companies and

private individuals make quicker and better

decisions.

Specifically, in terms of our field of activity, col-

lecting taxes, RTE means implementing elec-

tronic controls. I do not mean moving PDF files

and tables, but data acquisition, and cross and

automatic controls. For example, if we look

at value-added tax returns, the current logic

is linked with the submission dates of decla-

rations and the submission dates of returns.

Those dates are fixed. We could get rid of this

principle and say that if a company meets cer-

tain preconditions the state and the company

could make decisions immediately. Conditions

allowing for faster information exchange could

create motivation for law-abiding activity. This

could enliven the economy, and increase cash-

flow, data quality and economic safety. Inter-

actions with suspicious companies would de-

crease or be noticed much more quickly.

This would also mean that ab-solutely all entrepreneurs could work on equal conditions. It would be more complicated to cheat, wouldn’t it?

The way I see it, people would have more mo-

tivation to be honest. At the moment, the RTE

concept does not work and we offer the same

service for very many entrepreneurs: the same

deadlines for submitting declarations and for

returns. But if we implement the RTE concept,

companies will have a real motivation to be

honest, as honesty will be observable in real-

time and automatically detected. In this way,

we can offer certain advantages.

Like what?

It is our “problem” in Estonia that most dec-

larations are already electronic and we don’t

have the opportunity to develop them further.

Some people say that the appendix contain-

ing data of transactions in the value-added tax

return would be quickly supported by busi-

nesses if the Tax Board paid back the value-

added tax faster. But we already do that: 95%

of all returns go on the prepayment accounts

of companies within three days and from there

to banks. If today we paid this back within a

month, as prescribed by law, and said that with

the automated control of the value-added tax

we would start to do it within three days, this

automatic control system would exist already!

We have had the E-Tax Board for a while and people submit declara-tions digitally. Is the implementa-tion of RTE the next logical step?

Definitely. According to statistics, we are the

most effective tax collector among all OECD

states. We took a giant step in 2005-2008,

when most declarations became electronic.

There was no similar leap between 2008-

2014. We are still in first place but, in terms

of efficiency or costs, there hasn’t been much

change. RTE would certainly decrease the

share of the shadow economy. If we bring

some of the money in the shadow economy

into the “real” economy, it would significantly

improve the revenue and expenditure relation-

ship. The assumption underlying our new ap-

proach is that our organisation will not grow.

Some say that we should just employ more

inspectors, but this would not be right! In that

way, we would just have more people doing

things the same old way, but what we really

need is to do things differently and, in the

longer term, probably with fewer people.

Let’s talk more specifically about the RTE projects of the Tax and Customs Board. One of the bigger ones involves declaring VAT and providing data for the Tax Board on transactions exceeding 1,000 euros. This is not liked by busi-nesses. What is the status of this project?

We are ready to start. When the parliament

approves the draft act and the president pro-

claims the act, we can start on development.

We foresee six months for development work.

We have submitted a very strong concept and

it does actually have support among many en-

trepreneurs. Just a few weeks ago, the differ-

ent parliamentary fractions discussed this issue

and one prominent representative of entrepre-

neurs said that it is a much-needed act which

should be implemented.

What would it involve for entrepreneurs?

Businesses have to consider that, if there are

invoices on their books which exceed 1,000

euros as single invoices or the sum of invoices

for a transaction partner, they need to submit

the registry code of the partner, the sum of

the transaction and the share of VAT of that

transaction as a separate appendix to the Tax

and Customs Board. The duty itself looks like

this: when the VAT declaration is submitted

on the 20th day of the month, there is an elec-

tronic appendix which is filled in on the basis

of data in the accounting system. In other

words, we receive data on the transaction

partner, the sum of the transaction and the

share of VAT in this sum. We receive no infor-

mation about the contents of the goods, unit

price or amount. Companies add this data to

their declarations and the new information

system of the Tax and Customs Board will

receive and compare this information. Our

systems compare the transactions declared by

buyers with the declarations made by sellers.

The system will cross-check the data and de-

tect any discrepancies.

Unlike the current situation, where we receive

the VAT declaration without transaction data

(just three figures in fact), we will be able to

contact companies straight away and ask why

the data does not add up. Currently, we start

by asking for information, then we receive

the data in some weeks and only then can

we check it thoroughly. The new situation will

allow us to receive data automatically and we

can decide immediately which companies to

check.

yet there has been resistance to this idea by Estonian entrepreneurs.

I can understand that. After all, the Tax and

Customs Board will be controlling more. We

receive 35,000-40,000 VAT claims monthly,

and we pay 95-100 million euros in VAT

back each month to companies on the ba-

sis of minimal controls. Under the new sys-

tem, we would have an overview of who is

Tax declaration in Estonia is online


actually justified in receiving money back.

In other words, if a company sells goods, it

needs to consider that the buyer will submit

information on the transaction to the Tax and

Customs Board, having the right to deduct in-

put value-added tax. Hence, there is no way

to not account for the sales of the goods in

the company’s turnover. When a buyer wants

to receive value-added tax from the purchase

of goods and provides us with the data of the

seller, but the seller is not aware of the trans-

action, we will see immediately that there is a

problem with this specific transaction and that

it needs to be checked. Currently, companies

often ask for money back without transactions

ever having taken place, and we are only able

to check 3% of claims for refunds.

The resistance from companies results from

the fact that, instead of the ability to check

3% today, we will be able to check 100%. I to-

tally understand their concerns because trans-

ferring onto the new system will entail one-off

costs, including for those who are totally law-

abiding tax-payers.

According to your calculations, the VAT gap is currently 200 million euros per year. How much of this sum could you recover by implementing the new system?

It is difficult to accurately predict it, but we

have calculated that the state could receive

at least 30 million additional euros each year.

The gap will never be totally eliminated, but

we could significantly improve the culture of

the VAT environment. Our current checking

logic dates back to 2003. We cannot continue

like this; although almost 100% of tax decla-

rations today are electronic, we are still doing

the actual checking on paper.

Another new idea of yours is the project of employment registration. What is that?

From July onwards, the duty to register em-

ployees before they start to work will come

into effect. Currently, companies have to reg-

ister new employees within seven days at the

Health Insurance Board, but from July it has to

be done either at the e-Tax Board, via a text

message or in our call centre, before the em-

ployee starts working. For example, you are

about to start working for a building company.

Your supervisor will send the Tax and Customs

Board a text message and it will immediately be

registered that you are working. If on the first

day you pick up a rake and there is a Tax Board

inspection ten minutes later, we already know

that you are officially working. Within the last

few years, we have carried out regular checks

during which it often turns out that every third

builder is “working for the first day” and the

company has not managed to register them

yet. This is a typical kind of fraud.

There is also a social side to it. At the moment,

when an employee goes to work, he is una-

ware of whether he is officially registered or

not. From July, the employee will be able to

check this on the e-Tax Board and see whether

s/he has social insurance. For employers, this

means sending data once; they will not have

to send separate bits of information to the

Health Insurance, Work Inspection, Unemploy-

ment Office, Police and Border Guard.

Is it really true that during your checks every third builder is working “for the first day”?

We cannot generalise, but we often discover

that during our inspections. For example, we

went to check the construction of a health spa

last week and every third employee was not

registered at all. From July, it will also be the

case that when an employee is no longer em-

ployed, we will see within two months that s/

he is not marked on any income or social tax

declarations and we will then contact the em-

ployer and delete the employee from our reg-

ister and inform the Health Insurance Board,

who, in turn, will delete the entry from their

register. Today there are many people regis-

tered as insured by the Health Insurance Board

but they have not worked for a long time. In

future, the data exchange between the Tax

and Customs Board and the Health Insurance

Board will take place automatically, and peo-

ple themselves will be interested in monitoring

whether they are registered as working or not.

Currently they might find out at their GP that

they have no health insurance at all.

We haven’t talked about how these innovations would change economic predictions. Would RTE make it possible to understand every day or every minute what is happening in the economy?

We do not know the complete impact it will

have. It is obvious that RTE will enable us to

react to change more quickly, and to assess the

current situation more accurately. It could help

raise the growth in added value of companies.

This will be more and more visible from our

data. Prevention is always cheaper and more

effective than dealing with consequences.



The term “legacy system” came into use in

the 1990s when it started to denote comput-

ers (technology) and software which were out

of date. Later on, the definition was narrowed

down and stood for all systems which were

not dependent on the Internet. Today this

more explicit meaning has been rejected and

the “pet-name” legacy continues to refer to

all IT solutions which are out-of-date in terms

of content and/or technology, but which con-

tinue to be used on a daily basis.

On the Estonian IT landscape, legacy is a rel-

atively new concept. The country began to

invest in IT only after Estonia had regained

independence and, therefore, we were able

to start from scratch. There were no earlier

information systems from 1960-1980, the

“legacy” period. Starting from scratch al-

lowed us to use the newest technologies, to

learn from best practices in the world and

to develop information systems specifically

targeted to individual needs. It was clearly

much cheaper (more efficient) to learn from

the mistakes made by others than to make

our own.

Today the Estonian IT landscape is at a cross-

roads. According to an e-health report by the

OECD, Estonia has the best e-health solutions

in the world: all our hospitals use information

systems which interact and exchange data with

each other and across hospitals; a common

digital image bank has been created; health

insurance systems have been developed; ef-

fective communication with the National

Health Insurance Fund has been ensured, etc.

The IT systems of all doctors, pharmacies and

the Estonian Health Insurance Fund function

as a whole and, in order to receive a prescrip-

tion, one just has to call one’s GP, take along

one’s ID card and go buy the medication at any

pharmacy. It took half a year for the society to

give up paper prescriptions and take up digital

ones. Today, 98% of prescriptions are issued

digitally and nobody would change the system

back: it just makes sense, considering how

easy and user friendly the service is.

Despite this, the recent National Audit Office’s

report pointed out a number of shortcomings in

the Estonian e-health solution. One could sum-

marise the audit with the following idea: “Con-

sidering the technologies available today, it is

possible (and imperative) to offer citizens even

better services.” So, on one hand, based on the

OECD report, everything seems fine and most

countries can only dream of reaching the same

level of healthcare solutions that Estonia has.

But on the other hand, there is internal pressure

to still considerably improve these services.

This is where the dilemma comes in. It is not a

question of resting on our laurels or improving

existing services: surely we have to improve the

quality of services. But the real question has to

do with legacy. Is it enough to make small im-

provements in existing systems or should we

just bulldoze the solutions which have been

called the best in the world and start over?

The latter (using heavy machinery) seems radi-

cal but, once we analyse the pros and cons, it

does not seem such a bad idea after all.

What To Do With Legacy?

Implement No-legacy Policy

By aET raHE / Head of State Information Systems

Department, Ministry of Economic Affairs and

Communications.


Most of our world-leading e-health solu-

tions were created 10-13 years ago. The ar-

guments for radically changing the solutions

are the following:

development of new technologies.

Doctors could be more effective in their work,

if they could use not only the keyboards, but

also benefit from touch-screens, speech rec-

ognition, teleworking, telemedicine etc.

new user habits. Along with the intro-

duction of new technologies, the user

habits and skills have changed. The tools

used by doctors in their work should

evolve in a similar fashion as the tools

used in everyday life and they should pro-

vide a similar user experience.

new work processes. All organisations

develop and grow in ten years. To maintain

progress, fundamental changes are often

needed instead of minor improvements.

changed environment, including legis-

lation, both on the national and EU levels.

For example, cross-border medical services

have been possible in Europe since last year,

but most Estonian health information sys-

tems continue to be in Estonian and have

therefore no export potential.

cyber security. Guaranteeing cyber secu-

rity is much more of a challenge today than

it was ten years ago.

development of open data, Big data, e-

identity, digital signatures etc. technolo-

gies, has an impact on how information sys-

tems are built, how data is stored and tagged

etc., which influences what parts of systems

should be custom built and which parts

should not. For example, with new technolo-

gies, new standardized and reusable compo-

nents and solutions are being developed, so

we don’t need to re-invent the wheel in every

information system.

maintenance of legacy systems is costly,

as demonstrated clearly by the Swedish and

Finnish experiences. For instance, in Finland

there are still around 5,000 Cobol program-

mers. This is one of the oldest programming

languages in the world and, throughout the

years, continuous development of systems

has resulted in an expensive spaghetti archi-

tecture that is very difficult to maintain.

OECD 2012 eHealth Availability & Use indicator by country

The world is in constant flux and, in order to

offer the best services to customers, it is neces-

sary to keep up with the changes. The points

listed above speak volumes and Estonia’s pri-

vate sector practice to date demonstrates that

every now and then one needs to wipe off and

rebuild. In the long run, this will be cheaper and

more efficient than trying to maintain legacy.

As a result, a new umbrella term has been tak-

en into use by Estonian ICT policy makers: the

no-legacy policy. According to this idea, the

estonian public sector should not have

any important information systems in use

which are over 13 years old. This means that

at least in every thirteen years the most im-

portant information systems should be rebuilt

from scratch or significantly re-engineered.

Why thirteen years? Estonia’s experience has

proven that the quality lifespan of a large na-

tional information system is approximately 10

years. Considering that the planning, develop-

ment and implementation of a new solution

is about a three-year process, we reached the

number 13.

Because the public sector has a monopoly on

the provision of public services to citizens, it

risks falling into the comfort zone. If customers

do not like the food in a restaurant, or experi-

ence bad service in a hotel, they can always

choose not to return and can find alternative

service providers. However, in the case of pub-

lic services there is rarely an alternative. Thus,

from time to time, impetus is needed to make

civil servants generate new ideas and ap-

proaches. The no-legacy policy with its obliga-

tion to renew, will provide a great opportunity

in this regard. Rebuilding the system makes it

possible to learn from previous mistakes and,

as a result, to create better solutions.

This public sector approach is also important

for the private sector, as companies providing

hardware and software services need to keep

up with the latest technologies and develop-

ments in order to stay competitive in internal

and export markets.

In conclusion, if you want to continuously de-

velop e-government solutions and keep it ef-

ficient: do not deal with legacy, kill it!

Estonia (7)Finland (25)Sweden (24)

Denmark (10)Luxembourg (3)

Iceland (7)Netherlands (20)

Spain (112)Croatia (7)

Hungary (42)Norway (4)

Austria (35)Belgium (43)

Portugal (34)Czech Rep. (34)

Slovakia (32)France (269)

Italy (182)Germany (168)

UK (51)Malta (1)

Romania (78)Greece (59)

Latvia (15)Slovenia (6)Ireland (19)

Bulgaria (59)Cyprus (9)

Poland (146)Lithuania (32)

Benchmarking Information and Communication Technologies in Health SystemJoint EC-OECD WORKSHOP Brussels, Aprill 18-19, 2013

Input Decision Exchange Tele

0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7



“It doesn’t happen every day that twenty-five businessmen join forces

and establish an NGO in order to develop an early stage ecosystem

for Estonian start-ups and seed investors,” signe Viimsalu, CEO of

EstBAN (Estonian Business Angels Network), explains how the associa-

tion was born. “In other countries, the initiator or founder has usu-

ally been the state, a public entity or some arm of such an entity. In

Estonia, it was the serial entrepreneur Ivar siimar who said ‘let’s do

it ourselves.’ Super!”

EstBAN is an umbrella organisation for business angels and business

angel groups seeking investment opportunities in Estonia and its neigh-

bouring regions with an aim to grow the quantity and quality of

local seed stage investments. The year 2013, the first year of activity,

was incredibly successful for EstBAN. Firstly, the goals set at the outset

were surpassed. The number of members of EstBAN has grown from 25

to 59. Secondly, the business angels have invested over 4.6 million euros

in 66 companies. The initial goals foresaw support to 10 start-ups and

one million euros in total. Thirdly, two-thirds of EstBAN members found

suitable investment opportunities in start-ups in the first year of activ-

ity. Another significant number is 56,112 euros, which is the average

investment of EstBAN per deal in 2013. A retrospective of the first year

can be found at www.estban.ee/about/2013-review.

It is quality not quantity that matters

Signe Viimsalu explains that it was a conscious decision not to publicise

the statistics on the average investment per member. The reason is that

this figure is very high in comparison with the members of similar as-

sociations in other countries. “It is understandable that the best practice

of angel investments is still developing in Estonia. There are not that

many business angels in Estonia, the investment need is enormous and

invested sums per deal are high for seed investors in order to have a real

impact on start-ups,” explains Viimsalu. The Chairman of the Manage-

ment Board of EstBAN, Ivar Siimar, states that the sums invested show a

real interest by members in angel investing.

The main goals of EstBAN in 2014 are to increase collaboration with

business angels in neighbouring countries in order to have more cross-

border syndication and to initiate a co-investment scheme with the Es-

tonian government. Another aim is to increase the number of business

angels to 80 and to have about 30 investments in the amount of four

million euros by the end of the year, without leverage from the Estonian

government. With a co-investment scheme the numbers will be differ-

ent. Both Siimar and Viimsalu confirm that EstBAN’s priority is to finalise

negotiations with the Estonian government to launch a co- investment

scheme as soon as possible, but what really matters is the quality of

investment projects in the pipeline, not the quantity.

The Estonian Government Is About To Boost Seed Investments In Estonia In 2014 By ann-Marii nergi


Mutually beneficial collaboration

The co-investment scheme, which is being prepared in cooperation with

the Ministry of Economics and Communications, foresees an additional

10 million euros added to the money invested by business angels. “Join-

ing forces with the state will increase the number of active angels and

the size of investments, which in turn will bring more money in taxes

back to the state, create new jobs and enliven the overall economy,”

says Siimar, explaining why this “fund booster” is needed. Signe Viim-

salu adds that the co-investment fund could follow the working princi-

ple in which the state would add the missing 65% of money once three

business angels have joined forces to syndicate and have invested in a

start-up at 35%. “It is up to the state to decide which institution will

be the collaboration partner for EstBAN: the competency exists within

Kredex, Estonian Development Fund and Enterprise Estonia.” The CEO

claims that the additional support by the state will definitely motivate

angels, as in this way the risks they have taken will be mitigated.

Start-ups benefit from cross-border syndication

EstBAN also can provide some examples of cross-border syndication.

For example, the start-up Cloutex received funding in the amount of

441,000 euros from nine Estonian business angels and one member

of the St. Petersburg Business Angels Association (SoBA) at the begin-

ning of the year. The start-up had previously raised a small pre-seed

investment of 40,000 EUR from the business angels Riivo Anton and

Gerri Kodres and from Startup WiseGuys. Cloutex has built what it

calls a “cloud integration hub” software service offering. The service

allows small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) to link and bi-direc-

tionally sync their usage of multiple third party cloud-based software

services. The founder of Cloutex, Peeter Mark, says that it took some

time to convince the investors: active discussions took place over a year.

“During that time, the company continued to develop and investors

started to take us more and more seriously,” Mark explains the patience

required until the funding injection came. “EstBAN definitely played an

important role. One of the important roles is giving advice about what

kind of criteria a company has to meet before it even approaches an

investor.” Peeter Mark believes that Cloutex would probably have made

it without help from EstBAN, but that the business angels definitely

helped the company to receive financing faster. For a start-up, finding

fast funding is critical.

Busy business angels

Although for business angels their participation in the activities of Es-

tBAN is mainly a hobby on top of their main jobs, Signe Viimsalu em-

phasises repeatedly that being a member of the association requires

an active hands-on attitude in helping start-ups, and participation in

EstBAN’s workshops and events. There are frequent meetings among

members and with start-ups: a pitching event takes place every first

Monday of the month, where start-ups selected the previous month

present their ideas. On every second Thursday of each month, business

angels meet for coffee, where they discuss various topics in a relaxed

atmosphere with an interesting visitor to EstBAN. Each third Monday is

the time for pre-screening, or the quality check of the ideas that have

been submitted, where usually five to seven members participate. This

is where it is decided which business idea can be taken further and

EstBAN will be present at larger events related to start-ups and early stage ecosystem this year:

• thestart-uptechnologyconferenceLatitude59

in Tallinn on 28 – 29 April

• EBAN’sAnnualConferenceinDublinon19-20May

• FinanceEstonia2nd International Forum

in Tallinn on 17-18 June

There are definite plans to participate in the annual

EBAN Winter University and the Slush conference

in Helsinki, Finland in November

presented to the business angels during pitching events. Viimsalu claims

that it is this frequent information exchange among members and start-

ups, the monthly meetings, interesting educational workshops and joint

events which give EstBAN a competitive edge over business angels of

other regions, and start-ups are aware of this. “Start-ups always need

fast financial injections and mentoring, and we know that the EstBAN

process has to be fast. If a project is not suitable for us (for instance, the

business is not scalable or unique) or we cannot meet investment needs

at a certain point in time for some reason, this is also feedback and they

don’t have to wait long for our decision. We can also very easily forward

the project to the networks of neighbouring countries for analysis, if the

entrepreneur so wishes,” says Viimsalu.

EstBAN is open to new members with a hands-on attitude

“If you are interested in seed investments and in Estonia more generally,

welcome to the club! In order to join EstBAN, one does not need to

be Estonian or even live in Estonia. What is necessary is written recom-

mendations from two existing members and the willingness to invest”,

says Viimsalu. A living proof of that is Juan Herrera, a Portuguese who

used to live and work in London as an investment banker and moved to

Estonia a year ago.

“At first I heard about EstBAN through some investors in Tallinn. I de-

cided to join as I wanted to gain better access to early stage investment

opportunities in Estonia. Being part of a network also makes it much

easier to find partners to co-invest with. In addition, I really like the drive

and enthusiasm the management has for building EstBAN. In terms of

investment, I am interested in strong teams, addressing a profitable mar-

ket and preferably they should have something original which is not

easy to replicate,” says Herrera.

So, if you are willing to be active as an investor and participate in select-

ing and mentoring high quality growth companies, you can try your

luck and apply. In the words of EstBAN: “We don’t care which phone

you use. It’s the optimism. The belief in knowledge and experience in

building successful companies. The wish and ability to invest in start-up

entrepreneurship – that’s what matters. And we’re not afraid to get our

hands dirty. Got it all? Then, my dear friend, you are welcome to join!”

www.estban.ee/en



VitalFields HELPS FARMERS BE MORE EFFICIENT By ann-Marii nErgi

The estonian start-up VitalFields challenges the outdated view that

farmers are remote from technology and somewhat wary of it.

one of the founders and the ceo of VitalFields, martin rand, says

that agricultural enterprises are in fact very open to new solutions,

first and foremost due to circumstances: after all, every farmer

wants to work his land in the most effective way.


This is where the web-based farm management system VitalFields

helps. Its aim is to increase the efficiency of its customers. The services

offered by VitalFields can be divided into three different but, from the

farmers’ point of view, equally important components: weather fore-

casting, tracking climatic patterns to forecast plant diseases and farm

management software for managing day-to-day activities and finances.

Hence farmers are able to plan in advance what and where to cultivate

in the next season and to draw conclusions from previous seasons. In

doing so, they save a huge amount of time and have the ability to react

quickly to such factors as changes in weather.

“Our grand vision is that the more farmers use the system, the smart-

er the system becomes. For example, we would like to forecast the

phases of plant growth and to offer advice to farmers on that. To this

end, we are currently gathering information from existing customers,”

says martin rand. The founder of the start-up emphasizes that clients

should not be concerned about the information leaking to competitors

or neighbouring farmers having access to their data. “We are aware that

this information is important for the business activity of farms, i.e. plant

cultivation, and we will only use this data to improve our system,” con-

firms Rand. Currently, VitalFields has about a thousand clients all over the

world, with the majority located in Russia and Ukraine. The reason? Mar-

ket research revealed that whereas VitalFields has competitors in western

Europe, there are no similar systems in use in the East, yet the agricultural

lands there are enormous. As a next step, the app is set to enter markets

in Poland and Hungary, followed by Denmark and Germany.

The start-up of Martin Rand, a former Skype employee and the crea-

tor of Skype’s only enterprise solution, called “Skype manager”, and

Vahur meus, the CTO of VitalFields, who has previously worked as a

back-end developer at Playtech, has been successful in raising invest-

ments. Just recently the service received an injection of a half million

euros. The sum meant for the development of the service came from

Estonian and Russian investors and now the company will be able to

focus on entering new markets and on development work. It was

the third and the largest investment to date for VitalFields. The first

investment, in the sum of 15,000 euros, came from the start-up ac-

celerator Wise Guys some years ago. The second investment, in 2012,

of 250,000 euros came from SmartCap (the investment fund of the

Estonian Development Fund), Arvi Tavast and Wiser Financial Advisers.

In the third round, in addition to existing and new Estonian investors,

the Russian investment company TMT Investments has invested in the

start-up.

alexander selegenev, Executive Director of TMT Investments, said

that, even though their investment policy is focused on more mature

companies, they keep an eye on early-stage companies, as this allows

them to establish relationships with promising teams. “This was the

case with VitalFields. When we first met, we were impressed by the

team and shared their belief in the growth potential of the market

segment they were targeting, so we followed their successful pro-

gress. At a later stage, it was easier for us to approve this investment,”

Selegenev says.

TMT has also invested in another Estonian start-up, Pipedrive. The two

investments amount to 600,000 euros in total. Selegenev says that this

is a typical approach of TMT. “Should the company demonstrate fur-

ther growth, a small initial investment is often followed by further in-

vestments later on.” Therefore, VitalFields already has a likely investor

for its next period of raising capital.

President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who likes the spirit of start-up companies, visiting the opening party of the Estonian start-up VitalFields in its Tartu office.



The Success Story Of ZeroTurnaround Would Not Exist Without Estonian Business Culture And Education

By ann-Marii nErgi

Photos by rEin rauDjärv and DavE sHEvETT

Having to date financed its rapid expansion with sales profits, ZeroTurnaround announced at the beginning of March that it has attracted six million dollars of growth capital.

President Toomas Hendrik Ilves has visited the Tartu and Boston offices, in 2011 and 2012 respectively.

Chess is a great way of relaxation and brain training for employees

The Boston sales team, which started in 2012 with just five staff members, has the tradition of meeting once a week on a theme day – this time the 1980s were in focus.


The Estonian software company ZeroTurnaround (ZT) was born in 2007,

when Jevgeni Kabanov and Toomas römer, who worked in Web-

media (today Nortal), created the technology which helps Java develop-

ers write programmes faster and take written code into use. The flag-

ship of the company, JRebel, makes it possible to instantly see code

changes, and thus save four to six weeks of working time for a devel-

oper in the course of a year.

In the last five years, ZT has also brought a new product to the market

– LiveRebel - meant for application release management. At the begin-

ning of the year, the company presented the third generation version

of LiveRebel, and Jevgeni Kabanov, Founder & CEO of ZT believes that

2014 will be a breakthrough year for the product. The company has

4,000 customers in nearly 90 countries. The offices of ZT are also wide-

spread: in Tallinn and Tartu, Boston and the Czech Republic.

As the development and sales of the two powerful products require

talented sales and development people, the company sought (and at-

tracted) investments in the sum of six million dollars (4.3 million euros)

in March. Half of the sum came from the current owners of the com-

pany, the US company Bain Capital Ventures, and the other half was

in the form of venture debt from the US investment group Western

Technology Investment. Kabanov admits that attracting the funds was

somewhat easier than usual for start-ups, because one of the investors

had had shares in the company for years. He adds that it is perhaps not

appropriate to call ZT a real start-up any more because, on one hand,

it is older and more experienced and, on the other hand, the company

is aiming to grow quickly and bring new products onto the market.

“‘Growth company’ would be a better choice of words,” says Kabanov.

riina einberg, General Manager of ZT Estonian and Czech Operations,

adds that there are plans to increase the sales and marketing team,

based in Boston, from 60 to 100 employees. Currently over 40 staff

members work in the offices in Tartu and Tallinn, and the company

is looking to hire a Head of the Development Team, User Interaction

Designer, Tech Writer and software developers: 10-12 smart people in

total. “In the case of product development teams, we mostly empha-

size quality: both products demand that the developer be smart, able to

see the big picture, patient and able to think outside the frame in order

to solve real problems. At the same time, we would definitely not be

able to find the same kind of marketing and sales leaders as in Boston,”

says Einberg.

Due to its success, ZT has also been noticed by the President of Estonia,

Toomas Hendrik Ilves. Ilves has visited ZT in both their Boston and Tartu

offices. Kabanov recalls that it was a huge deal in the USA to have the

President come meet the staff: some staff members did not believe it

until their “home street” was closed off for traffic because of the arrival

of the President and presidential escort.

In 2012, ZT was selected as the “#1 company to watch in Estonia”.

Before the 96th Independence Day of the Republic of Estonia, the then

30-year-old Kabanov received an honorary decoration, Fifth Class Order

of the White Star, from the President. Kabanov feels that starting a

business in Estonia today is definitely simpler than in the early years of

ZT. The improvements evident today have definitely been aided by the

IT-friendly President. “At the same time, the success story of ZT would

not have happened without Estonian business culture and education,”

he adds.

By ann-Marii nErgi

Photos by rEin rauDjärv and DavE sHEvETT

In 2012, the employees of ZeroTurnaround met at a workshop in Greece where work and relaxation went hand in hand. It was a great opportunity for staff from the offices of

Tallinn, Tartu, Prague and Boston to meet each other. This year the meeting in Cancun, Mexico will bring together 120 staff members.



Pipedrive is one more example of a successful

Estonian start-up which has the potential to

conquer the world. Founded in 2010 without

much fuss (or advertising), Pipedrive has man-

aged to stand out in the vast ocean of Cus-

tomer Relations Management (CRM) tools,

where each “drop” claims to be the best in

the world!

The facts speak for themselves: the company

has almost 10,000 paying customers (and

50,000 users) in over a hundred countries. It

makes millions of euros in sales revenue, whilst

claiming that everything—even the product it-

self—is still in the early phase of development.

One of the founders of Pipedrive, Urmas

purde, says that, typically for many remark-

able inventions, the idea for the product grew

out of the frustration of the founders them-

selves. Purde and Timo rein worked as train-

ers and salesmen with one of the most famous

Estonian training gurus, Peep Vain.

“We had to manage the sales of our own

training sessions. We had invested a lot of

money in three different CRMs in a row but

none of them were suitable for sales people.

We asked ourselves how we could fail with

customer management software three times

in a row. And we were still keeping an over-

view of our sales activity as post-its on the

wall!” says Purde.

Five years ago, whilst giving a training ses-

sion to a start-up company, Purde was

sketching some principles of sales pipeline

management on a whiteboard when some-

one from the audience asked: isn’t there

software for that? The idea was born and

the group of founders - Timo Rein, Urmas

Purde, ragnar sass, martin Henk and

martin Tajur - came together to develop

Pipedrive. The first seed money came from

Peep Vain.

Why is Pipedrive such a high-flyer? Whereas

most customer management software is

meant for supervisors and focuses on provid-

ing them with an objective overview of sales

activity and the working sales people only

tick boxes in each stage, Pipedrive has kind of

turned it upside down: it starts from the needs

of the sales person who is working on devel-

oping customer relations. It aims to provide

feedback on the effectiveness of sales activity

in the “sales-pipe”. This new logic quickly won

over the first users, who started to use the

product’s beta-version in autumn 2010. The

following spring the company was established

enough to start charging its customers.

Pipedrive helps sales people to maintain focus.

Purde explains that sales involves many exter-

nal impulses and demands: e-mail, meetings,

calls, and requests from supervisors and col-

leagues. It is therefore difficult to keep up the

pace of work.

Pipedrive Estonian Company In Shaq O’Neal’s Investment Portfolio By Toivo Tänavsuu

The Estonian company Pipedrive has developed valued customer management software which provides wise and practical help to any salesman. Recently, the Silicon Valley technology guru Vivek Ranadivé and the former star basketball player Shaquille O’Neal invested in the company.

Sacramento Kings Unveil New App (at 10:10)


Purde asks: “Doesn’t this sound familiar: you

work like crazy for a week, making loads of calls,

sending tons of e-mails but you do not achieve

what you set out to do? Pipedrive is here to

help! It gives you a clear answer on what you

have to do in order to get the best results. What

is holding your money up? You maintain the

pace and do the right things at the right time.”

Pipedrive has generally received positive media

reviews and feedback from clients. Customers

include those who have never used customer

management software before and have used

Excel, notepaper etc., and those who have ex-

perience with Salesforce, for example.

Pipedrive can be used to sell anything, from

advertising and trucks to journalism. The com-

pany targets both small and large customers,

and most have found products without any

advertising. They just heard about it from

other users. The product sells itself. It may be

ironic that Pipedrive, a company selling sales

software, has no sales team of its own! Purde

says that a third of their customers come from

Europe, a third from the USA and a third from

the rest of the world.

In order to use Pipedrive, it does not matter

whether a sales company has five or five thou-

sand staff, says Purde. At first the company

thought of focussing on bigger customers

who made tempting offers to help the com-

pany fine-tune the product to their needs. But

the founders of Pipedrive stayed true to them-

selves, believing that this was not the way to

reach the masses.

Starting a start-up often provides many les-

sons. Purde says that they have not just

learned a lesson about celebrating success.

Estonians are modest in this regard.

When the first customers came on board, they

thought this was not a cause to celebrate.

Customers began to pay for the service and

they still did not think it was worth shout-

ing about. The number of customers grew to

ten, then a hundred and then a thousand. It

was only with the thousandth client that the

founders celebrated in a restaurant. The sec-

ond big celebration was the opening of the

new office in Tallinn.

Pipedrive has now attracted nearly 3.5 million

USD in investments, including support from

two business angels of the Estonian start-

up community, former Skype employees Ott

Kaukver and Taavet Hinrikus. The company is a

graduate of the AngelPad incubator.

Last autumn, without much attention, the

former NBA superstar shaquille o’neal and

his multimillionaire business partner Vivek ra-

nadivé invested in Pipedrive. “They were the

ones who called us, looking for a partner to

serve a couple of customers,” Purde says. “We

met and seemed to understand each other.

The proposal to invest came from Vivek. We

understood that we had a lot to learn from

him, especially with regard to building a com-

pany like an organization. If we want everyone

to use Pipedrive in the future, we have to in-

tegrate with many systems. And this is exactly

Vivek’s speciality.”

Whereas the charismatic basketballer Shaq

may be a more familiar name, Ranadivé is no

less colourful a character. Growing up in a

small village in India, he built up the success-

ful stock-exchange listed IT-services company

TIBCO. Ranadivé also “wired up” Wall Street

in the 1980s. Since last year, Ranadivé and

O’Neal have been the owners of the Sacra-

mento Kings basketball team.

Pipedrive continues to grow and is about to

reach puberty. Now it needs to be clever in order

to allow the inner life of the company, customer

relations and the office side to grow in parallel.

Currently, nearly 40 people work in the two of-

fices of Pipedrive in Tallinn and Silicon Valley.

Purde says: “We are going to reach a 10-mil-

lion annual revenue run-rate by the end of this

year or the beginning of the next. Some smart

guys say that things get a bit easier as a man-

agement team grows with the company. Until

then, as is normal for start-ups, we have to deal

with all questions fast and at the same time.

We have to maintain focus and not get tired.”

By Toivo Tänavsuu

The founders of Pipedrive in 2011: from left, Timo Rein, Martin Henk, Martin Tajur, Ragnar Sass and Urmas Purde.

By CarL PuCCi, Datel Ovela

Photo by siiM soLMan



Out of the ashes of occupation, Estonia has risen to become one of the

IT capitals of the world. Boasting a recent history that includes being

one of the birth places of Skype, there have been many down-right

astonishing creations in the tiny but brilliant nation of about one and a

half million people.

Not the least of those was the early decision to invest and push heav-

ily into bringing government services to the forefront of technological

innovation.

At a time when we see most of the world still struggling with legacy

information systems, arcane things like paper cheques, and closed dis-

parate government systems, Estonia breezes ahead with mobile pay-

ments and online voting to become the envy of many more sizeable and

storied nations.

It’s this story that grabs you: how is a nation with a smaller gross do-

mestic product than the annual revenue of 7-Eleven able to provide

such systems?

Let’s take a brief glance at what your average Estonian citizen can do in

the span of a few moments with a few swipes of a smart phone: vote

electronically and change their minds during the voting period, file taxes

in less than five minutes and without transaction costs, pick up prescrip-

tions, sign legal agreements, access, submit and track public permits

electronically, pay for parking, transfer money with a phone call regard-

less of bank affiliation etc.

This fusion of private sector and e-government inspired tools has several

simple but profound effects. Government saves money through process-

time reduction. There is growth in enterprise as the private sector finds it

easier to do business. Increased transparency eliminates the appearance of

corruption and leads to faith in government. There is increased public rev-

enue as compliance rises with the ease of access to information and tools;

in fact, Estonia has one of the highest tax compliance rates in the world.

All of this is, in no small part, thanks to the simplicity and security built into

the framework of interaction between the people and their government.

The beauty in this is that Estonia has not only created these concepts, it

has brought them into successful practice. The never-ending persever-

ance and sheer stubbornness to make their way to spite the world is as

much of a natural resource in Estonia as are the swaying birch trees and

rye flowers.

Estonia Can Change

The World, Will It?


It is a gift that Estonians can now share these systems with the rest of

the world, learning more and more along the way. That is precisely what

we at Datel Ovela have set about doing, ever since the idea of exporting

these tools to the United States occurred late one night in the middle of

a desert (that�s a wholly fascinating story meant for a warm glögg wine

in a cosy Tallinn café).

Datel and its peers have grown up with the new Republic of Estonia;

side by side with the development of the company has been the growth

of these cutting edge national ICT technologies, many of which are an

excellent fit for the global market. For instance, we have brought this

clever idea to the United States: linking the various spatial databases

in local government and connecting them to a web portal map tool

that can be accessed from any device without a download, in much

the same way as is done within the Estonian X-Road framework (www.

eesti.ee/eng).

With the overwhelming support Estonia and its firms, including our

own, have received from various levels of the international community,

there is clear validation for the concepts Estonia has developed. As im-

portant to our own development has been the support of the university

community, in such places as the United States, for engagement and

cooperation. After all, the brilliance of our tools lies not only in the

technology but also in the commitment and synergy created between

funded government mandates, private sector innovation, and engage-

ment with research institutions.

Bringing what Estonia has developed to the global market has involved

so much more than simply the Estonian economy. It means building

crucial ties to governments, making Estonia increasingly relevant, and

showing the world exactly why they should listen to this surprising and

brilliant little country in north-eastern Europe.

datel as was one of the first IT firms in Estonia and has

significantly contributed to the development of the Estonian

e-governance systems. The firm has developed core Estonian

government software platforms for State Land Information

that have grown into global products. Specialising in nextgen

GIS systems, Datel links all location-connected data with a

simple, intuitive user experience in HTML5, tailored for all

platforms. Its subsidiary Ovela LLC / www.ovela.us / con-

ducts business operations solely in the United States, with

development groups within Datel AS. / www.datel.eu /

After all, these concepts we have worked so very hard to build are not

merely computers and technology; they are changing the way people

interact with government. In 1984 many Western governments had fil-

ing rooms full of paper, disconnected databases on huge rotating silicon

disks, paper cheques, and people running from one florescent-lit office

to the next. What we have found in Estonia is a way to keep 2014 from

looking much the same. Together, we can change the very process, not

simply give the same concepts a new coat of paint and brighter light.

No matter how you look at it, what Estonia has is remarkable, and in

the story of Datel Ovela we find just one of many bridges that Estonia

can use to change the world. The question is simply: just how far can

we go together?

Right on the edge of Europe, halfway between Stockholm and St Pe-

tersburg, the tech-savvy country that launched Skype a decade ago

continues to be a hotbed of entrepreneurs and innovation. The start-up

community in the small nation, dubbed the #EstonianMafia on Twitter,

has been gaining visibility globally.

Examples of tech companies to come out of Estonia include Fitsme, a virtual fitting room for online clothing retailers, now in 16 countries,

and Creative Mobile - a company creating free-to-play games for mo-

bile platforms. Playtech, one of the world’s biggest providers of online

gambling software, was founded in Estonia 15 years ago and is now

listed on the London Stock Exchange with a value of around £2bn.

Speedy commuting

Now a bunch of entrepreneurs and engineers working overtime in mod-

est workshops in the capital, Tallinn, are months away from launching

products to revolutionise transport - and guitar-playing.

Stigobike - a nifty unfolding scooter, designed for city commuting - is

hailed the fastest folding electric scooter in the world. It weighs just

17kg, has a range of 40km for each charge of its onboard lithium bat-

tery - and a top speed of 25km/h.

Next Silicon Valleys:

Small Estonia Has Big Ideas

By nigEL CassiDy / Business correspondent, BBC News

Estonia may be tiny but in tech terms it’s a giant. It has a population of just 1.3 million, yet produces more start-ups per head than any other country in Europe.

Testing out the Stigobike

With frozen, packed snow on the ground and temperatures way below

zero in the Estonian capital Tallinn, there was no chance that even your

fearless BBC reporter was going to risk trying out the Stigo in a car park.

The next best thing was getting permission to ride it round an indoor

shopping centre.

It was easy to unfold and easy to ride. The tyres made a pretty good job

of keeping a grip on the highly polished stone floors. What fun we had

dodging pedestrians outside shops and executing tight turns between the

escalators.

A new design substitutes aluminium for carbon fibre. It has a simple two-

step opening and closing mechanism that allows the pint-sized scooter to

fold up and stand securely, yet with a footprint no larger than a shoebox.

“It’s true we don’t have traffic jams or commuting problems here in Tallinn,

but our team travel a lot, and the idea was born when we saw the difficul-

ties commuters face in international capitals. And only now has the battery

technology became available,” says Stigobike chief executive Rando Pikner.

The inventors envisage the bike, which will cost about 2,370 euros, being

ridden right up to airport check-in desks, railway ticket gates, or around

large buildings.

With safety concerns as they are, the main hurdle could be getting EU

authorities to approve the design as street-legal - let alone pavement-legal.

It seems unlikely that all the company’s dreams will be realised - in Europe

at least.



SPECIFICATIONS:

• Speedsupto25km/h

• Weighs17kg

• Foldsupin2secondswithafootprintofamere45×40cm

• 250Whubmotor

• 36VLiFePO4battery

• Drivesupto40kmwithasinglecharge

• L1e-Bstreet-legalelectricscooter

• Doesn’tneedparkingspace

• Canbechargedfromaregularoutlet

stigobike.com

The new, innovative foldable Stigo electric scooter was presented to

the public for the first time on 20 September 2013, in Paris, France,

as part of the “1000 Pionniers” event, which brought together excep-

tional innovators from across the globe.

The Stigo solution is really simple: due to its ultra compact design and

light weight, it allows drivers to go virtually anywhere and it can be

brought along anywhere – to a restaurant or apartment, on public

transportation or on a small lift.

“It is quite fun to observe the reactions of people in the streets who

see us driving the Stigo: smiling faces, recognition and interest from

strangers have given us the courage to expect to see a lot of Stigo-bikes

on the streets in future,” said rando pikner, CEO of Stigobike Ltd.

Stigo is also very cost effective: driving 12–13 km per day, which is the

average commute of an urban person, costs a mere 1.5 euro cents a

day for the user. The cost of the Stigo electric scooter is 2,370 euros

and it comes with a two-year warranty. The company is planning to

produce 8,000 electric scooters in 2015.

Stigobike Ltd, which is seeking manufacturing partners for its novel

electric vehicle, has listed three main target groups: urban users, motor-

home and yacht users, and organisations, such as hospitals or airports,

which are in need of indoor or closed territory transportation.

By nigEL CassiDy / Business correspondent, BBC News

STIGO – a unique foldable electric scooter


Guitar revolution

Another Estonian invention - the electronic Spicetone control box - is

aimed at competent guitar players. The control box, or effect pedal, is

plugged between guitar and amplifier.

Until now, devices of its kind have been mono, picking up signals from

all the strings together and processing the sound on one channel. But

the Spicetone box is polyphonic - it can process the sound of each string

individually. This allows an electric guitar to be played using the tech-

niques familiar to acoustic players.

The output of all six channels is processed separately, with the facility

to control distortion, modulation and overdrive, and to add many other

customised effects.

Guitar player Janek Kesselmann demonstrates the new device, filling

the room with loud yet subtle and undistorted sound - high harmonics

and all.

“I like it because I can play in the same style as I would on an acoustic

guitar, yet fill an entire concert hall with sound,” he says. “Otherwise,

to play electric, I would have to change my technique and the sound

would be very different.”

Spicetone’s prime mover, Rein Sabolotny, is proudly an analog man who

began building his deep knowledge of integrated circuits in the Soviet era.

He doesn’t play guitar himself but knows a lot about processing sound.

“A guitar in its nature is a polyphonic instrument. Yet for several rea-

sons, including cost, you lose all the polyphony,” he says. “After a life-

time in electronics, I felt you could do a lot more things to the sound,

and now we are finishing the design I hope it will also turn out to be a

good business decision.”

But will Spicetone find any customers?

London guitarist Greg Michalik runs Guitar Aid, an independent busi-

ness specialising in guitar repair and modification. He says there are

already some polyphonic (or hexaphonic) pickups on the market, but

they all have a different combination of coils and components.

“Basic designs have changed little since the 1950s and 1960s, so there

is always room for fresh ideas,” he says.

“It would be good to see something new, but one problem is that seri-

ous guitar players are conservative and tend to be sceptical about ex-

perimenting with niche ideas if they are too expensive.”

Estonia, with its tiny population, has to think beyond its borders and

look abroad to sell ideas like these. But it is also coming to terms with

the realisation that many of its best new ideas will end up overseas as

successful start-up entrepreneurs move to be nearer their markets.



Electronics engineer Rein Sabolotny testing the prototype.


25 most promising Nordic cleantech start-ups selected by an international jury

The third edition of the Nordic Cleantech

Open competition saw a record-breaking 107

cleantech companies applying. An interna-

tional jury of more than 50 influential repre-

sentatives from multinational companies and

venture capital firms were involved in selecting

this year’s top 25. Among the jury members

were representatives from International Fi-

nance Corporation – IFC (Int), IdInvest Partners

(France), Evonik Corporate Venturing (Ger-

many), General Electric, Veolia (France), Tsing

Capital (China), Dow Chemicals (Switzerland),

Fortum (Finland), Grundfos (Denmark) and The

Swedish Energy Agency, as well as Enterprise

Estonia and the Estonian Development Fund.

“The Nordic Cleantech Open has always been a

great opportunity to discover new and innova-

tive companies from Scandinavia. This year’s co-

hort was diverse and promising, and we are very

much looking forward to meeting with the en-

trepreneurs,” said Julien mialaret, Investment

Manager at Idinvest Partners, France. This year

Estonia participated in the competition for the

first time. “Estonia’s participation in the compe-

tition was a joint effort of Cleantech Scandina-

via and three Estonian organisations: Enterprise

Estonia, the Estonian Development Fund and

Tehnopol,” said Jaan Heinsoo, FDI Manager

and Cleantech Coordinator at the Estonian In-

vestment Agency / Enterprise Estonia. “Partici-

pating in the competition has helped Estonian

start-ups find their way to international investors,

work on their pitching skills and receive profes-

sional feedback.” Heinsoo also pointed out that

another goal of entering the competition was to

promote the level and achievements of the Es-

tonian cleantech sector to the Nordic cleantech

scene and international investment firms.

With 11 impressive Estonian cleantech start-up

companies entering, two of them – cityntel (IoT Technologies) and stigo Electric Scooter -

made it to the top 25. Among other Estonian participants were Bikeep, Prismattery, Roschier-

Technik, Ashtree Eesti, NordBiochem, BioOil,

Enetic, Nanoformula and NFUEL. The applicants

represented all of the Nordic countries and

cleantech segments. Similarly to previous years,

the largest proportion of entrants came from

Sweden and the largest represented segments

were renewable energy and energy efficiency.

Norway had the best results in terms of the

share of entrants that made it to the top 25.

What’s next?

”We see an ever increasing flow of brilliant, in-

novative companies coming out of the Nordic

and Estonian innovation systems. This is what’s

next! It is a great display of what the future

holds. The trends that we see are that they

are increasingly innovative, solve real industry

problems and are driven by younger and hun-

grier teams. This bodes well for the future,”

says magnus agerström, Managing Director

of Cleantech Scandinavia, the organiser of the

Nordic Cleantech Open.

The selection of the top 25 was just the be-

ginning for these companies. An intensive

program lay ahead. The top 25 companies

took part in Nordic Camp in early March, a

weekend meeting of the international jury

and the companies, held in the 450-year-old

Trolleholm Castle in the south of Sweden. The

Trolleholm Castle, one of the best-preserved

castles in Sweden, with spectacular interiors

and surroundings, provided the Nordic Camp

with a unique venue. After the Nordic Camp,

a group of companies will go to Paris to meet

with European investors and industrials at the

Nordic Cleantech Showcase in April. The win-

ners will be announced at the finals in Stock-

holm on 19 May. The top 25 start-ups and

investors from the Nordic Cleantech Open will

also be invited to participate in latitude59,

the go-to conference for the Nordic and Baltic

start-up scene, held in Tallinn on 28-29 April.

Nordic Cleantech Open is a business compe-

tition aiming to identify, upgrade and display

the top 25 early stage cleantech companies

in the Nordic region each year. Partners and

sponsors of the competition are Cleantech

Scandinavia, Swedish Energy Agency, Tekes,

Tillväxtverket, Autodesk, LADEC, Enterprise

Estonia, Estonian Development Fund, Innovit,

Klak, Level39 and Pivotal Innovations.

For more information about the competition

and the companies visit www.nordiccleantechopen.com

Nordic Cleantech OpenEstonian delegation with Cleantech Scandinavia project managers in Trolleholm.

The modern world presents our societies with many challenges, some of

which are extremely difficult to address due to fundamental limitations:

limited supply of resources, increased urbanisation and high expecta-

tions for standards of living are some of the variables in these equations.

Street lighting is the greatest energy consumer for local municipalities,

amounting to forty per cent of yearly budgets. By combining LED street

lights with smart control, potentially eighty per cent savings can be

achieved compared to conventional sodium street lights. The Estonian

Cityntel Allows For Flexible Smart Street Light Control

smart street light control solution Cityntel provides all the advantages

of smart street light control, while also offering additional beneficial

features.

The development of Smart Street Light Solution Cityntel began in June

2012, and the first pilot project was launched in September 2012 in the

Tallinn Technology Park Tehnopol.

A Cityntel control device is installed in every street light, and the street

lights are controlled based on high-level rules defined by the owners of

the lights. The Cityntel controllers form a mesh network, which makes

it possible to both communicate control rules to the lights as well as

provide feedback from the lights (including actual power consumption

and alerts in case of malfunction) to a central server. The street lights are

dimmed and can be brightened dynamically in specific regions based

on movement.

The reduced complexity and therefore also lower system price of Cityn-

tel permits greater adoption of these systems and thereby savings for

society. The Plug & Play installation distinguishes the Cityntel solution

from competing smart street light control solutions: any trained electri-

cian is able to install street lights equipped with Cityntel controls. Once

the lights have been powered, they form a network automatically and

start operation: there is no need for network configuration of individual

devices. “The Cityntel solution has been successfully integrated with

products of eight luminaire manufacturers and several commercial pilot

projects have been launched in Estonia, Finland and Germany,“ says

Jürgo preden, CTO and Founder of Defendec & IoT Streetlight.

The underlying Internet of Things (IoT) networking technology, which

makes it possible to create smart mesh networks of street lights ena-

bling the Cityntel features, was originally developed by the Estonian

company Defendec for wireless security applications. Over a period of

six years, about �1M have been invested in the development of this

technology. As a spin-off from Defendec, IoT Streetlight, the company

commercialising Cityntel, is at a great advantage, having direct access

to this technology. The IoT network created by the Cityntel solution in

cities can also be used for other Smart City applications, such as traffic

management and waste management. These applications offer more

opportunities for municipalities to reduce CO2 emissions while also sav-

ing money.

www.cityntel.ee



kristiina randoja, CEO of IoT Streetlight OÜ

with the Cityntel smart street light control device.

Cityntel Allows For Flexible Smart Street Light Control


Startup Wise Guys On The Hunt For B2B Start-upsThe Estonia-based start-up accelerator Startup Wise Guys is about to start its new programme, Business Tech. For the first time, they are looking specifically for business to business start-ups only. Life in Estonia met with Mike Reiner, the co-founder and managing director of Startup Wise Guys to find out more about the guys (and girls).

By HoLgEr roonEMaa

What is Startup Wise Guys’ new programme all about?

We are providing a dedicated program for B2B

(business to business) companies focusing on

three key competence areas: Payments, Secu-

rity and Cloud. With our program we will focus

heavily on reducing sales cycles and improving

online channels. We are working closely with

corporate partners to leverage their networks,

knowledge and resources.

The reason for this new focus is based on our

strengths, portfolio companies and our sup-

port network. Most of our companies were

already B2B and most of our mentors have

a B2B background as well. When we look at

the Estonian market, it also makes more sense

because there are a lot of successful B2B com-

panies coming out of Estonia. Another impor-

tant thing to consider is that European inves-

tors prefer to invest in B2B start-ups rather

than B2Cs (business to consumers).

Is it because the business model of B2B start-ups is a lot clearer and more simple than those of B2C companies? It’s easier for investors to understand in many

cases, yes. B2Cs often have a higher risk

profile. A lot of B2C start-ups need to focus

more on growth first and revenue might po-

tentially come later. With B2B, you have rev-

enue early on. So the risk profile for investors

is lower.

How would you describe the type of start-ups you are looking for? Can you give me some examples? If you’re thinking B2B, it’s any company

that has business customers. Good Estonian

start-ups include Fortumo, ZeroTurnaround,

Erply and Pipedrive. Earlier stage examples

are Cloutex and Plumbr. Payments, Security

and Cloud are areas we are especially inter-

ested in. Its great to see what Transferwise,

Fortumo and Erply, for instance, are doing.

In the context of security, we have the NATO

Cyber Defence Center here in Tallinn, which

means that there’s a great link with security.

Currently, we are working with different cor-

porations to support the start-ups during our

programme.

Mike Reiner



I gather that you are not trying to find a smaller niche by select-ing only B2B companies, but rather the other way round: there is more potential in that segment. The problem we face as Accelerators is that you

want to focus as much as possible and, at the

same time, you have to be careful not to limit

your pipeline too much. At the end of the day,

you want to have the opportunity to choose

the best deals. If you do too narrow of a niche,

then the applications that you get will be too

few and hence you might not have enough

quality. If you make it too broad, you might not

offer enough value in terms of mentor pool and

so on. It’s not easy to find the right equilibrium

given the competitive landscape.

Is there a trend that the start-up scene is moving more towards the concept of B2B rather than B2C?

I think the trend is always changing. Especially

in the US, there was a significant B2C trend:

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Based on

their success, there were a lot of start-ups that

focused on social products. It was a real hype.

But in Europe, start-ups had a harder time

raising money for B2C products. Investors in

Europe have seen that B2C is really tough. A

lot of investors have got burned and now they

prefer B2B. So yes there is a trend in terms

of B2Bs right now, but the trend is changing

based on what’s happening on the market.

With the acquisition of WhatsApp, some start-

ups might get inspired…

When will the programme start and what will it be about?

We’re going to start this summer. We’ve cho-

sen 1 August as the starting date. The idea

is that we are going to do a four-month pro-

gramme. During the first month, we’ll focus

heavily on mentorship. The teams will meet

a lot of mentors. We’ll do mentor-matching

based on the industry background of the start-

up and based on the speciality that they need.

The teams are going to have one lead men-

tor who’s going to focus very heavily on the

start-up. The second month will focus more

on the business model validation and adjust-

ing the product based on the feedback of the

mentors. At the end of the third month we’re

going to have a showcase of the products and

we’re going to have a lot of investor meetings

for the start-ups and a demo day. Our lessons-

learned indicate that it’s much more important

to involve the investors early on, have informal

get-to-know and get-together meetings. In

the fourth month, we are going to focus on

the follow-up. We want the start-ups to move

to their target markets. We are going to look

especially towards the UK and US markets, but

only if that makes sense for the team. We’ll

help them with co-working spaces, finding

new mentors, investor talks and smoothing

the transition. We want them to focus on

what is most important at the right location.

Is it enough for you if someone just has a great idea for a start-up, or are you looking for some-one that already has a product to show?

The typical stage of the start-ups we are look-

ing for is when there is a team in place and

they have an initial product in place. So far the

teams we’ve taken in range from ones that

have been building a product for many years

and have already raised seed investments, to

teams that are really early-stage. They basically

just had an idea and a very, very early version

of a product, but they still got in. The range

is wide. If you only have an idea and a great

team, there is a chance that you’ll get in, but

typically we would like to see a product and

some initial traction as well.

If I get to join the programme, what will you get out of it?

We invest 15 000 euros of seed money in a

start-up and typically we take 8% of equity for

that.

Surely you are not just looking for start-ups from Estonia but from anywhere?

Exactly. So far we’ve had 24 companies from

15 different countries. We’ve had companies

from Costa Rica, India, Chile and Russia. Our

marketing focuses heavily on Eastern Europe,

but the reality is that applications come in from

everywhere. Start-ups talk, you get published

in the media and attention grows. We’ve even

had applications from places like Lesotho. I’m

always amazed how they find us.

Can you tell me some success stories about your graduates?

Sure. There is VitalFields from Estonia. They’ve

raised 750 000 euros in total so far. They’re

focusing on increasing the output of farmers.

Then there is Monolith, which is Croatian but

is now based in the Netherlands. They have

raised a similar amount and focus on analysing

shopper behaviour in retail stores. Very liter-

ally, they can see what shoppers are doing and

what shelves they’re looking at. Customers

include Timberland and Nike. A B2C example

we invested in at the beginning is WappZapp,

which raised around 650 000 euros and aims

to compete with Netflix.


How many new start-ups are you looking for?

So far we’ve taken in eight start-ups per pro-

gramme but now we’re looking for ten. The

quality needs to be good though.

Let’s take a different perspective now: investors. If someone reads this piece and thinks that maybe he would like to invest in a start-up, what should he do?

They can definitely contact me. We are always

happy to match our portfolio companies with

investors. If investors are just interested in see-

ing our portfolio companies, they can send an

email to me or anyone from our team. We’ll

make sure we add them to our event lists and

we’ll invite them to our demo days and inves-

tor events. They can come and meet the start-

ups, and see the pitch. It’s all about building

relationships and getting to know the teams.

I think it’s a perfect opportunity to become in-

volved, during the programme, and see how

much progress the start-ups are making, and

how they work as a team.

Who are the mentors that you have?

Typically we have three different types of men-

tors. First, we have mentors with start-up

experience who’ve made exits. Then we have

mentors who are themselves currently involved

in their own start-ups and have very recently

had experiences similar to what our teams are

doing. The mentors that I’ve often found to be

the best hands-on mentors are actually around

30-year-old guys that had start-ups in the same

time space and are still working on them. Those

young mentors work really well. Finally we have

more experienced corporate mentors with back-

grounds from IBM, Paypal, Amazon etc. They

can help connect and they bring their networks.

Finally can you give me two or three tips for both young start-ups and investors looking for great new ideas?

For start-ups the most important thing is valida-

tion. I see a lot of start-ups building stuff with-

out actually validating if there is a need for it.

Maybe the most important advice I can give to

early-stage start-ups is to go out there and talk

to customers all the time. Ask the customers

the right questions. You can even go to them

without a product. If you are tackling a certain

area of a problem, you just ask them about it:

how are they currently solving the problem,

and how much money are they spending on

it? Only then will you get a sense of whether

there’s actually a problem and how much mon-

ey it’s possible to make. You will see very fast if

there really is a need for your product or not.

Many start-ups are focused very heavily on

money and investments. What they really

need to do is focus on traction and the cus-

tomer. This is where the money will come

from. It takes a lot of effort to build rela-

tionships with investors. We see some start-

ups just basically shouting “come on, we

need the money”. They expect investors to

throw money at them. You have to under-

stand that it’s a lot of work to build a rela-

tionship with an investor. It’s a full-time job.

And for investors?

I see that many investors don’t actually take

the time to talk with start-ups. Many of them

just take a quick look at the idea and say

“okay, this is not for me.” In many cases, you

can see that the ideas change very fast and

it is much more about the team. Good inves-

tors take their time and follow the progress of

the teams. Accelerators are the perfect place

for that. Another thing is that I would love to

see a lot more cross-border investments. That

offers a lot more opportunity. Let’s say an Esto-

nian investor and a UK investor invest together

in an Estonian company. The company from

that point on has access to a UK network as

well. Getting those investors early on helps a

lot. Angels typically only like to invest locally,

because that’s what they know and what they

are more comfortable with. If angels trust each

other, there’s much more potential.



GameFounders is the first European business

accelerator exclusively working with game

studios. The accelerator was started in 2012

and it has become a considerable player in the

game industry in the past two years.

GameFounders selects 10 game start-ups at a

time from a global pool to go through their

programme, and so far applications have been

submitted by 67 countries. Teams are expect-

ed to have a Beta version, prototype or demo

rail of their project and be ready to set up a

business. The applicants go through a month

of evaluation and the best ones receive small

investments and the chance to go through

the programme. “Feedback from mentors

has been increasingly positive. That obviously

raises our expectations of future teams,” says

Kadri Ugand, one of the co-founders of

GameFounders.

The teams relocate to Tallinn, Estonia for three

months, during which they participate in a

programme of seminars and mentoring ses-

sions, have access to gaming partnership deals

and get introduced to all the relevant people

for their game. GameFounders has over 110

mentors from various countries all over the

world, so the teams have top-notch gaming

executives giving them advice and sharing

their knowledge in different fields. These men-

tors fly in and help the teams get the business-

es behind their games set up.

Estonia as an exotic place

Estonia looked like a truly exotic place to the

teams: the city of Tallinn offered free transport,

the office in Tallinn University was modern and

most areas had Wifi. To top it off, there was

still snow on the ground as the teams arrived,

which many of them were seeing for the first

time.

During the three months, various specialists in

the gaming industry, from developers to inves-

tors, come to assist the companies. In the first

weeks of the programme, the teams met al-

most twenty mentors and the programme is set

to continue at this pace until the end of May.

In the first week of GameFounders, we have

received more than we expected from the en-

tire programme,� says Jonas, the co-founder of

Tiny Lab Productions, from Lithuania. The cycle

ends with demo days in large gaming events

in Europe � Tallinn, Malmö and Helsinki - and

in San Francisco, USA, where the companies

will pitch their products to potential investors

and publishers. The purpose is to find the fi-

nancing/publishing deals necessary for further

development.

This spring, the Estonia-based first game ac-

celerator in Europe will bring some new power

on board: Andrew Walker is joining the accel-

erator as a partner. Andrew has been working

in the gaming industry for eighteen years and

has dedicated recent years to working with

young game studios developing their busi-

nesses and creating strategic partnerships. His

previous work experience was with two of the

giants in the industry: Microsoft and THQ.

Currently GameFounders has twenty-eight

game studios from sixteen countries in its

portfolio, covering almost all continents. The

teams come from Italy, India, Lithuania, Ar-

gentina, Hungary, Estonia, Mexico, the US,

Ukraine, Macedonia, Brazil, Georgia, China,

Germany, the Netherlands and Finland.

Name: GameFounders

Activity: business accelerator for game studios

Game studios: 28 (in Portfolio)

Established: 2012

Website: gamefounders.com

GameFounders: We Believe In The Gaming Industry


Name: GameFounders

Activity: business accelerator for game studios

Game studios: 28 (in Portfolio)

Established: 2012

Website: gamefounders.com

“I hated maths”– this is something we often hear from

former school leavers. The problem is not unique to Esto-

nia. The British educational visionary Conrad Wolfram has

developed a programme called Computer-Based Math, and

Estonia is the first country in the world to implement this

programme in schools.

How Do We Fix Maths Education?Conrad Wolfram Knows The Answer

In Estonia we have reached the point where maths education boils

down to the national maths exam. Exam results, however, point to a

problem: we are testing things like calculus, which is something com-

puters have been able to do for years. There is a clear gap between the

maths taught in schools and the actual opportunities offered by math-

ematics. This begs the question: what should be done?

Over the last few decades, the importance of mathematics to jobs, society

and thinking has become greater than ever before. Yet maths educa-

tion is in a worldwide crisis: diverging more and more from the needs

of countries, industry, further education and students. Basically, no one’s

very happy. People trying to learn maths consider it boring and irrelevant:

students spend 80 per cent of their time doing calculus and only 20 per

cent of their time learning to think mathematically. Employers claim that

people don’t know enough. Governments realise it is a critical issue for

economic development, but don’t know how to go about fixing it. Many

teachers are frustrated, too. And yet, without question, mathematics is

more important to the world than it ever has been in human history. So

the falling interest in maths education truly contrasts with a world which

is ever more quantitative and ever more mathematical.

So what’s gone wrong and how do we bridge this chasm? The British

visionary of maths education conrad Wolfram believes that comput-

ers are the key: only when they do the calculating is mathematics ap-

plicable to hard questions across many contexts. Real-life mathematics

has been transformed by computer-based calculation; now mainstream

maths education needs this fundamental change too.

“We have an opportunity to reform maths education so it’s both more

practical and more conceptual”, says Wolfram. “We can simultaneously

improve the vocational and the intellectual. And because mathematics

itself as a subject has so fundamentally changed in the outside world

with new computing technology, we have this opportunity in education.

Computer-Based Math: a critical reform

Wolfram initiated the project called Computer-Based Math, which aims

to reset the subject matter of maths beyond hand-calculating to wider

problem-solving, using modern computing. Statistics and probability

theory, or Data Science, is a key area that totally transforms the sub-

ject, providing a crucial general education for young people, offering

the skills needed to understand, analyse and utilise big data. Education

can no longer ignore the fact that information is mostly analysed on

computers. Rather than such topics as solving quadratic equations or

factoring polynomials, Computer-Based Math™ focuses on using the

power of mathematics to solve real-world problems, such as “should I

insure my mobile?”, “how long will I live?”, or “what makes a beauti-

ful shape?”

The core mission of the project is to create new curricula and study

materials which reflect fundamental changes in the application of

mathematics outside education, changes brought about by comput-

ers doing most of the calculations, not humans. “Computers have the

power to liberate mathematics from calculating, raising its use to new

levels—exactly what’s happened outside education,” says Wolfram.

“Mimic this real world of mathematics, and your education will be-

come more conceptual, more practical and more motivational.”

“I believe Computer-Based Math is a critical reform, and it’s not op-

tional,” says Wolfram. “However difficult, it is vital. It’s a critical part

of moving economies forward. I think it can take us from a knowledge

economy to what I call a computational knowledge economy, where

high-level mathematical thinking is widespread—for many, not just the

few—and those abilities, rather than just basic knowledge, which one

would term knowledge economies, are driving the economy forward.

The country to do this first will leapfrog others.”

Kristjan Korjus, Jaak Aaviksoo and Conrad Wolfram at a meeting in Tallinn

I EDUCATION & SCIENCE


PROJECT PARTNERS

conrad Wolfram, British

technology entrepreneur and

maths education visionary,

studied mathematics and natu-

ral sciences at the University of

Cambridge. He is the European

founder of the consortium of

software companies Wolfram

Research. He has developed

various technological applica-

tions, including Mathematica,

Wolfram Alpha and the com-

putable document format CDF,

and founded the company

computerbasedmath.org.Ltd.

Ülle Kikas is the project

coordinator at the Ministry

of Education and Research

(MoER). She holds a degree in

physics from the University of

Tartu. She currently works as

an adviser of STEM education

at the MoER. She worked for

a long time as a researcher at

the University of Tartu, where

she taught methods of statisti-

cal data analysis, among other

subjects. She has been the na-

tional coordinator of the global

school environmental educa-

tion programme GLOBE.

Kristjan Korjus is the Project

Manager at the University of

Tartu, and holds an MSc in

Mathematics from the Uni-

versity of Manchester in the

UK. He is currently doing his

doctorate in Informatics at the

University of Tartu. He works

on the methods of brain sci-

ence and machine learning

and teaches pure maths to

first-year Informatics students.

His multifaceted working

background includes teaching

maths to basic school children

with learning difficulties and

organising a popular science

lecture series at the University

of Manchester. Kristjan Korjus

is also a co-author of “Evening

Course in Maths”, one the

best-selling books in Estonia at

the moment.

First Computer-Based Math Education Country is Estonia

In February 2013, it was announced that Esto-

nia would be the first country to make use of its

revolutionary re-thinking of maths education in a

project to build a new school statistics course. The

announcement was made at a meeting in one of

the oldest secondary schools in the country: the

Gustav Adolf Gymnasium, founded in 1631 in Tal-

linn by the Swedish King Gustav II Adolf.

“Since the start of computerbasedmath.org, I’ve

been asking which country will be first?’” said

Wolfram. He searched for a country that was small

enough, with strong education in mathematics

and ICT, and interested in testing new forms of ed-

ucation. “Now we have the answer: it’s Estonia.”

Jaak aaviksoo, a physicist and the Estonian Min-

ister of Education at the time, stressed that com-

puter-based learning would only succeed when

it interested and challenged students, when they

saw that they could learn something very useful

with the help of the new technology.

Aaviksoo, who initiated the Tiger Leap programme

in 1996, said that in the last century Estonia was

a leading country in terms of Internet connections

available in classrooms. Now Estonia wants to lead

in innovating educational technology. “We believe

in the enthusiasm and potential of the Internet

generation: they are ready for computer-based

mathematics. It will also give them a competitive

advantage in the labour market,” he said.

31 volunteer schools testing computer-based statistics

Estonia has been blazing a trail of world-leading

technical educational reform, notably its integra-

tion of programming as a central part of the pri-

mary curriculum from age seven on. With leader-

ship from the University of Tartu, many schools are

keen to volunteer for the pilot projects.

Computer-based mathematics will be taught in

Estonia in a distinct branch of maths: statistics.

“Statistics is by its nature closest to computers,

as a statistician almost always works on a com-

puter. Statistical calculations cannot be done in

your head,” said Kristjan Korjus, the Estonian

manager for Computer-Based Math. He states

that similar innovations have been implemented

before: “About sixty years ago, calculations in

maths lessons were done with the help of the slide

rule. Then calculators were invented and gradually

taken into use in maths lessons,” said Korjus.

A contemporary approach to teaching statistics

and probability theory was developed as the first

test project in the framework of computer-based

math. In this first phase of the project, “curric-

ulum mapping”, the task of Estonian and Brit-

ish experts was to try to forget everything they

knew about how maths was being taught. The

idea was to come up with 20 story-lines that

described real-life situations where you needed

to apply maths concepts. Each story-line posed

a main question that students would attempt to

solve. Computers, which are an organic part of

the process, allow for quick searches of numeri-

cal information, visualising data, and fast per-

formance of statistical procedures. The aim is to

broaden and deepen problem-solving without si-

multaneously increasing the time spent studying.

In addition, interactive lesson materials are

developed methodically, with the aim of help-

ing students and teachers tackle complex real

life problems with the help of computers. The

new lesson materials will also simplify the life of

teachers since they require less time for prepara-

tion. After the teaching resources – handbooks

for teachers, textbooks for students, problems

to solve in classes, tests and exams – are com-

pleted, the new curriculum will be tested in the

real world. “Teachers are the key people for suc-

cessful educational implementation of this inno-

vative approach. Altogether 45 volunteer maths

teachers are involved in the project,“ says Ülle

Kikas, the project coordinator at the Ministry of

Education and Research. “In 2013, they were

trained to embrace the new concept of comput-

er-based statistics and to cope with teaching in

a technology-rich environment, “ she adds. In

order to carry out the lessons, teachers do not

need in-depth knowledge of programming or

computing.

The new teaching concept and lesson materials

will be tested in 31 basic and secondary schools all

over Estonia in spring 2014. All aspects of the pilot

project will be thoroughly analysed and published

by scientists of the University of Tartu. Teachers will

reflect on their teaching processes and act as an

analytical group for up-scaling the project.

This project is the start of what is predicted to be

a complete shift in the world’s maths education

over the coming decades to a computer-based ap-

proach. The change promises to empower students

with abilities to do high-level problem-solving, ap-

ply mathematics, and gain experience far beyond

what traditional STEM education has delivered:

crucial both to twenty-first century economies and

the enrichment of each and every student’s life.


ProgeTiger – let’s teach programming to all kids

When ProgeTiger was introduced a year and a

half ago, the news spread in the world media

that Estonia—which already had a progressive

image as an e-country—was making first grade

pupils write computer programmes. “It is of

course not quite like that”, says Lauringson.

Firstly, schools can participate in the ProgeTi-

ger programme on a voluntary basis. Secondly,

although the programme starts in first grade,

it does not kick off with teaching kids to write

code. “We do not make them learn JavaScript

or HTML from day one,” laughs Lauringson,

adding that children are introduced to the

world of coding in a playful way. “It is vital

to create and keep the children’s interest in

ICT. For example, we can show them which

programming languages can be used to create

simple computer games,” she explains. Pro-

gramming is only taught after primary school.

A clear need for a programme like ProgeTiger

was noticed in 2011 when informatics was no

longer a compulsory subject in the curriculum,

as it was thought that it should be integrated

into different subjects. This, however, led to

many schools making informatics teachers

redundant. “We had a choice of whether to

restore informatics as a compulsory subject or

to create demand for the subject by raising the

awareness of schools and parents,” says Lau-

ringson. They chose the second option and it

was a good choice as was evident from the

first day that ProgeTiger was announced.

“I started to receive phone calls from parents

trying to find out which school they should put

their children into. Parents were clearly inter-

ested in this,” she recalls. This demonstrates

that technology and ICT-centred learning is a

great marketing tactic which can help many

smaller Estonian schools stand out and survive

on the educational landscape. It should also be

considered that running the ProgeTiger pro-

gramme is a low-cost enterprise for the Estoni-

an state. The state offers the programme and

trains teachers for free. In the first six months,

over 100 primary school teachers participated

in the training sessions. Even today the train-

ing positions are filled in just a couple of days.

ProgeTiger, Lego Robots and Computer-based Math Conquer Schools

“We need a smarter workforce,”

says ave lauringson, IcT skills

coordinator at the ministry of

economic affairs and communi-

cations. lauringson is responsible

for introducing the various forms

of IcT education into estonian

schools, in order to equip basic

school leavers with the neces-

sary minimum skills to cope in

the information society or, better

yet, to make them continue their

education in the fields of IcT, en-

gineering or such like. life in es-

tonia asked lauringson to give us

an overview of smart initiatives

in estonian schools.

By HoLgEr roonEMaa


I EDUCATION & SCIENCE

Mozart learned to code at the age of four,

we do too!

The next phase is to create some competitive

moments and applications for the programme.

In other words ProgeTiger will be even more

attractive for schools and students. “For exam-

ple, companies could offer their services or ask

children to come up with ideas to solve prob-

lems. This helps to maintain teachers’ sense

of mission and the children will be even more

motivated to participate,” claims Lauringson.

Wolfram Alpha’s computer-based math pro-

gramme is also linked to the ProgeTiger pro-

gramme and the first 31 Estonian schools are

testing it. This is also something which makes

Estonia unique in the world: nowhere else has

Wolfram Alpha been incorporated into school

lessons.

Robotics in every fourth school

The opportunity to build something on one’s

own and to develop various new smart so-

lutions is what brings children into robotics

clubs. Children are very smart: one fifth-grader

was approached by a teacher with the pro-

posal to be the assistant teacher in a starting

robotics club. Today there is a robotics club in

140 Estonian schools, which means that every

fourth school has one.

The robotics club has a simple concept, says

Lauringson. As Estonia will participate in the

international First Lego League (FLL) compe-

tition, children start working on a new FLL

task from autumn. A robot will be built, us-

ing Lego Mindstorms, which should be best

able to solve tasks. The programme will lead

to participation in the international final

competition in spring. For example, this year

the topic of FLL was nature fury. Hundreds

of supporters gathered in March for the na-

tional final between two teams in the Tallinn

Sea Plane Harbour. Last year pupils had to

come up with ideas on how to help elderly

people. “For example, there was the idea of

a smart board next to the front door which

tells you if you’ve left the iron plugged in be-

fore you leave the house, and another one

reminding elderly people when to take their

medication and giving the accurate dosage,”

says Lauringson. One of the main advantages

of robotics clubs is the fact that, whereas

other subjects tend to focus on individual

tasks, robotics requires great teamwork and

communication.

What is the use of it all?

Learning programming from an early age and

playing around with robots may be great fun

for children, but why is it necessary? Laur-

ingson replies: “We need more higher value-

added people in our economy,” she says.

“We do not need hundreds of new lawyers or

public administrators, as there are more than

enough in our labour market,” she says and

gives the example of her employer – the Min-

istry of Economic Affairs and Communica-

tions – where there are 27 applicants per post.

In contrast, there is room for thousands more

ICT specialists and engineers in Estonia. In

addition, these are exactly the fields which

top all charts when it comes to salaries, staff

satisfaction etc. “If we think about creating

more added value, then it is precisely the pu-

pils in primary school and basic school who

will be able to do this in the future,” claims

Lauringson.

SPRING 2014 I LIFE IN ESTONIA 51 51

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HOW TO VISUALISE A NARRATIVE? MARKO MäETAMM

By Anneliis Aunapuu

From the moment he entered the estonian arts scene, marko

mäetamm has amazed audiences with his productivity and

overflowing sense of fun, which may border on the provocative

or reach painful integrity. He never tires of surprising the audi-

ence and, quite possibly, himself.

Marko Mäetamm (born in 1965 in Viljandi) has been selected twice

to represent Estonia at the Venice Biennale (where nothing short of a

shocking idea is even considered). In one exhibition after another—and

there have been several dozen since the 1990s—he has managed to

create excitement in Estonia and abroad, presenting fresh and unex-

pected collections, each new one seemingly having nothing in common

with the one before, except for vibrant energy.


I CULTURE

The artist admits that there is always a narra-

tive underlying his creations, and the narrative

is always new. This issue focuses on his last

comic-book-like works, which have a narrative

as their essence. But his earlier works, where

just shapes and blots of colour interact with

each other, also have a changeable situation

embodied in them. This characteristic, which

probably explains his huge popularity, has

been quite rare in the Estonian arts scene since

about the 1980s.

“Explaining the painting” was considered bad

form in Estonian art circles. This attitude was

probably created by the pressure exerted by

the Soviet regime, i.e. the predetermined prop-

agandist content prescribed by socialist realism

was so unpleasant for artists that later when

the control became more relaxed, the only pos-

sible way forward seemed to be to give up on

anything literary. Mäetamm, however, went

against the current.

When he was studying graphic art, Mäeta-

mm created one hundred and fifty colourful

lithographs with pure joy. At our meeting in

his studio at the Tallinn Art Hall, he showed

them to me, joking about them being a kind of

pension which he keeps neatly stowed away

in a drawer. After he exhausted this conserva-

tive technique of lithography, he continued

to come up with technical surprises, working

with materials or formats which have not yet

been accepted by the general public. During

an earlier period, his works of pure patches

of colour were transferred onto the back sur-

face of unframed organic glass. He is often

attracted to the style of animation: either cut-

out animation technique or collage, where you

see characters in the background with “speech

bubbles”. Then again, he presents installations

which seem to come out of puppet anima-

tion, each one neatly tucked into a hamster

cage. Once he decided to try porcelain paint-

ing (2010). At the same time, one of his more

traditionally painted canvases is 24 metres long

(2005). Well, he cut it into pieces later and uses

those today to paint new works on.

People used to call the laconic motifs of his

earlier works “hippy-like” or “poster-style”.

As a key stylistic element, he used to sign his

name on the surface of the painting and make

it as significant as the main images. In

contrast to this kind of self-advertising,

Mäetamm admits that he used to be a

shy child, not an easy communicator,

popular or successful in school. He grew

up near Viljandi and his seafaring father

spent a lot of time away from home.

Instead of hanging out with other kids,

he used to admire the illustrations in a

school textbook, the colours and the de-

sign of it. He still keeps this yellow book

within easy reach. He holds it gently and

admits that it is this book with its pure

colours and sensitive illustrations by Silvi

Väljal which more than anything has

shaped his view of the world. This book

continues to influence him strongly.

CHICAGO

47 X 34 I lithography 1992THE SUNDAY

38 X 29 I lithography 1992

Who would guess that he came from those

beginnings to his disturbing installations or

houses filling up with blood? The tough life

of an artist and a man? But perhaps his lack

of success in childhood provided him with a

tough core and the burning ambition to stand

out, to be seen and heard. The desire to play

by his own rules.

The rules kept growing, just like an oak tree on

a hill, which is what the artist’s name, Mäeta-

mm, literally means. In time, the language of

pure colours became more schematic, mak-

ing way for the concreteness of blacks, reds

and whites. The shapes themselves reached

for more existential topics, circling around the

mysteries of sex, birth and death, moving sure-

ly and clearly in the direction of pictograms (ca

2000). “Until suddenly I realised that nobody

understood them any longer. Then I got the

idea of creating a line of cartographic signs

under the picture which explain what each

shape in the picture stands for. The texts be-

came longer and longer. Then I started to write

down little stories; the role of the images be-

came smaller and smaller. At exhibitions, I also

tried to increase the role of text: I started to

write text on the wall next to the pictures,” the

artist says, describing his changes in approach.

Then came the point when Mäetamm’s exhi-

bitions showed a picture or an object on the

wall which would be completely surrounded

by long stories written in the artist’s hand-

writing. Many people consider his fantasies

that peek into the private sphere to be “ter-

rible” and “threatening”, but Mäetamm says

his aim is not to shock the audience. “I don’t

often know myself how other people should

BAR

31 X 35 I lithography 1993


understand my works. I don’t always think in

the same way. It is not important if the work

creates a positive or a negative emotion; it is

important that it creates something. That I

have managed to address someone,” he ex-

plains. At the same time, his pictures of hunt-

ers have been turned into wallpaper, with help

from a designer friend, and they now seem

like a Dutch fireplace made of blue and white

tiles. In contrast, this naturally warm and safe

symbol turns the impact of the pictures upside

down, creating kind of a fun surprise.

Indeed, Mäetamm is not the kind of artist to

create something in the isolated and still envi-

ronment of a studio and then quietly bring it

out to an exhibition. The opposite is true.

There was a time when he teamed up with

the artist Kaido Ole in a tandem called “Group

of Artists known as John Smith”, which repre-

sented Estonia at the Venice Biennale in 2003.

Together they created works which brought

together images, stories and motifs from their

memories in a fun way. The image language,

graphics and colour of those large format

paintings were quite subdued when you con-

sider the two artists, but the idea of the work

was deeply funny, playful, absurd and memo-

rable. The creative personalities of the two art-

ists seem to fit perfectly together, to intertwine

with each other.

However the bits which didn’t intertwine

continued to grow and develop and demand

their own freedom. Once again, Mäetamm

started to glance towards his own canvas with

yearning and comic book windows began to

emerge. The story which keeps being reborn

found a new form of expression. Mostly it

involves the never-ending subject of the rela-

tionship between a man and a woman (“...

every story could be solved in this key of a

man-woman relationship,” says Mäetamm),

but one can never say that this is how it will

always be. Nobody—and that includes Marko

Mäetamm—knows what will emerge on the

next canvas. What is clear is that he will con-

tinue with the series he has started, with the

technique and the colouring. Until a collection

is ready which can be shown at an exhibition.

In fact, he says that he is just half-way there

and it is all just starting to take shape.

ME SUPERNATURAL #5 I 150 X 200 I oil on canvas

FACTS ABOUT MARKO MäETAMM

He paints his comic book series in acrylic onto 3-meter-high canvases.

He paints with a free hand and brush, without using a ruler.

He is a very orderly person, a serious perfectionist.

He collaborates with the Temnikova-Kasela Gallery.

He has represented Estonia twice at the Venice Biennale, in 2003 and in 2007.

He once formed one half of the creative group called John Smith.

He has a wife and three children.

Sometimes he practices playing drums in his studio. He shares the drum kit with his 8-year-old son. He is currently setting up an exhibition in Moscow.

He has held exhibitions in many countries.

He is painfully sincere in his works.

He likes to meet his audiences as it helps him to understand his works better.

He uses clean, bright colours. Or not.

He has created a painting on a canvas measuring 24 x 3 metres (the work was amazing for more than its measurements)

He has published two books with text and pictures.

He is a warm-hearted person who likes to test the boundaries.

His topics include death, abuse in the family and other relationships.

His favourite book is the reading textbook he had in first grade.

ARVO

PÄR

T /

Phot

o: K

aupo

Kik

kas

I CULTURE

SOuNdS EmaNaTINg LOvE By iMMo MiHkELson


In 2010, a sculpture dedicated to Pärt, “Young lad on a bicycle listening to music” by Seaküla Simson, was

opened on the main square of Rakvere, the childhood hometown of Arvo Pärt. Ph

oto:

Prii

t Gre

pp

ARVO

PÄR

T /

Phot

o: K

aupo

Kik

kas


In the final days of May and in early June, four concerts of Arvo Pärt’s music will be performed in Washington D.C. and New york. The choir and orchestra will fly over the ocean, the recent Grammy-winner Tõnu Kaljuste will conduct and the composer himself has helped to put the programme together. Health permitting, the 78-year-old maestro will attend.

It is reminiscent of Arvo Pärt’s first authorial concert, which took place

almost thirty years ago in New York and was organised with great en-

thusiasm by the ensemble Continuum and Joel Sachs. The composer

was present and helped the performers to fine-tune their performance.

In the years in between, Arvo Pärt’s name has become very influential.

It stands for music which many people love. Tranquillity, sadness and

selfless love emanate from the sounds of that music. It consoles and

gives strength.

Estonians are proud of Arvo Pärt because he is a world-famous Esto-

nian. Fame creates respect. But when we look more closely, his compo-

sitions address everyone, attempting to appeal to that shared aspect of

humankind which rises above nationality, skin colour and culture. It is as

if the music wishes to say that we are all in it together.

The road to music

Arvo Pärt was born in 1935, in the Estonian provincial town of Paide,

but his parents separated and, before the onset of the war, mother and

son moved to Rakvere. The childhood and early youth of the future

composer were spent in the tranquil milieu of that small town. When he

started school, the Germans were still in charge in Estonia, but when he

commenced his piano lessons at the age of nine, life was lived accord-

ing to the directions set by the Soviet occupation regime. Those were

restless and anxious times, and left a stamp on many people. When, on

Stalin’s command, tens of thousands of people were deported from Es-

tonia to Siberia, Pärt’s close relatives were among them. This left a thorn

in his soul and a strong sense of revulsion towards the foreign powers.

The young lad attended school, fooled around with his friends, and

became fixated on films screened in the local cinema. Music entered

his life bit by bit, but from a certain point onwards it overshadowed

everything else. The radio became the focal point of his life: after all it

played classical music. On Fridays live concerts were transmitted and the

boy biked to the central square of the town, which had a loudspeaker

attached to a post. He used to circle around that post until the end of

the concerts. Today the sculpture of a boy with a bicycle on the central

square in Rakvere is reminiscent of those occasions.

In fact, this tale is of a person who merged with music from the word

go. It is a story of the kind of love and yearning for what’s beyond

the horizon, which is often much more emotionally expressed by music

than by other arts. And it is also the story of Arvo Pärt’s music, music

which many people all over the world feel an affinity with. The patterns

of those melodies call people back into themselves, announce a sense

of inexplicable harmony, and enable them to be part of or to hope for

contact with something much larger. People need it. And this is what

Arvo Pärt needed as he followed the call of music throughout his life.

This path was, from the start, full of joy but also twists and obstacles,

temptations and suffering. The composer has said in interviews that he

does not think his life has differed much from the lives of many others.

We share so much with each other: our main needs and our goals are

the same. In one way or another, this is what his music is about.

In the draughts of power and spirit

After graduating from school, Pärt went to Tallinn, where the best Es-

tonian musicians and teachers worked. His wish was to become a com-

poser. By then the city had been cleaned up of war ruins, Stalin was

dead and a whiff of newborn hope was floating in the air.

In the late 1950s, Pärt’s early works first attracted attention in Tallinn,

where they were approved of by older colleagues in the Union of Com-

posers, and subsequently in Moscow. The times favoured young energy

and the socialist society tried to guide it in the “right” direction. Culture

also played a role in the bloodless battles of the Cold War, where com-

peting ideologies tried to prove their supremacy to the masses on the

other side. Sometimes it worked.

The premiere of “Adam’s Lament” at the Hagia Irene Church in Istanbul on 7 June 2010. The piece was written under the joint contract for the cultural capitals Istanbul 2010 and Tallinn 2011. On stage: Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, ensemble Vox Clamantis, Borusan Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Tõnu Kaljuste.

Manuscript of “Adam's Lament” by Pärt

Phot

o: M

ahm

ut C

eyla

n / A

rvo

Pärt

Cent

re


I CULTURE

Ever since his student-time orchestral work “nekrolog” (1960), strong

pro and contra draughts had been blowing across his path as a Soviet

composer. He was praised, only to be criticised later, persecuted and

favoured. Audiences were keen on his music, but the officials had their

doubts.

Working as the recording director at Estonian Radio in the 1960s taught

him to listen to the fine nuances of sounds. This job probably also gave

him a crash course in the psychology of musicians, which later helped

him significantly in making his own special world of sound audible. Years

later Arvo Pärt said that his crooked road of searching for beauty, purity

and truth—of seeking God—began in the 1960s. It was the course he

chose. Even as a young man, he had high ideals and the intuitive sense

that making compromises could lead to losing everything.

A new breath of life

Around 1968, when there was anxiety throughout the world, Pärt lost

faith in the contrasts and oppositions of his music. He began to look for

a new shape and expression for sounds. This was a situation in which

Pärt had a general sense of what he wanted to say, but he had not yet

found the right words, the shapes of sentences and rhythms of speech

to express it. Pärt turned to music from earlier centuries and tried to

find a way to translate the tranquillity and clarity of that old music into

his own language.

This was the great turn which changed his life, both internally and ex-

ternally. He married for the second time and moved, living a modest

life in a dismal housing estate on the outskirts of Tallinn. The searching

years were difficult and those solitary attempts often brought only dis-

appointments. His wife, nora pärt, has recalled witnessing Arvo almost

losing faith and seemingly considering the idea of giving up trying to

be a composer.

In this confrontation, every talent was seen as a future warrior and Pärt

was favoured. But in Estonia, on the border of the huge red empire, the

Iron Curtain was weaker and thus the echoes of modern Western com-

position techniques could be heard. Pärt became fascinated by them,

the more so as they provided the opportunity to express his defiance

of the regime. Problems soon developed, as the environment in which

Pärt lived considered Western influences to be enemies. Defiance was

unacceptable.

Phot

o: K

aupo

Kik

kas

/ Arv

o Pä

rt Ce

ntre


Then came the spark which changed it all. Born one February morning

in 1976, the piano piece “Für alina” opened a new door and light

poured in. Discovering tintinnabuli was a new start for Arvo Pärt in

music, but the direction of his search remained the same. Tintinnabuli

is often mentioned when talking about Arvo Pärt’s music. It has been

called a method of composing, a unique style and a way of thinking.

There is no simple and clear definition, but many explanations have

been offered. Interest in those explanations has grown in parallel with

the interest in Pärt’s music all around the world. We do not know if this

interest has reached its peak, but we do know for a fact that the music

of this estonian composer has been the most performed contem-

porary music in the world for several years running.

The call in his music has been slow to reach people, just as the music

itself has a slow tempo. When Arvo Pärt left the Soviet Union in 1980

and moved to Vienna with his family, there was nothing positive waiting

for him there. The foreign environment made him withdraw ever more

into himself and the spiritual world of his music was just as ill-suited for

that environment as for the one he had left behind. He wasn’t aware

of the fact that a particular German had listened to his music on a car

radio and become so excited by it that he wanted to release an album.

When manfred eicher and ecm released “Tabula rasa” in the au-

tumn of 1984, it was a real statement and marked another significant

turning point. Eicher later said that he believed the main piece on the

album changed the awareness of music throughout the world in the

late 1980s. This may sound a bit pretentious, but many people agree.

The story released by the American press, which has been cited on many

occasions, tells of a journalist seeing young men with AIDS, waiting for

death in a refugee centre, who listened to Pärt’s “Tabula rasa” again

and again. The sounds must have incorporated something very signifi-

cant for people dealing with such a serious situation.

Arvo Pärt and Manfred Eicher before the premiere of “Adam’s Lament” at the Hagia Irene Church in Istanbul.

Phot

o: M

ahm

ut C

eyla

n / A

rvo

Pärt

Cent

re

The composer taught pupils of the Old Town Music School as part of the collaborative project “Playing Pärt” between the Arvo Pärt Centre and the Old Town Educational College. The young cellist Johannes Sarapuu rehearses for his performance of “Spiegel im Spiegel”. The rehearsals and the concert which took place in May-June 2011 have been released on DVD.

Phot

o: P

riit G

repp

/ Ar

vo P

ärt C

entre


I CULTURE

All is one

Later many articles asked what it was which pulled people from differ-

ent parts of the world, people with different skin colours, who spoke

different languages and had diverse world-views, towards the music

composed by Arvo Pärt. Many answers have been proposed and, at the

same time, his music has been criticised for being light and flirting with

listeners. Such comments have come from representatives of modernist

music. Such reactions may have been caused by the composer’s clear

desire to be on the same wavelength as his listeners, not to tire their

perception with sound tangles and structures pushing their limits.

On the cover notes of the album “Tabula rasa”, there is a beautiful com-

ment by the composer in which he compares his music to white light,

which after piercing the prism of the listener acquires different shades.

From this angle, all of the elements in this music meet each other: the

composer, the musicians and the audience. “Me” and “they” become

“us” and things find their natural place. There is balance and order. At

least in the ideal world.

Arvo Pärt has said very little to explain his clear and simple music, which

aims for unity. The fewer the words, the larger the space to interpret the

music. “All is one” and “one and one makes one” are two of the most

typical descriptions. The first sums up his world-view generally, and the

second describes the unity of the polarities of tintinnabuli.

Music crossing borders

The universe of this music is spiritual and the sounds can be seen as “re-

ligious” in a way. People often wonder why Pärt’s music communicates

with people regardless of their religious confession or lack of it, regard-

less of age or ethnicity. Perhaps he has been able to translate something

very human into sound which crosses the borders that normally sepa-

rate people. We do not know; we can only accept this explanation or

offer our own answers.

The Arvo Pärt Centre has been active for some years in Laulasmaa, near

Tallinn, close to where Arvo and Nora Pärt reside. The Centre collects

and systematises materials related to the composer. Once the Centre

opens its doors to the public, researchers will be looking for answers to

such questions.

St. Vladimir’s Seminary in the USA has founded a research field called

the Arvo Pärt Project and, on their website, they claim to attempt to

uncover the part of Arvo Pärt’s compositions which have been most in

the shadow: everything linked to the Orthodox tradition. The seminary

is also the organiser of the concerts of Arvo Pärt’s music taking place in

Washington and New York this year.

Pärt’s latest piece, “adam’s lament”, has drawn inspiration from the

Orthodox spiritual tradition. Written for choir and orchestra, the piece

received acclaim at the Grammy Awards this year, and the BBC Music

Magazine has nominated the album containing this piece for its own

award ceremony to be held this year.

Arvo Pärt and President Ilves on 5 April 2011 at the Arvo Pärt Centre.


Having been kicked out of Paradise, because of sin, the story of

Adam is the story of humankind, according to the composer. Pärt

uses his music to tell a story which was once written down by Saint

Silouan the Athonite. Actually it was made public by one of his

disciples, Archimandrite Sophrony, who Arvo Pärt met in the 1980s

in Essex, UK, and who became an important guide for Pärt, perhaps

even the most important source of support at that time in his life.

The words of encouragement and teachings of Fr. Sophrony helped

the composer who had relocated to the West to keep up his spirits

in the foreign environment and this resulted in a lot of wonder-

ful music. Pärt started to write the music for “Adam’s Lament” in

the early 1990s and Fr. Sophrony managed to share his thoughts

with the composer before his passing. But then the rough drafts

remained in a drawer until a few years ago, when Pärt finalised

the work and made it public. He had matured and become wiser

by twenty years; he was more experienced as a composer and his

sense for life was much deeper.

Whoever listens to the music and tries to touch the sounds and

words with his heart, may find a hopeful message in “Adam’s La-

ment”. This message says that, although many things have turned

out badly, each person and humankind as a whole may find their

way with the help of love.

This is not the end of the road but just a signpost.

A signpost to Arvo Pärt’s music.

The Arvo Pärt Centre (APC), in co-

operation with the Estonian Union

of Architects, recently organised

an international idea competition

in order to find the best architec-

tural solution for its building in

Laulasmaa, near Tallinn.

Seventy-one applications from all

over the world were submitted to

the first round of the competition.

Twenty participants were selected

to continue in the second round.

Among them is the bureau of the

world famous architect Zaha Had-

id, who has designed various arts

venues and opera houses.

In four years, when the Republic

of Estonia celebrates its hundredth

birthday, the new APC will open its

doors to the public in Laulasmaa,

surrounded by the magnificent

pine trees of the Lohusalu pen-

insula. The centre will be located

near the former summer house of

Arvo Pärt’s beloved teacher Heino

Eller. The plot of land in the forest

has been given the name Kellasalu

(grove of bells – ed.).

Anu Kivilo, Executive Manager of

the APC, said: “Laulasmaa has al-

ways been a very special place for

Arvo Pärt and his music. It was his

wish that the centre be located

away from the hustle and bustle

of the city centre. People would

then come to visit the centre on

purpose and not just drop by on

the spur of the moment. Thus the

journey will take some time and

visitors will be in the right frame

of mind.”

The APC architectural competition

was the first of its kind in Estonia.

In the first round of the competi-

tion, the quality of the architects

was assessed. Applicants had to

submit portfolios with four photos

of their previous works. According

to Peeter Pere, Head of the Esto-

nian Union of Architects, the level

of participants at a competition

organised in Estonia has never

been as high. “Just as Arvo Pärt’s

music is special, it is our wish that

the centre be designed to be a top

architectural piece by world stand-

ards. The international level is dem-

onstrated by us having a Fritzger

winner—the Nobel Prize of archi-

tecture—among us,” said Pere.

All of the twenty participants to

make it past the first round are

very well-known and will contin-

ue to compete anonymously and

from the same starting position.

“It is a paradox that special Esto-

nian music and a special composer

are about to bring special architec-

ture into being. This is happening

away from main centres and, as a

result, the pine forest we have se-

lected for the site of the building

will become especially attractive,”

added Pere.

Michael Pärt, Head of the Selec-

tion Committee, said that their

goal was to select those architects

whose previous work best fit the

concept and needs of the APC. “I

am really looking forward to the

next stop on this journey, when

we see the building designs of the

future Kellasalu venue,” said Mi-

chael Pärt. It is planned to select

the winning design by 20 June.

The future building will guarantee

appropriate storage for archive

materials. The new building will

enable the APC to enlarge its ac-

tivities, for example to cooperate

with researchers, and organise

educational programmes, confer-

ences, exhibitions, and music and

film evenings. This will enable the

centre to be more appealing to

visitors.

Visit the competition

homepage at

www.arhliit.ee/apc

The APC homepage:

www.arvopart.ee

ARCHITECTURAL COMPETITION for the Arvo Pärt Centre’s new building

Phot

o: E

velin

Ilve

s

Tõnu Kaljuste and Arvo Pärt during the recording of “Adam’s Lament” in the St Nicholas Church in Tallinn, November 2011. In 2014, conductor Tõnu Kaljuste won a Grammy for the album (released by ECM) in the Best Choral Performance category.

I CULTURE


At the end of January, the conductor Tõnu Kaljuste

won a Grammy for recording Arvo Pärt’s “adam’s la-

ment”. The high recognition was at the same time a

tribute to Pärt’s music. Released by ECM, this particular

album is Pärt’s latest.

In just a few decades, Tõnu Kaljuste has undoubted-

ly become the most outstanding interpreter of Arvo

Pärt’s music. ECM, the reputable Munich-based record

company which has for decades worked closely with

the composer in publishing his newest works, has re-

leased seven albums in which Kaljuste conducts Pärt’s

music.

Released in 1993, the first of those albums – “Te

deum”– was nominated for the Grammy Award in

the Best Choral Performance category for the conduc-

tor, who back then was not well-known in the rest of

the world. For several months, the album topped the

classical charts in Billboard and received many positive

reviews. Hence, their collaboration began at almost

the very top. “Te Deum” was also the first record that

Arvo Pärt made together with Estonian musicians

since his move to the West. He later said that it was all

Kaljuste’s “fault”.

In the early 1980s, Arvo Pärt dedicated himself en-

tirely to writing the choral and orchestral piece “Te

Deum”, but the work didn’t find its right shape un-

til the score somehow found its way to Estonia, and

Tõnu Kaljuste managed to make the music come to

life in a way which impressed the composer. Pärt de-

cided to record “Te Deum” with the estonian phil-

harmonic chamber choir and the Tallinn cham-

ber orchestra, conducted by Kaljuste. The conduc-

tor brought the orchestra together precisely for that

piece of music.

Kaljuste’s chamber choir has a history. His father, Heino

Kaljuste, founded the renowned children’s choir “el-

lerhein” in the early 1950s. Throughout the years,

many young singers grew up in the choir and Tõnu

TõNU KALJUSTE & THE ESTONIAN PHILARMONIC CHAMBER CHOIR

Photos: Kaupo Kikkas


Arvo Pärt will be in attendance

at all concerts.

As Arvo Pärt is going to the US in

conjunction with New York’s St.

Vladimir’s Seminary’s decision to

grant him an honorary degree, the

New York concerts and the Phillips

Collection concert will be organ-

ised by the Arvo Pärt Project at St.

Vladimir’s Seminary.

arvopartproject.com

The concert in the Kennedy Center

will be organised by the Embassy of

Estonia in Washington on May 27.

The event is free of charge and the

Concert Hall seats 2,442 people.

The event is supported by the Esto-

nian Ministry of Culture, Estonian

Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Estonian

organisations, Honorary Consuls and

individuals in the U.S.

www.estemb.org/arvopart

This event will be the highlight of

Estonian culture in Washington, a

unique opportunity to experience a

world-class performance by Estonian

musicians in the busiest concert ven-

ue in the United States. The concert

is also the finale of European Month

of Culture, a festival organised by the

Delegation of the EU to the U.S.

A reception in the presence of Presi-

dent of Estonia Toomas Hendrik Il-

ves and Maestro Pärt will follow the

concert. Funded by Enterprise Esto-

nia, the event aims to promote the

Estonian ICT sector, e-solutions and

tourism.

MAy 27KENNEDy CENTER CONCERT HALL, WASHINGTON Estonian Philharmonic

Chamber Choir and

the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra

conducted by Tõnu Kaljuste

MAy 29PHILLIPS COLLECTION, WASHINGTON musicians from the Tallinn

Chamber Orchestra

MAy 31CARNEGIE HALL, NEW yORK Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and

the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Tõnu Kaljuste

JUNE 2METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW yORK Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, conducted by Tõnu Kaljuste

Kaljuste himself received his first experiences as a mu-

sician with the choir. In 1970, Tõnu Kaljuste gathered

a group of former “Ellerhein” singers of his own age

and founded the chamber choir. They were united by

friendship, a shared history as singers and their desire

to discover new perspectives in music. The sound aes-

thetics which the young conductor aimed for came

from the chamber choir movement in Western Europe.

Their repertoire included works by Bach, but also by

Veljo Tormis: they connected sounds reaching to the

sky with music which got its strength from its roots.

They manoeuvred between the restrictions established

by the Soviet regime, and succeeded in spite of them.

As more and more information about Arvo Pärt’s suc-

cess as a composer abroad reached Estonia during the

time when the Soviet Union was disintegrating and

Estonia was becoming independent again, it was obvi-

ous that interest in Pärt’s music—which had been for-

bidden before—was starting to grow.

Tõnu Kaljuste points out that, after many years, it was

the first opportunity for the composer to explain his

wishes to musicians in his mother tongue. This was

extremely significant, because the soundscape of Pärt’s

music has a fragile and special essence, crystal-clear

and yet pulsating like a living organism. The musical

score often fails to describe this kind of sound pre-

cisely. The conductor recalls that the composer’s rec-

ommendations to confused musicians tended to be in

the style of: “lean gently on the sound”. It seemed

impossible to do. Yet such imaginary shapes have an

unexplainable impact on musicians and they did in-

deed play with another kind of feeling.

Now sixty, Tõnu Kaljuste has, together with the com-

poser, painted the “typical Pärt soundscape” for a cou-

ple of decades. During this time, the experiences have

ranged from disappointments and setbacks, and the

stresses of trying something out, to exhilaration at mu-

sic that reaches the skies. Arvo Pärt has called Kaljuste

the closest interpreter of his music.

ARVO PäRT CONCERTS in Washington D.C. and New york

Hiromi

I CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Outloudz

It is all in the name: years ago the festival received its name from

blending the Estonian words “jaskar” (party – ed.) and the jazzy

“vikerkaar” (rainbow – ed.), combining different colourful music

styles. It has always carried a very positive message.

When anne erm, the organiser of Jazzkaar, managed to pull off

the very first festival as a complete beginner in 1990, she said that

she wanted to introduce local audiences to the best jazz music from

abroad and to give an overview of local music achievements, hoping

that people beyond the borders would hear about it. For twenty-

five years Jazzkaar has generally followed in the same spirit.

For audiences it has been educational to have direct contact

with leading world musicians and creative vibes. The expec-

tations of the audience have in turn spurred on local musi-

cians, making everyone a winner in the end. It is a story of

growth. Jazzkaar has grown into the largest jazz festival

in the Baltic states and one of the largest in northern

Europe. It is also a significant highlight on the European

festival map. It is the only music festival in Estonia with

such a broad scope and high professional level.

Shai Maestro Trio

Gregor Porter

Char

les L

loyd

Courtney Pine

Anne with Al Jarreau and Will Calhoun

Bobby McFerrin

Jan GarbarekAnne Erm with Charles Lloyd


I CULTURE

Jazzkaar More Than Just A FestivalBy iMMo MiHkELson

THE BIGGEST ESTONIAN JAZZ FESTIVAL – JAZZKAAR - WILL CELEBRATE ITS 25TH ANNIVERSARy THIS yEAR, MARKING AN IMPORTANT CULTURAL MILESTONE.

The highlights of the celebration will be world-renowned artistes: the guitarist Pat Metheny with his Unity Band and the vocalist Cassandra Wilson from the USA.

The biggest artists who have visited Jazzkaar are:

Bobby McFerrin (2011)

Angie Stone (2009)

Chick Corea (2012 and 1994)

Dianne Reeves (2010)

Jan Garbarek (2012, 2003 and 1997)

Mike Stern (2001)

Richard Bona (2011, 2003 and 2002)

John Scofield (2004)

Charles Lloyd (2013, 2005, 1997 and 1967)

New York Voices (2013, 2000 and 1996)

and many others

It’s especially surprising that behind this reputable jazz festival is one

person’s perseverance and love of music. The road to success has not

been smooth. But the sound of the music has always been audible and

the sum of positive experiences and the warm spirit of festival days

overshadow anything negative.

Anne Erm says that in the early days things happened randomly. In

1990, she was working as the music editor of Estonian Radio, when a

Georgian blues band asked if they could organise a concert in Tallinn.

She said she would give it a go. Back in those days, the Soviet Union

was ripping apart at the seams due to perestroika and glasnost, and the

rays of hope shining through the gaps spurred the desire to act, which

had been frozen for a long time. Older jazz fans discussed the possibility

of renewing the International Tallinn Jazz Festival tradition, which had

been abruptly interrupted after the legendary festival of 1967, which

had featured the Charles Lloyd quartet. The festival was called off by

officials from the Communist Party.

Toots Thielemans

Char

les L

loyd

Courtney Pine

Avishai Cohen Trio

Ain Agan & Dennis Rowland

Joe Zawinul Band

Joe Zawinul

Hiromi


At the end of the 1940s, the same regime had banned jazz as being

music of the West and saxophones were claimed to be instruments

of traitors. Although later the barriers were lowered, jazz music barely

survived during the entire Soviet era. The reason was that the idols of

this music were located on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Would-be

restorers of the old festival tradition talked a lot, but became very cau-

tious when action was called for. Anne Erm just got on with the work

and did it. She invited performers and convinced sponsors. The blues

concert was followed by a second one and a third one... In the end, the

first festival included approximately fifty concerts and the main attrac-

tion was the Ray Anderson Alligatory Band from the USA.

Once the curtain fell and the sounds had faded, all of the sponsors

pulled back and the debt was left for Anne Erm to pay. It was an aston-

ishing and painful fall. But after having shed some tears, Anne pulled

herself together, kept persuading sponsors, paid off the debts and or-

ganised another festival the following year. She fell hard once again

and the year after that as well. The fourth time out, she managed to

remain standing, although wobbly, and by the tenth festival she could

call herself a winner.

Today the festival (run by Anne and her small all-female team) can feel

victorious when looking at its track record: the numbers are impressive

as is the list of celebrities who have performed at the festival. But the

numbers tell only a part of the story. It happens every now and then in

various places that a sequence of events becomes a beacon in the eyes

of the people, and continues to inspire people. Jazzkaar has pushed Es-

tonian culture upwards, it has introduced Estonia all around the world

and, transcending all borders, it has made its contribution to the crea-

tion of amazing experiences in the world of music.

Long live Jazzkaar!


I CULTURE

Estonian Song And Dance Celebration Touches HeartsBy Maris HELLranD / Internal Communications, Estonian Song and Dance Celebration Foundation


The Estonian Song and Dance Celebration is a

unique event that brings together a giant choir

of 25,000 people every five years for a week-

end in July. More than 100,000 people enjoy

the concerts and sing along with the most

popular songs.

The song celebrations have been held since

1869 and have become the main anchor of

Estonian identity. Twice the song celebrations

have led to Estonian independence. In the 19th

century the choirs and song celebrations were

at the core of the national awakening of a for-

merly peasant people who discovered the val-

ue of their own language and cultural heritage

through singing. The national awakening and

establishment of identity led to Estonian inde-

pendence in 1918. After WW II, during the So-

viet occupation, the song celebrations helped

to keep the national identity alive. The Soviet

powers understood the propaganda potential

of the celebrations and added Soviet songs to

the repertoire; however, people still sang their

favourite national songs. In 1988 several hun-

dred thousand people gathered at the song

festival grounds and sang for days and nights

for freedom. The Singing Revolution ended the

Soviet rule and led to Estonian independence

once again in 1991.


I CULTURE

More than 20 years after regaining independence, the Song Celebrations

are still as popular as ever. Estonians from all over the world come home

for the celebration, like for a family gathering. The prospect of participat-

ing in the Song and Dance Celebration motivates Estonians at home and

abroad to join choirs and dance groups and helps to keep the traditions

and language alive in the globalized world. The repertoire is challenging

and choirs practice for two years in order to pass the selection auditions.

According to a recent study, 90% of Estonians have personal experi-

ence with the Song and Dance Celebration as performers or audience

members. The Song and Dance Celebration has been listed by UNESCO

as oral and intangible heritage since 2003.

Quite a few foreign choirs have participated in the Song Celebration

in recent years. The artistic director of the Piedmont children’s choir,

Robert Geary, said: “It’s a completely different and overwhelming ex-

perience. It’s not so much that it was loud, although it was a very full

sound, an amazing sound. It created an environment that somehow

felt like you were a battery plugged into a battery charger; your soul is

plugged into a battery charger.”

This summer the theme of the Song and Dance Celebration on 4-6 July

is “Touched by Time. The Time to Touch.” What are the real things that

have touched us and changed our lives? The Song and Dance Celebra-

tion is always touching. It is not just a few choirs singing but a powerful

emotional experience. The strong positive energy spreads to the audi-

ence. The otherwise cool and reserved Estonians show and share their

emotions among each other and with guests.

Together with the song celebration, a dance celebration is held, and in

three performances 8,600 dancers aged 8 to 80 form complicated pat-

terns on a stadium lawn to live music.

On Saturday all participants join in a colourful procession from the city

centre to the Song Festival Grounds, singing and dancing during the

five km journey to the cheers of the public.

All concerts and performances take place in the open air. Tickets are on

sale for 4-50 Euros.

www.laulupidu.ee


Lottemaa (Lotte’s land – ed.) will open on a 18-hectare seaside land plot

near the summer resort of Pärnu in July 2014. It will be the largest fam-

ily theme park in the Baltic states. Lottemaa is an original family leisure

park based on the dream world of Janno Põldma and Heiki Ernits, and

will offer both children and adults exciting activities and playful forms of

participation. Popular animation films, theatrical productions and books

by Põldma and Ernits introduce Gadgetville, home to the friendly and

ever helpful girl-dog Lotte, with her faithful friends: the cat Bruno, the

rabbit Albert, the old traveller dog Klaus, a fly called Jaak and other fun

village inhabitants.

Children can play with Lotte and her friends, visit Lotte’s home, build

some inventions with Lotte’s father Oskar, have fun on the adventure

trails and work out with the cat Mati in a stadium. Kids can discover

the house of the rabbits, with its mysterious attic and surprising plan-

etarium, and also visit the cat Bruno’s house, with its fantastic scale

models of Lotte’s trip to the South. Over a hundred different attractions

and games wait to be discovered.

There are exciting activities, and opportunities to make things on your

own and to test your nerves on the adventure trails, for both small

and big visitors. In the fox Giovanni’s home, you will find a 500-seat

theatre, where the in-house troupe will perform a funny play about

life in Gadgetville several times a day. There are also performances by

singers, dancers and circus artistes. In the evenings, there are plays and

concerts for adults.

Lottemaa Welcomes Visitors Beginning In JulyThere is Walt disney’s original theme park disneyland

in southern california in the Usa, and in paris in europe,

and astrid lindgren’s World—a theme park where children can

meet pippi longstocking, emil and Karlsson from the roof—in

sweden. Finland, our neighbour, has moomin World, based on

the moomin books by Tove Jansson. In July, lotte, a cartoon

character cherished by estonian children, will spring to life in

the theme park lottemaa, built at the site of a former soviet

missile base near pärnu.

Gadgetville has eleven large buildings and over a hundred different attractions. Almost 90 staff members are at work on a daily basis taking care of visitors.

Watch the trailer of "Lotte and the Moonstone Secret" here:


I TOURISM

As one must have a proper meal during an active day, there is a food

street with seating for 250 in Lottemaa. Even the best Tallinn restaurants

would be proud of the menu. For a light meal, there are also various

pancake kiosks around Lottemaa.

On hot summer days, one can visit the beach, which has a play area for

children and opportunities to cool down by going for a swim or enjoy-

ing an ice-cream shake.

Lottemaa is the place to be if you have the urge to discover things, and

to find joy and playfulness. It is a place for all age groups, and positive

emotions are guaranteed. The programme of the amusement park also

caters to Latvian-, Russian-, Finnish- and English-speaking visitors.

As Lotte says: “GOODNESS MAKES LIFE INTERESTING”

The tandem Põldma and Ernits have made two feature-length animated

Lotte films: “Lotte from Gadgetville” (Leiutajateküla Lotte) in 2006, and

“Lotte and the Moonstone Secret” (Lotte ja kuukivi saladus) in 2011,

which have both been dubbed into English.

Estonia In BriefOfficial name: Republic of Estonia

State order: Parliamentary republic

Area: 45,227 sq kilometres (17,500 sq miles)

Population: 1,294,236 inhabitants: 67.9% Estonians, 25.6% Russians and 6.5% others

Population density: 28.6 people per square kilometre. Over 70% reside in urban centres

Capital: Tallinn with 427,894 inhabitants (as of 1 Sep 2013)

Other major towns: Tartu (98,522), Narva (64,041), Pärnu (42,433), Kohtla-Järve (40,032)

Administrative divisions: 15 counties (maakond), divided further into 226 local municipalities,

incl 33 towns and 193 rural municipaliites (vald)

Islands: 1521, the biggest being Saaremaa 2,671 sq km, Hiiumaa 989 sq km, and Muhu 198 sq km

Biggest lakes: Lake Peipsi 3,555 sq km (1,529 belong to Estonia), Lake Võrtsjärv 271 sq km

Longest rivers: the Võhandu River 162 km, the Pärnu River 144 km, and the Põltsamaa River 135 km

Highest point: Suur Munamägi (Great Egg Hill) 318 m

Air temperature: annual average +7ºC; March +6.3ºC; July +17.7ºC (2013)

Official language: Estonian, a member of the Finno-Ugric group. Russian is widely spoken.

Many Estonians speak English, German, and Finnish

Alphabet: Latin

Religion: Predominantly Protestant (Lutheran)

Currency: euro (EUR) since 2011

Average salary: 887 EUR (as of 2012)

Driving: Right hand side of the road. Speed limits in town 50 km/h, out of town 90 km/h.

International driving licence required

Weights and measures: Metric system

Electricity: 220 volts, 50 Hz

Country calling code: 372

Emergency number: 112 (free of charge)

National flag: Blue-black-and-white

National holiday: 24 February (Independence Day)

National anthem: Mu isamaa, mu õnn ja rõõm (My fatherland, my joy and happiness)

National flower: Cornflower (Centaurea cyanus)

National bird: Chimney swallow (Hirundo rustica)

Member of EU, NATO, OECD, WTO, and Schengen area


For more travel details, please consult the

sources below: www.visitestonia.com

(Estonian Tourist Board), www.riik.ee/en.

Tourist information centres are located in all

larger towns.

The Tallinn Tourist Information Centre in the

Old Town is located at 4 Kullassepa Street - no

more than 10 steps from the Town Hall Square

(ph.: + 372 645 7777, e-mail: turismiinfo@

tallinnlv.ee). The Tallinn Tourist Information

Centre in Viru Keskus (ph: + 372 610 1557,

610 1558), open every day 9 am - 9 pm, is lo-

cated in the centre of the city. A wide selection

of maps, brochures and publications in several

languages (largest selection in English) can be

found at local bookstores and tourist informa-

tion centres.

VisaAs of 21 December 2007, Estonia is a part of

the Schengen visa area.

Nationals of EU and EEA member states are

free to enter Estonia. The required travel docu-

ment for entry is a national ID card or passport.

Nationals of the following countries do not

need visa to enter Estonia, and can stay for up

to 90 days in any 6-month period: Andorra,

Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Brunei, Canada,

Chile, Costa Rica, Croatia, El Salvador, Guate-

mala, Holy See, Honduras, Hong Kong, Israel,

Japan, Macao, Malaysia, Mexico, Monaco,

New Zealand, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay,

San Marino, Singapore, South Korea,

USA, Uruguay, Venezuela. The re-

quired travel document for entry is a

valid passport.

Citizens of countries not mentioned

above require a visa to enter Estonia.

Visitors arriving in Estonia with visa

must have national passports valid

at least 3 months after their planned

departure from Estonia.

Children aged 7 to 15 years must have their

own passport when travelling to Estonia or, if

they are registered in their parent’s passport,

must have their photo next to the name. Chil-

dren under 7 years need not have a photo if

they are registered in their parents’ passports.

Persons above 15 years must have a separate

travel document with photo.

For detailed information on visa requirements

and entry rules, please consult the Ministry of

Foreign Affairs website at www.vm.ee/eng.

ArrivalBy plane: Recently renovated, the Tallinn Len-

nart Meri Airport, just 3 km from the city cen-

tre, is welcoming, modern and user-friendly.

Among other amenities, travellers have access

to a free WiFi area in the transit zone. The air-

port’s 24-hour customer service telephone is

+372 6058 888.

Tartu Airport is situated at Ülenurme, near

Tartu. Flights from Tartu to Helsinki depart six

times a week.

Regional airports are located in Kuressaare

(Saaremaa), Kärdla (Hiiumaa), and Pärnu; these

provide no regular international connections.

By ship: With over 6 million passengers an-

nually, the Port of Tallinn is undoubtedly Es-

tonia’s main gateway. Large passenger ferries

arrive from and depart for Helsinki and Stock-

holm regularly. The 85-km Tallinn-Helsinki line

is served by ferries that make the journey in

2 hours; hydrofoils and catamarans make

the trip on 1.5 hours and operate between

April to November-December, depending on

weather conditions. Travellers should note

that different ferry lines depart from different

terminals and harbours. The City Port with its

four terminals is a 10-15 minute walk from Tal-

linn Old Town; the Paldiski-Kapellskär line uses

the Port of Paldiski, about 50 km from Tallinn.

By car: Border checkpoints greet travellers

entering or departing the country by way of

the Estonian-Latvian border points at Ikla (the

Tallinn-Riga highway) and Valga, as well as

on the Estonian-Russian border at Narva (the

Tallinn-St. Petersburg highway), Luhamaa,

Koidula and Murati. On the Estonian-Russian

border, all traffic is subject to border formali-

ties both when entering and leaving Estonia.

By bus: Not only is travel by bus the fastest

and most convenient mode of international

public transportation in the Baltic states, it also

offers excellent value for your money. Regular

connections service all major cities in the Bal-

tic countries and St. Petersburg. Eurolines Lux

Express and Hansabuss offer comfortable Riga

Airport transfers from Tallinn, Pärnu, Klaipeda,

Vilnius, Panevezys, and Šiauliai. Prices start

from €20.00. A useful tip: Regular passenger

buses have priority at the border checkpoints,

so travel is smooth.

By train: There is only one international over-

night train to Moscow.

Practical Information For Visitors


I TOURISM

CustomsWe suggest travellers consult with the Esto-

nian Customs Board help desk (ph.: +372 880

0814 or www.customs.ee) for details. The

limit on import of alcoholic beverages from

outside the EU is one litre for beverages over

22% alcohol content, and two litres for bev-

erages up to 22%, and four litres for wine.

Import of tobacco and tobacco products from

non-EU countries is limited to 40 cigarettes or

100 cigarillos or 50 cigars or 50 g of tobacco

products. Counterfeit goods, including pirated

CDs, video and audio tapes, are prohibited

by law. A special export permit is required for

specimens of plants and animals of endan-

gered species, protected species and hunting

trophies (please contact the Nature Conserva-

tion Department, Ministry of the Environment

for details). Articles of cultural value produced

in Estonia more than 50 years ago also require

special permits (please contact the National

Heritage Board).

Getting Around EstoniaInter-city public transportation Public buses are the easiest, cheapest and most

convenient solution for visiting Tartu, Pärnu or

any other of the larger towns. Buses from Tal-

linn to Tartu depart every 15-30 minutes, to

Pärnu every hour. On weekdays, seats to these

destinations are almost always available even

immediately before departure (watch out for

special events). For weekend travel or trips to

more remote locations with fewer connec-

tions, it is advisable to buy tickets in advance.

The Tallinn Bus Terminal is located at Lastekodu

46. The timetable is also available online at

www.bussireisid.ee and ticket information is

available at telephone +372 6800 900.

Travelling by car

Travellers hoping to see more of the country

and the rural areas it would be best advised

to travel by car. The roads are quite good and

traffic is light. Crossing Estonia from north to

south or west to east by car takes approxi-

mately three to four hours. All major car rental

agencies have offices in Tallinn. It is also pos-

sible to rent the car in Estonia and drop it off

at a rental agency in Latvia or Lithuania, or vice

versa. The speed limit in rural areas is 90 km/h

and in cities 50 km/h. In some areas the high-

way speed limit is increased during the sum-

mer months. Headlights and seatbelts (front

and back) must be on at all times. Driving un-

der the influence of alcohol or other intoxicat-

ing substances is punishable by law.

Local TransportTaxis: Taxis must clearly display their fares,

driver’s taxi service licenses, and a meter. The

initial charge for entering a cab ranges from

2 to 3.5 euros. Different taxi companies have

different rates, but the average charge per

kilometre is 0.5 euros. There is no additional

charge for ordering the taxi by phone, and it

usually takes the cab just five to ten minutes to

arrive. All taxi drivers must give you a receipt

(in Estonian, ask for “Kviitung, palun”). Locals

usually give the exact fare and no tip. As in

most major cities, some dishonest drivers at-

tempt to overcharge unsuspecting passengers.

If in doubt, note the taxi company and license

plate number.

public transportation: Tallinn has a public

transport network of buses, trams and trol-

ley-buses. Other Estonian towns have buses.

Check the time schedule for Tallinn bus lines

for any bus stop at www.tallinn.ee/eng.

Free public transport: As of 2013, all resi-

dents of Tallinn, students and passengers 65

years and over are entitled to free travel on

Tallinn public transport.

Tickets for visitors: The Public Transport Card

Ühiskaart may be purchased for the price of

€2. This smart card, onto which you can load

money, or e-tickets can be purchased from

post offices and online at www.pilet.ee. Per-

sonalise the card for €1 at the point of sale or

for free at www.pilet.ee/yhiskaart.

If you are using pay-as-you-go credit, your

smart card automatically calculates the cheap-

est fare within the next 24 hrs (never more

than one-day travel card). Validate your jour-

ney with Ühiskaart immediately after entering

the public transport vehicle. You can also buy

tickets from kiosks and from the driver (single

ticket €1.60 and student ticket €0.80). Try to

have precise change (cash only) for the driver.

The ticket is valid for one journey only in that

specific vehicle. Discounts only for ISIC Scholar

and Student Card holders. Holders of a vali-

dated TallinnCard are entitled to a free ride.

AccommodationsAll major hotels in Tallinn have been newly

built or completely renovation in recent years.

Despite annual additions to the number of ho-

tels and rooms, it can nonetheless be difficult

to find a hotel room on short notice (particu-

larly over the week-end). For the best selec-

tion, we urge visitors to Tallinn and the rest of

Estonia to book hotel rooms in advance. For

more details, see the Estonian Tourist Board

website at www.visitestonia.ee.


MoneyOn 1 Jan 2011, Estonia adopted euro as its

currency thus replacing the Estonian kroon

which had been the only valid currency in

Estonia since 1992.

Most larger hotels, stores and restaurants ac-

cept Visa, MasterCard, Eurocard, Diner’s Club

and American Express. However, it is advisable

to carry some cash with you.

Traveller’s checks can be exchanged in most

banks but are less likely to be accepted in

shops. Eurocheque is the most widely ac-

cepted traveller’s check, but American Express

and Thomas Cook are also accepted. Banks

are plentiful and easy to find in Tallinn. Most

are open from 9:00 to 18:00 on weekdays,

while some offices are also open on Saturday

mornings. All banks offer currency exchange

services. Exchange offices can also be found

in larger hotels, the airport, harbour, railroad

station and major shopping centres. ATMs are

conveniently located around town; instruc-

tions are in English, Russian and Estonian.

Telephones and InternetThe country code of Estonia is 372. Dial 00 for

outbound international calls.

The GSM mobile phone system is available;

please check compatibility with your operator.

Public Internet access points have been set

up all over Estonia. They are located in local

libraries and post offices. There are over 100

wireless free Internet zones around the coun-

try, many of them in rather unexpected places

- beaches, Old Town squares, stadiums, and

concert halls.

Emergencies112 is the emergency number for ambulance,

police and fire department. The police can

also be reached directly at 110. Emergency

numbers can be dialled free of charge. Select

pharmacies are open 24-hours-a-day in many

major towns. The one in Tallinn is located at

10 Pärnu Road (opposite the Estonian Drama

Theatre); the one in Tartu is located in the

Town Hall building (Town Hall Square).

National HolidaysEstonians celebrate January 1 as New Year’s

Day, a rather slow and quiet day as people re-

cover from the festivities. Shops open late and

banks are closed. February 24, Independence

Day, is celebrated with a parade of the Esto-

nian Defence Forces at Vabaduse väljak (Free-

dom Square). May 1 is a bank holiday, similar

to Good Friday and May Day. June 23 is the

biggest holiday of the year as Estonians cel-

ebrate Midsummer Eve and the Victory Day in

commemoration of the 1919 Battle of Võnnu,

and June 24 is St. John’s Day (Midsummer).

August 20 is the Day of Restoration of Inde-

pendence (1991). December 24 (Christmas

Eve), December 25 (Christmas Day) and De-

cember 26 (Boxing Day) are usually spent at

home with families.

FoodTraditional Estonian cuisine consists of simple

peasant food, such as cottage cheese, pota-

toes and bread, all of which are still important

components of the local diet. The Estonian

dark bread is the main staple missed by Esto-

nians abroad. Typical Estonian dishes do not

feature prominently on restaurant menus, and

traditional home cooking is more likely to ap-

pear at small eateries in remote areas. Still,

a few establishments have made Estonian

specialities their niche; to sample Estonian cui-

sine, try the Vanaema juures, Kaerajaan and

Kolu Tavern (Open Air Museum) in Tallinn,

and the highly recommended Muhu Kalakoh-

vik and Lümanda söögimaja on the Island of

Saaremaa.

The list of the top 50 Estonian restaurants can

be found at www.flavoursofestonia.com


I TOURISM

DrinksThe main drinks in Estonia are beer, wine and

vodka. While many young city residents opt

for beer or wine, the older generation and

rural folk tend to prefer vodka. In the 1930s

Estonian vodka made it into the Guinness

Book of Records as the strongest vodka in

the world (96º). Local brands of beer enjoy

a very strong market position in Estonia. The

two main breweries are Saku and A. Le Coq.

Saku is Tallinn-based, and its corporate col-

our is navy blue while A.Le Coq is brewed in

Tartu and its colour is red. There are also many

smaller breweries. A full list of Estonian beers

is posted at www.BeerGuide.ee

Spirits also include some traditional liqueurs.

The famous Vana Tallinn (Old Tallinn) has a 45º

alcohol content, and is coincidentally made

from 45 ingredients - the recipe is known only

to a handful of people. Indeed, the legendary

19th-century kristallkümmel (caraway liqueur)

has made its long-awaited comeback.

Estonian wines, made from currants or other

local berries, are rather sweet. Wine lovers

usually prefer imported wine, of which there

is an ever-increasing selection at stores and

vinoteks. A very popular and refreshing non-

alcoholic drink is kali, made of bread, malt,

rye or oats flour and yeast; it has a character-

istically dark brown colour. It was with this

drink that the Estonians forced the Coca-Cola

company into submission, or at least into a

business deal. Kali was enjoying phenomenal

sales, while Coke was not selling up to expec-

tations. It was then that Coca-Cola decided to

broaden its horizons by buying one of the local

kali trademarks in order to make a profit on

the stubborn Estonians.

EntertainmentThe entertainment scene in Estonia is vibrant

year-round, providing visitors and locals alike

with a long list to choose from. Concerts, festi-

vals theatre, street raves, DJ competitions – Esto-

nia has it all. It is not by chance that both Tallinn

and Tartu have their own opera and ballet thea-

tre. Tickets are an excellent value for the money;

concert tickets cost around 10 euros, and best

seats at the opera are yours for about 25 euros.

For more information on the concert schedule

see www.concert.ee; the programme for the

national opera is posted at www.opera.ee.

Tickets can be bought at the box offices or via

ticket agencies located in all larger supermar-

kets, or via Internet www.piletilevi.ee, www.

piletimaailm.com and www.ticketpro.ee

Even the most sceptical museum-goer is bound

to find something intriguing in Estonia’s large

selection of museums, which feature every-

thing from history, art, photography to toys,

chocolate, musical instruments, even wax fig-

ures and many other topics. Most museums

are closed on Tuesdays and many on Mondays

as well. It is advisable to have cash on hand

as many museums do not accept credit cards.

Tallinn is also bustling well into the night with

booming and blooming club scene. Clubs are

usually open and packed with energised vibes

from Thursday to Sunday, with Friday and Sat-

urday drawing the liveliest of crowds. In addi-

tion to local and resident DJs, clubs frequently

present guest performers from London, the

US and other club hubs. For those looking for

a more mellow night on the town, Tallinn’s

street are brimming with pubs, vinoteks and

bar-restaurants, many of which offer live mu-

sic even on weekdays. Rather take in a movie?

Films in cinemas are shown in the original lan-

guage with subtitles.


ShopsSouvenir shops in Tallinn and most other tour-

ist locations are open seven days a week,

10:00-18:00 or 19:00. Big supermarkets and

hypermarkets are open seven days a week

from 9:00-21:00 or 10:00-22:00. Department

stores close a few hours earlier on Sundays or,

in smaller towns, may be closed on Sundays.

Smaller food shops may have shorter open-

ing hours. Some 24-hour shops can be found

as well. Other shops usually open at 9:00 or

10:00 and close at 18:00 or 19:00; they of-

ten close early on Saturdays and are closed on

Sundays. The majority of shops accept credit

cards, with the exception of smaller stores and

stores in rural areas.

SouvenirsSouvenir and shopping preferences vary

hugely but there are certain souvenir gifts that

have gladdened many a heart. Estonian handi-

craft comes in many forms. There are woollen

sweaters and mittens with local ethnic pat-

terns, linen sheets and tablecloths, crocheted

shawls and veils, colourful woven rugs, hand-

made jewellery and glassware, baskets, and

an array of wooden spoons and butterknives

made from juniper. Fine and applied art for

show and purchase is on display at art gal-

leries around the country, featuring graph-

ics, glass, ceramics, hand-painted silk scarves

and leatherwork. Various herbal teas from

wild plants are available at pharmacies. Local

honey – pure or flavoured, e.g. ginger, is an-

other delicious treat. In rural areas, you may

find hand-milled flour. And those who keep

coming back swear by the Estonian black rye

bread. To bring home local spirits, popular

choices include Vana Tallinn or kristallkümmel

liqueur or local beer. And there is no place bet-

ter than Estonia to buy Estonian music.

CrimeAlthough common sense is advisable in all

destinations, Estonia gives no particular reason

to be excessively worried. Do not walk the un-

lit and abandoned areas alone at night. Do not

leave bags or items of value in the car, as not

to tempt car thieves or robbers. Pickpockets

may operate at crowded tourist destinations

in Tallinn, so make sure your wallet and docu-

ments are stored safely.

LanguageEstonian is not widely spoken in the world, so

Estonians do not expect short-term visitors to

master the local language. Still, local people

are thrilled and pleased to hear a foreigner say

“Tere!” (Hi!) or “Aitäh (Thank you) in Estonian.

Knowledge of foreign languages is naturally a

must for hotel staff and numerous other pro-

fessions in the service sector. Many people are

fluent in English, particularly the younger ur-

ban generation, and a great number of people

also speak Finnish, due to Finnish TV, Finland’s

close proximity to Estonia and the great num-

ber of Finnish tourists. German is less widely

spoken in Estonia, although previous genera-

tions have often studied German, not English,

at school. Russian-language use has dropped

to a point where older people no longer speak

the language well and the younger generation

have already chosen other languages to learn

at school. Studying French has become more

popular over the last few years but the number

of people who speak French is still quite small.

An English-Estonian dictionary is available on-

line at www.ibs.ee/dict.

EstoniansEstonians are typical Nordic people – they are

reserved, not too talkative and speak rather

monotonously, with very little intonation. All

this may give one the impression of coldness

bordering on rudeness. But rest assured, this

is not the case, and the speaker may actu-

ally be extremely well-meaning, even excited.

There are several well-known Estonian sayings,

such as “Think first, then speak”, “Weigh eve-

rything carefully nine times before making a

move”, and “Talking is silver, silence is gold”.

It is, therefore, no wonder that the people are

not very good at small talk, do not waste too

much time on grand introductions, and usually

come straight to the point. This is why Estoni-

ans’ English may sometimes sound shockingly

direct. There is, however, often a subtle irony

involved in Estonians’ utterances - delivered

with a serious face and just the slightest twin-

kle of the eye.

Estonians are relatively individualistic. There

is a saying that five Estonians mean six par-

ties. Even though people agree on the final

objective, they insist on reaching it in their

own ways. Estonians also value their privacy.

In the old days, it was said that the neigh-

bour’s house was close enough if you could

see the smoke from the chimney. Modern,

tight-packed urbanites flock to remote coun-

tryside on the weekends to enjoy more space

and privacy.

Even though guests at birthday parties and

concerts are rather quiet and subdued in the

onset, they warm up eventually and turn into

a direct opposite of their day-character, as you

are likely to see in Tallinn’s clubs.


I TOURISM

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