“This is f…ing sick!” Kresten Buch, the Founder of HumanIPO has apparently said to this. Yet, the crazy startup has received a quite a response from social media and Estonian media.

Hundreds of people have downloaded Smashr already! The Founders say they are earning money by giving the users “an option to cheat”!

What I wonder is, can the technology that Smashr is based on, be used in any other, perhaps more practical ways.

Look at the video, where I spoke with Smashr-guys after the Garage48 weekend.

Estonian business registry shows that new investors behind the project are Regio (the well-known mapping, mobile positioning and GIS software developer), Estonian Development Fund (Arengufond) and its Chairman of the Supervisory Board, entrepreneur Raivo Vare. Investment sum, as I recall Martinson telling me earlier, was around 200 000 euros.

I wrote a post on Inner Circle few weeks ago. In september the team will go to Silicon Valley to prepare for the launch.

Inner Circle aims to establish a new social network, much like Facebook, but lot more private, crap-free and easier to use.

Martinson says that 95 percent of all the communication currently takes place in smaller groups: among family, collegues, friends, hobby groups, training mates etc. Facebook is extremely popular, with hundreds of millions of users (over 200 000 in Estonia already), it has a plentitude of functionality, but Facebook is not the best communication tool for smaller groups.

„Facebook has lists and groups, but they are inconvenient to use. Everyone is your „friend“, irrespective of how they became your fiends,“ Martinson says.
In the new soon-to-be revealed environment of Inner Circle, currently in rough beta phase, the users will be able to switch in between different groups with ease, share content, information,  multimedia – in other words do all the modern social communication things – separately in each of their group.

A group of eight people, among them Ahti Heinla – a founding engineer of Skype, Siim Teller – a well-known blogger and Tõnu Runnel – a famous startupper and Founder of Edicy, came to together for 48 hours (12 hours of sleep – two nights – included) and built a rocking tool for designers, that already has over 234 users worldwide.

The idea came from Tõnu Runnel and Priit Haamer from Edicy. But four days ago they had only one page description of it. User interface, design, coding – everything was done over a weekend.

Runnel and Haamer wanted to solve the problem they had – designers have hundreds of ideas and many of them in sketchbooks. Why not storing them, letting others to collaborate, work on them in an interactive way, play around with them? This is what Defolio tries to do. It’s like a design library, but very sexy one, and one of the best parts of it is that you can upload files simply by dragging them to the site uploader.

Siim Teller told me that Defolio has already received a „marridge proposal“ from an Estonian creative agency, but as far as I understood the team of Defolio is eager to develop it further independently (not from angel investors, of course) and the features we are currently seeing – this is just the beginning. Thumbs up!

He gave me a video interview, describing his gushy, yet concealed feelings after 48 hours of intensive collaborative startup building, heavy brainwork in other words. Salumaa was amazed by some of the projects and he says it is likely that the next Garage48 event will be in Helsingi this October, but definately in Tallinn next spring.

Crowd of people, all together about 100 persons with different backgrounds gathered in Tartu on Friday, formed 17 groups and started building startups (working beta products) from scratch.

Yesterday evening the honorary jury announced the winner – Defolio – a collaborative designing service, backed by famous startuppers Siim Teller, Tõnu Runnel, Ahti Heinla and others. I will have separate post on Defolio and few other more interesting projects (JoinMyBet, Cashmuse, RichRats, GoSpotIt and Smashr) during this week. 

TestMarket would like to congradulate the organizers behind Garage48 – it truly is one remarkable and enjoyable event.

BDA will focus on major corporate clients, offering them digital archiving software (that they can use independently), digital archiving as a service (with management and storing) and databases archiving.

It is interesting, when CEO of the new company, Kari Maripuu, talks about how banks, for example, currently archive their documents, loan agreements and everything. Yes, of course they have backups, but those are insufficient in long term. The banks can’t assure that sensitive information is stored securely for decades. This is where BDA wants help them.

Take a look at the video below (in Estonian), where Kari Maripuu explains the plans of BDA. 

Another startup in this critical area of storing information is Eesti Arhivaar, owned by entrepreneurs Valentin Ivanov (the Founder of Yaika.com) and Stanislav Tšerepanov.

Eesti Arhivaar targets smaller clients, mostly SME’s, but even private individuals. What happens if you have bought a TV and discovered one year later that it doesn’t work, but the invoice is lost? It means that you are in trouble and have to pay for the repair. Well, not if you are using Eesti Arhivaar’s software tool Arhivaar PRO, where you store all your documents, contracts and important invoices. It will help you keep your paper management under control and you don’t need a shoebox for storing invoices.

„It happens very often in companies that when the boss asks secretary for a document, she starts to panic, because the document can either be in sales department or on the accountant’s desk, stored in a strongbox or perhaps even laying on the bosses table somewhere,” Valentin Ivanov explains. „We can help to solve this mess!”

Ivanov has some interesting ideas for extra archiving functions in Arhivaar PRO. How about archiving an e-mail or a website in one click? Or how about giving any document a digital signature in only few clicks, after you have entered the program with your ID card?

The goal of Eesti Arhivaar is simple – to become the market leader of digital archiving in Estonia!

However, tough for both of the new enthusiastic startups – Baltic Digital Archive and Eesti Arhivaar – is the fact that they have to sell trust from day one, similarly to any insurance company. But it takes years to earn trust and respect.

Another thing perhaps haltering their business is the small market size - it goes especially for Eesti Arhivaar, focusing to Estonia.

Artec’s STB’s with Vecly’s software are currently sold in Estonian electronic stores. But Vecly is now targeting much larger partners such as Renesas, NEC, NXP and Trident-Adecq. The company is also having negotiations with Levira, the main TV and radio broadcast network operator in Estonia.

Vecly’s consideration is following: China, where majority of STBs are obviously produced, is an inexpensive country for electronics production, but Chinese software is far from being perfect. Here’s where Vecly enters into the game.

Yrjö Ojasaar says that in the next 3-5 years transition to digital broadcasting will happen in many countries worldwide. Consumers will have higher quality TV and much higher number of channels.

Want it or not, all the analog TV watchers will need to buy the STB. But STB, as we know, is basically a computer, enabling much more than just showing TV. It allows to play games, without the need to buy separate console, X-Box or Wii. It can also be used to share content – movies, pictures etc. It allows video on demand. One can even use Skype, Facebook and Twitter via STB.

„Set-top boxes become the multimedia centers of our lives!“ Ojasaar imagines.

And that will open up totally new possibilities not only for consumers, but for advertisers. In times when conventional TV ads are drying up and Internet advertising is growing, one could expect to see new special advertising channels distributed via STBs. For example a gardening channel paid by your local gardening store.

We’ll see. One thing is for sure though: Vecly wants to be present in all the countries going through the switch from analog to digital.

Who doesn’t know yet – last week I was invited to Ministry of Economic Affairs to pitch my blog in front of small audience and the honorable jury.  I showed the promotional video that I prepared for Stanford University audience in summer 2009. I have to admit the video looks a bit funny, because I am saying there that I do not need Facebook and Twitter. That is not true of course.

I explained the jury that for me TestMarket.eu is a one-man-band. And if I would stand by and look at this project, I would consider myself very stupid, yet self-confident. The bottom line is that I consider having a lot ( and I mean A LOT) to learn in this area of tech blogging, but I am still going ahead with the blog bull-headedly.

What am I missing the most? That Estonian startups would be even more active in letting me know about their plans and ambitions. That one day I would find partners in this project that would share the „light and fun“ burden of covering the Estonian tech scene in English. That this blog would have more win-win partnerships with people and institutions that share the same goal.

That I would have more time to look at TestMarket.eu from the business point of view and start testing crazy ideas. It is incredible how many interesting plans I have. Some of them will be realized very soon.

As I told the jury – it is all too much fun and that’s the core. But – believe it or not – if some people think monetizing a blog in Estonia is not possible, then my case proves the opposite.

What else makes it fun? That I receive surprising feedback from all over the world. From Lebanon and Dominican Rebublic, for example, where people ask me if Estonian technology sector has any medical supplies to sell. Or from China, where Mr Chang wonders how much does the Estonian jammer cost and how it works. I wrote a post on a company developing jammers two years ago.

So the jury gathered for 30 minutes and announced me as the winner. I received a small testimonial and will be given „a little something else“ during the grand season-opening business gala, organised by Enterprise Estonia and The Chamber of Commerce in September 7 at the Estonian Concert Hall. Additionally I am going to proudly represent our small nation in „European Enterprise Awards 2010“ final next spring in Budapest.

Anyway, stay tuned for more stories on Estonian startups. Coming this week: Vecly and Baltic Digital Archive. I will be in Garage48 event this weekend with my eyes open. Also in pipeline: lost and forgotten Estonian startups. How to cover a startup failure? Estonia – a hub for global cyber terrorists?

Marius Arras, the CEO of Indilo talks about a multimedia e-book publishing tool, currently under intensive development, that would enable anyone to publish his or her materials (books, notes) as e-books in a sexy multimedia-rich way and start earning money through purchases from the AppStore.

The „do-it-yourself“ process of publishing e-books via Indilo’s new tool will be simple: enter your manuscript, add videos, audio files or pictures, preview the whole thing, set the price for your e-book and publish it. Of course, at some point you will have to pay Indilo around 100 USD and they will charge a certain percentage from sales.

Arras says that Indilo is entering e-publishing business beside regular app development for three reasons. Firstly, because e-books are already most sold item category in AppStore. Secondly, because estimates show the sales of iPad multimedia tablets skyrocketing over few years. And thirdly, Amazon has announced that people already buy more e-books than paper books.

„If you have purchased a device like iPad and you like reading e-books, you would propably prefer the ones that give you multimedia-rich reading experience,“ Arras explains. „The problem currently is that there is no service, that would enable any self-publishing author or small publishing house to create stand-alone multimedia-rich e-books and publish them in AppStore.“

Whom would this be targeted? Cooks for example. There are no easier way to publish e-cookbooks with nice pictures and videos than this. Question is whether people are willing to buy this book.

I have also spoken with Yrjö Ojasaar, one of the investors behind Indilo. He has expressed his blithesome happiness about the profitability of Indilo. Estonians have truly gone mad for Apple.

„Are you ready to help build a technology that has the power to change the way people communicate?“ the company asks in their Estonian job ads. „We are dedicated to building a world-class team to create the next wave of innovative mobile services.“

Isabelle Dumont, Product and Corporate Marketing Director of Seven Networks tells me that the company will open a new office in Tallinn to support its worldwide growth and plans to enter aggressively into new product areas that tackle some of the most challenging problems faced by the telecom industry today. Seven, she says, is a profitable business and continues to expand globally.

“We have secured several new global customers over the past 12 months, including Samsung Mobile,” Dumont explains. According to her, the focus of the Estonia office will be R&D and it will be staffed primarily with development engineers and related supporting infrastructure.

New location was selected based on its proximity to the Seven office in Helsinki, Finland. No wonder the Estonian business registry shows that Seven Networks Estonia is lead by a Finn Petri Tapani Tuura.

But the reputation of Estonian tech sector also seems to play a role.

“Estonia, one of the smallest new European Union member states has established itself as one of the fastest-expanding economies of the EU. The proximity to the Nordic countries, well-known for their technological and telecommunication innovations, has had a positive effect on Estonia, bringing the country among the most advanced in Europe in terms of telecommunications infrastructure,” Dumont praises us.

What else we would need to know about Seven, besides the fact that its headquarters is located in California? Maybe that even though it has a global reach – products in production around the world in 14 languages and 70 countries, running on more than 550 device models across six operating platforms – it only has four R&D centers, one in Redwood City (US), one in Hangzhou (China), one in Helsinki (Finland) and now … in Estonia!

I tried to look for the financial results of Seven, but that wasn’t very easy task.  How big is the company in terms of revenue and how profitable it is?

But now, four years later, there’s a depressing dispute between Laufer and Playtech. Martin Leiger from Playtech Estonia’s public relations refuses to comment what is it about, referring that there’s a trial ongoing in Estonian court. One thing, however, is certain: the issue will not improve Playtech’s reputation.  

Boaz argues that he was fired from Playtech unfairly, due to one of his tasks – he was working on a Playtech’s Intranet project, but it failed and according to Laufer, Playtech managers thought he was to blame for this. But he objects having done anything wrong.  

But it turns out that Laufer hasn’t been exactly a blue-eyed boy himself. A well-known Estonian white hat hacker Tõnu Samuel „discovered“ the Israeli few weeks ago. Samuel has dedicated a blogpost to him, writing that the former Playtech employee has spread spam shamelessly over the web in different weblog commentariums, including Samuel’s.

Laufer has established many websites related to online gambling – for example tomatocasino.com (printscreen below), smsslot.com and others – and is desperatrely looking for ways to promote these. „It’s a monkey-business, he earns 100 dollars from here, 100 from there…“ Samuel quesses.

Boaz’s LinkedIn profile confirms his connections with the related gambling websites. Question is whether his online gambling activities have anything to do with the dispute with Playtech and if he ran his own business already when working for the company?

Laufer has responded to Samuel’s accusations furiously. He claims that he owns many internet sites, but his internet marketing company Human Sapiens has nothing to do with spamming. “I build traffic into my sites using legitimate marketing ways,” he wrote in a comment to Samuel’s post. Samuel says that Laufer has even considered suing him for slander, but hasn’t taken any actions yet and will probably reconsider, “like the spammers usually do!”

Boaz confirmed me over a phonecall that he is not a spammer and that he considers moving its business to Latvia, where people are assumingly friendlier. But I guess the question „who do you believe?“ would sound a bit awkward here.