Estonia – the homeland of Kazaa, Skype and Hotmail

When one introduces Estonia abroad as a highly developed info technological country, one gets surprised reactions from pure wonderment to ironic and doubtful nods “Is that so…really?” Asking what does Estonia, Hotmail, Kazaa and Skype have in common, an unsavy person would not know what to answer. Estonia is, yes, one country somewhere, the location of which might be difficult to define for some persons. The computer users obviously know what are Kazaa, Skype and Hotmail, but most of them don’t know how they are linked to Estonia. Actually it is very easy. Estonia is the country, which could be called the homeland of the three info technological super achievements.

“Hot mail” – Hotmail

The oldest, biggest and well known of those is obviously the Hotmail system, whose lineage “father” is 37-year-old Steve Jürvetson (one of the owners and also managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson). Steve’s father and mother escaped from occupied Estonia to Canada, where they met for the first time and also married, before moving to the States.

At first, Steve worked as a young risk investor and during these times bought the risky project of Hotmail from a young Hindu for 300 000 dollars and began developing it. After two years, Jürvetson sold the product for 400 million dollars to Microsoft.

KaZaa – shared files and court cases

The primary code writers of KaZaa and Skype are Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu and Jaan Tallin – all of them 32 years old and childhood friends. They programmed the original KaZaa code together with an Estonian and Swedish team.

KaZaa’ s birth resulted in several court cases around Europe and also in the US. After enormous success, the founders sold KaZaa to Sharman Network, who still offers KaZaa downloads. The well-known North-European portal Everyday.com was also created by the same trio – Heinla, Kasesalu and Tallinn.

The free phoning software Skype conquers the world

After selling KaZaa to Sharman Networks, Zennström and Friis decided to establish a new company and hired the same programmers who created KaZaa. The team got also an addition in a new Estonian programmer, named Toivo Annus. The new company created a highly popular software – Skype, which enables the user to make free telephone calls all over the world. The only condition necessary to talk is that the persons need to install Skype into their computers.

The advantage of Skype compared to other similar programs (like MSN Messenger for example) is the purity of the sound quality, the living proof of which is the growing user base. The free Internet phone created by three young men could have serious consequences in the communication business, at least that is what various info technology and telecommunication specialists predict.

Talking about e-Estonia one cannot leave out Estonian e-government, the Estonian machine-readable ID-card, which has served as an example to quite a few countries in the world. Go, e-Estonia, go!

Written by Priit Kivi & Dea Martinjonis