OpenCoffee in Tallinn

For almost a year now we have regularly had OpenCoffee meetings in Tallinn. From here you can read more about the global OpenCoffee movement. Shortly: The OpenCoffee Club was started to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow.

In Tallinn we meet once a month, 9 o'clock in the morning. We have met at the Scotland Yard pub at Mere puiestee. No registration, no fee, just turn up and meet people. The meetings have been very interesting and you can always meet somebody with a new and fun idea. Usually there have been 10-20 people there. For the last half a year there has always been somebody from MicroLink's incubator team. Either Rauno, Tõnis or me.
The main organizer behind the Estonian OpenCoffee is Jüri Kaljundi and a big thanks to him for bringing the club to Estonia!

The meetings have been really positive. If estonians (or finns for that matter :-) usually need like 3 beers before they start to talk to strangers then at Opencoffee there are no such ridiculous communication barriers. Really open, really intelligent and really interesting people who all want to share their ideas and opinions. To be honest I was surprised by that at the first meeting. :-)

So if you are near by for the next meeting, come by! We can all speak good english and many of us also Russian. You can find interesting people and ideas there. The next meeting will be announced on our Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6854479626 or if you are interested then send me an e-mail and I will let you know.

Buying software development from Belarus

We visited Belarus a week ago and made contacts with their software development companies. We are currently running a pilot project with one of them - ITransition and in creating software for one of our incubator's new e-services idea. "SLA calculator" will be an e-service that will allow (IT) service providers to generate automated reports for their customers with whom they have a Service Level Agreemeent.

Anyway, the Belarus software industry and the companies made quite an impression on us. It seems to be a serious industry there. They have even created a virtual Technology Park meaning less taxes and burecraucy for the members. The Technology Park will later become a physical one when in some 3-5 years time the required office buildings will be built. On the airport there are software development company's ad's instead of mobile operator's and beer ad-s like in Tallinn. Everybody we met, over ten salesmen and specialists, talked freely english. in my mind the most important was their will to do projects and to get foreign work, even mediocre sized projects were in their interest.

We are planning to have the specifications for our incubator e-services (http://inkubaator.microlink.ee) done in Tallinn and the coding in Minsk. (At least if the pilot goes well.)

In Minsk: the city is renovated, people are nice, roads are good, KGB seems to be present, but if you are a foreigner bringing in money that is just good as it keeps the small-time criminals away).

Don't stay in the Hotel Minsk. It is way too expensive for what you get and the personell is not that nice, especially the guy in the bar who wanted to cheat on us. :-)

Better way to incubate new e-service business ideas

Beginning from august there will be a programmer in our MicroLink's incubator (homepage in estonian: http://inkubaator.microlink.ee/) team. Therefore the process of incubating new ideas will be faster and better. We call the new incubation concept "MicroLink Lab". The process of incubating new ideas will be roughly following:
- The owner of the e-service idea presents it to us. If we like the idea then:
- ML and the owner of the idea will create a first prototype of the solution.
- The owner will contact the first potential customers, demonstrate the prototype and from their comments refine the business idea, finance plan and also the requirements for the service.
- A full business and finance plan is created and agreed on. A plan of work is agreed on. A marketing and sales plan is created.
- A full technical solution is created, programmed.
- Going to market = fulfilling all the plans that were agreed on.

If you are interested in the incubation or have a good business idea feel free to contact our incubator team at inkubaator@microlink.ee