![]() ![]() In 20, Niklas Zennström, a Swede, and Janus Friis, a Dane, were developing peer-to-peer technology with some Estonian engineering whizzes. It is in this paradox of a place – a country where tourists still flock to the Museum of Medieval Torture Instruments, but whose president started computer coding at age 13 – that a world-changing technology was created. ![]() They should come over here and have a look.” “They expected us to be living on farms without normal facilities, then came over and were pleasantly surprised and a little bit embarrassed by just how advanced some things are over here,” Bowman says. When his British family was preparing to attend his wedding in Estonia, Bowman got all sorts of cultural and travel inquiries, including whether they’d be able to drink the water. “My mother sent me packages of thermals to wear,” he says. During his first winter in Tallinn, the temperature got down to 22 below zero. In England it hits the news if the temperature hits five degrees below zero, Bowman says. ![]() Still, he admits Estonia took some getting used to. “A lot of people may tell you that Estonians are very serious and not particularly friendly, but I’ve found the opposite,” he says. In Tallinn, Bowman found beautiful forests and beaches, more vodka than he’d ever before encountered (he still can’t keep up with the locals), absolutely unforgiving winters and surprisingly warm and welcoming people. “Estonia just threw out all the old Soviet stuff and started again, and they started over very well,” says James Bowman, a Skype employee who moved to Tallinn from Brighton, England, six years ago to be with his Estonian girlfriend (now wife). Tallinn residents now use mobile devices to buy bus tickets and pay for city parking, and from gas stations to cafes, have enjoyed nearly ubiquitous Wi-Fi for years. Modern glass and steel buildings began to rise, and the city became renowned for its civic forward thinking. In Tallinn, a city The New York Times would eventually call “a sort of Silicon Valley on the Baltic Sea,” the craggy, medieval town wall became a monument and the medieval moat a city park and walking trail. The country, with its medieval buildings and Russian Orthodox churches and cobblestone streets, decided to refashion itself as a high-tech hub. So Estonians elected young, creative, tech-savvy leaders, and got to work untangling decades of mismanagement and replacing the country’s dated infrastructure. When was skype created free#began to crumble, Estonia became independent once more.Īt a time when much of the developing world was driving at high speed into the Internet age, the newly free Estonia was saddled with crumbling, Soviet-era infrastructure – not much by way of a ride. After two centuries of Tsarist Russian rule, Estonia gained its independence after World War I, only to lose it again after World War II when the country was swallowed up by an expanding Soviet Union. To fully understand the ambitious, high-tech, torpedoes-be-damned hearth in which Skype was forged, start by understanding Estonia.Įven if you only go back a modest couple of hundred years, the country’s political history can issue a Wimbledon-style whiplash. So now I say I’m the president of the country where Skype is,” he mused to employees during a visit to Skype’s Palo Alto, Calif., office a few years ago. “Not many know where Estonia is, but everyone knows Skype. It’s a business card even Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves carries. But straightaway after Skype was created, everybody started using Skype as a business card for Estonia. ![]()
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