Skype Tallinn

At the big CEO Forum in Beijing the two Swedes part of the program was Niklas Zennström of Skype and myself.

He was in China in order to pave the way for broader use of Skype in the rapidly increasing Internet community of the country. And I noticed in the media that eBay CEO Meg Whitman at the same time was in South Korea announcing the setting up of their Asia headquarters in Seoul.

There is no denying that Skype is an interesting company that is part of the new wave of Internet development that we are now seeing.

And it is certainly interesting to see where Skype intends to locate those of its different activities that require a more physical address than just cyberspace.

Its research and development unit is not being set up in Stockholm, San Jose or Bangalore but instead in Tallinn in Estonia. The plan is to grow to no less than 400 people there. This entails recruiting locally, but I guess it also has to entail people moving from other parts of the world to Tallinn.

This was bound to happen. The success of the Baltic tiger economies is obvious, and Estonia has been in the lead in developing different aspects of information technologies. It is rapidly catching up with the most advanced nations.

The combination of Skype and Tallinn is a combination that says a lot about the trends shaping our tomorrow.


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