I TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION
Giuseppe Carnevali, the president and founder of Navionics compares Estonia with Silicon Valley where you can feel technology in the air
These popular apps often rank high in the sales charts in their field. The best-selling Navionics app has almost a quarter of a million user sessions a day. Its nautical charts cover the whole world, including Antarctica. According to Carnevali, Navionics has several competitors, including Garmin, but Google is not among them. “We are below their radar screen. Google’s approach to maps is too general, and they don’t speak the language of boaters and skiers,” Carnevali claims.
Why Estonia? Last spring Navionics opened a branch in Estonia, where according to Carnevali they plan to hire a large team: probably a hundred software developers eventually. Carnevali: “When we started to research where to expand, the only thing we knew about Estonia was that Skype was created in Tallinn. I had also seen a documentary on Estonia, about how its first prime minister after regaining independence was very young, full of youthful, vain and exciting spirit and had done a great job. It sounded like a good place to be for Navionics. Our core business is innovation. It is in our DNA. We apply it to location-based services. We are
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LIFE IN ESTONIA I 2013 FALL
looking for people who like innovation, from environments which favour innovation.” Navionics also considered Estonia to be business friendly, with great transparency, relatively low corruption and bureaucracy, a competitive tax policy, flexible labour laws and great openness to the world. So, as Carnevali explains, Navionics wanted to add a new business culture to its global mix: the Estonian culture. When asked what innovations will come next in the area of navigation and location-based services, Carnevali is not too keen on disclosing his ideas. He likes the arrogance of Steve Jobs, who has said: “customers do not know what they want until we provide them with what they want.” The cost of labour is definitely not the lowest in Estonia, and good people are hard to find. However, in Estonia, technology is in the air: you can feel it and breathe it. There’s a lot of excitement around innovation, technology start-ups and e-government, according to Carnevali. He goes on: “Estonia is sort of like Silicon Valley, where people like to go to meet their
enthusiastic peers. Estonia is in almost the same time zone as Italy, while Silicon Valley is nine hours away.” At the same time, according to Carnevali, Estonia is relatively little known, and thus has good potential for growing smart technology companies. “We hope to find in Estonia a place that allows us to be more competitive in the global market.”