So where is Estonia?

In winter 1993 when, being one of the lucky members of US State Department/USIS international guest team of politicians and few journalists from 34 states who were offered a chance to attend Bill Clinton inauguration, shake the hand of the new president and travel then around US for weeks, an Houston businessman who was sitting next to me at one of those inter-US flights asked me where I am from. I told him I am from Estonia. He then said, ok, you are from Estonia, but from which country. I said again I am from Estonia. He repeated his question. Then I realized he had never heard of state called Estonia and he had thought its some town or village somewhere in Europe. No wonder, accounting the population of Estonia is just 1.3 million and the noise these people make is a bit known in Europe but not so much at other continents. When I had my internship at Washington Times foreign news desk in autumn 1990, my colleagues there even doubted at first Estonians have their own language and they seemed to think its just some kind of weird Russian tribe - until they found Estonian-English dictionary at my table. Shortly - Estonia is a chilly country in North Europe but without icebergs yet even that in some winters it really feels so and there are even rules for school-kids that allow them to stay at home when the temperature is too freezing. If you know where the biggest Europe states are you can see where Estonia is clicking these words - new map of Europe.

Estonians wrote Skype basic code

Do you know Skype basic code was written by Estonians? Thats what world media has said on that:

The New York Times, Hot Technology for Chilly Streets in Estonia, December 13, 2005:

/...there is an outlaw mystique to some of Estonia's ventures, drawn here to Europe's eastern frontier. Whether it is online gambling, Internet voice calls or music file-sharing - Skype's founders are also behind the most popular music service, Kazaa - Estonian entrepreneurs are testing the limits of business and law.

/For the 150 people who work at Skype, Estonia is clearly where the action is.

"What Skype has shown the world is that you can take a great idea, with few resources, and conquer the world," said Sten Tamkivi, the 27-year-old head of software development.

/More than 70 million people have downloaded Skype's free software from the Internet. /.../On a recent evening, 3.7 million people were logged on to the service, nearly three times the population of this country.

/.../Although Estonian developers wrote Skype's basic code, only a fraction of the eBay bonanza went into Estonian pockets.

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Small Estonia a big leader in global IT revolution, DPA (German news agency):

Estonia may be the original home of the revolutionary internet communication company Skype, but it's hard to find a completely Estonian business among the numerous information technology (IT) companies in the Baltic state.

With Skype being its hottest calling card, tiny Estonia has transformed itself into a something of a Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe./.../