Ahti Heinla

Co-developer of Skype, Heinla is an Estonian programmer and entrepreneur who served as Lead Architect on the project alongside Priit Kasesalu and Jaan Tallinn. They had also originally developed Kazaa, which started as a peer-to-peer file sharing application using the FastTrack protocol licensed by Joltid Ltd. and operated as Kazaa by Sharman Networks. As of August 2012, the Kazaa website was no longer active. Skype The service allowed users to communicate with peers by voice using a microphone, video by using a webcam, and instant messaging over the Internet. Phone calls may be placed to recipients on the traditional telephone networks. Calls to other users within the Skype service are free of charge, while calls to landline telephones and mobile phones are charged via a debit-based user account system.

Skype has also become popular for its additional features, including file transfer, and videoconferencing. It was first released in 2003 and developed into a platform with over 600 million users and was bought by Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5 billion.

The network has been operated by Microsoft, which has its Skype division headquarters in Luxembourg. Most of the development team and 44% of the overall employees of the division are situated in Tallinn and Tartu, Estonia.

Heinla received the 2008 Estonian Volunteer of the Year national award and has also served as an organizer of Let's Do It 2008, a civic action with 50,000 volunteers participating in cleaning up the countryside of Estonia in one day. He has been a member of the board at the nature protection NGO Estonian Fund for Nature from 2006.

Heinla has served as a co-leader of The Estonian tech-visionaries along with Asko Seeba — the former Engineering Manager at Skype. He and Rainer Nõlvak are developing what they call "predictive content personalization technology". They planned to debut this technology in a project called DailyPerfect. That is a news site that predicts your interests through an automated semantic analysis of information publicly available on the web. DailyPerfect's site was meant for everyone reading news online and wishing to find interesting stuff easily. They don't tell too much about this, since the project is at the moment in closed beta-stage.

But will be launched publicly at the beginning of next year. DailyPerfect was initiated by Ambient Sound Investments and Curonia Research.