In a nondescript Soviet-era building in a suburb of Estonia's capital, Tallinn, is one of the telecommunications world's most important research outfits. It is the development centre for Skype, a software product that allows free, or very cheap, phone calls from any internet-connected computer. Skype is a global company recently bought by eBay, an internet auction site, for $2.6 billion. Its Scandinavian founders used programmers not from pricey Silicon Valley or faraway India, but from a small east European country that has barely figured on the business landscape in software, or anything else.
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