How intelligent can your house be?

Imagine your house being really smart one day.  Almost as smart as you! Not only it would be extensively “furnished” with sensors and easy-to-use as your cappuccino machine, but it would also think independently. And realize what are you comfortable with. That’s Yoga’s dream, writes IT and innovations news website TigerPrises.com.

Reduce costs by 50%

Yoga is an Estonian undertaking that develops self-learning intelligent building system. It controls everything – from lighting to climate, room-by-room, for both, offices and residential buildings. With an investment roughly 1500 euros you can get your own Yoga system, with endless programming possibilities, that allows you to reduce costs on cooling, heating, ventilation and lighting by 50%. 

Priit Vimberg and Raivo Raestik, the founders of Yoga claim that they saved 40% after installing the system in their small office in Tallinn. For instance the lights were used only during the time when people were at their desks.

Self-learning house

Watch the video below, where Priit and Raivo explain how it all works! One of the most fascinating things they talk about is the self-learning skills of the system.

Yoga-guys make an interesting point: 80% of all costs made into the buildings in their lifetime are operating costs from which the majority is related to energy usage. This means that construction costs are only 20% of total cost of ownership related to buildings lifetime.

Something to think about

So when wisely planning your house, it is possible to reduce the energy usage more than 60%. And this means that your house will be 50% cheaper from birth till death.

Second point they make is that if only half of the new buildings would be constructed with 50% lower energy usage, it lessens the CO₂ emission by more than 6 million tons. That’s something to think about. 

There’s one intelligent Yoga building in Tallinn already – Juurdeveo 19th.  The second one will be Tammsaare Business Center. Yoga’s goal is to become a company with global reach and 1 billion euros revenue by 2015.

Need for money

What they desperately need is money. For some time already they have searched for an investment of 9,7 million euros to enter the global market.

Some people lack faith in Yoga though. That is quite understandable, since the company went into bankrupcy in 2007 and restarted its operations in 2008.

We’ll see. Yoga’s future is laregly dependent on the energy prices, but as we know the frantic boom in this sector is over for the moment.

Source: TigerPrises.com
Check out the VIDEO

Venture capital fund stops calculating NAV

Estonian investment bank Gild Bankers announced that it has stopped calculating the net asset value (NAV) of the units of Estonia’s only venture capital fund Gild Arbitrage.

Tõnno Vähk, partner of Gild Bankers and fund manager of Gild Arbitrage, told Äripäev that the decision was made because at present it was simply not possible to calculate risk reliably.

Vähk said that it was not yet clear when the fund will be able to announce net asset value of its units.

The bank told investors in December that the estimated value of the investments of Gild Arbitrage was between 50 and 116 million euros at the end of November. The worst-case scenario shows a loss of 27 percent and the positive scenario a profit of 69 percent.

Vähk said that since the fund is no longer calculating NAV, the information given to investors included such a wide range. “We are operating in a turbulent market climate with very low liquidity where one cannot accurately assess risks,” he said.

Read more: BBN