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December 04, 2006
Alt Energy And Tech Pioneers - Nine From Europe
Since 2000, The World Economic Forum (the Davos confab that brings together the Bill Gates and Bill Clintons of this world) selects a few dozen "technology pioneers" each year - the ones that are going to be "changing the world as we know it", says the WEF.
The a:c euro doesn't know about the "world changing" part, which is probably more applicable to the bioscience companies, but Europe was the source for nine of the alt energy and computing- communications companies, which could end up to be great businesses.
Certainly, Ron Kok's OTB, a Dutch company whose products radically changed some parts of chip manufacturing, and now applies the cost-reducing know-how to solar cells, is already one.
Our impression from past years was that too many of the winners were from the portfolio of a single European venture capital fund or not very disruptive. This time some of the ventures have very original products and a few haven't been VC funded yet, such as Enfucell, a paper battery company, and Flisom, a Swiss solar cell startup. And a couple of others, Truphone and ClimateWell, are privately financed.
Regular readers will recognize a few some names from recent posts (see profiles below the jump), but also some that we have not covered, listed right here with descriptions from the WEF Technology PIoneers website:
A Russian Inventor And A British Entrepreneur Have Some Newfangled Electric Car Batteries (image of 3wheeler above is also from UMC)
UltraMotor Company - UK
UMC has developed an entirely new design concept for electric motors which provides high-end performance in a robust, low-cost solution. Ultra-motors are “permanent magnet DC motors. They consist of a steel stator disk with multiple permanent magnets attached and five U-shaped electro-magnets positioned on the outer rotor.
Dutch Startup IceMobile Delivers Up Sex And Sport Video Content To Mobilephones
IceMobile The Netherlands
IceMobile is a leading publisher of mobile entertainment content. In addition to publishing mobile video content on the portals of 30 European mobile operators, IceMobile launched its VideoCall2TV technology that allow viewers to make a video call from their third-generation (3G) mobile phone to a TV program and participate in the show with live spontaneous performances.
ClimateWell's Solar Powered Air Conditioners
ClimateWell - Sweden
ClimateWell AB is a supplier of highly efficient solar air conditioner equipment with the unique ability to store energy and convert hot water to cooling and heating. ClimateWell’s technology makes it possible to use solar energy for delivering cooling not only when the sun shines but around the clock.
Enfucell Ltd Finland
Enfucell, Ltd. develops thin and flexible power supplies for disposable micro electronic devices, such as smart cards, music playing greeting cards, micro mobile sensors, LED on paper, electronic paper, bi-stable display, and radio frequency identification tags.
Flisom AG Switzerland
Flisom, a Swiss Federal Institute of Technology spin-off, has a high-efficiency copper-indium-gallium-selenide solar cell technology that it plans to put on plastic foil—not glass—potentially opening up new applications like solar for cell phones.
OTB Group The Netherlands
OTB Group is a leading company in the design, engineering, development and manufacturing of tailor made inline production equipment. OTB Group operates through three units: OTB Engineering, OTB Display, and OTB Solar.Alfresco Software Inc UK Company Profile: Alfresco offers true Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) - Document Management, Collaboration, Records Management, Knowledge Management, Web Content Management and Imaging. Alfresco dramatically lowers total cost of ownership through open source distribution, working in the user's native environment, minimizing training and using low cost, loosely coupled hardware.Truphone UK/Germany
The company has developed a software infrastructure that allows mobile phones with Wi-Fi to make calls and send SMS messages using only Wi-Fi and the Internet. Crucially, when a Truphone-enabled mobile handset is out of Wi-Fi range it reconnects to the mobile network, allowing customers to roam between the two networks.DeepStream Technologies designs and manufactures digital sensors for three-dimensional packaging.This time around, over half of the Technology Pioneers 2007 are US-based companies, the UK has six and the Netherlands, India, Israel and Singapore two each; while Canada, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland have one each.
Link - WEF Tech Pioneers 2007
Posted on December 4, 2006 10:55 AM | Posted to Early stage | Permalink
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