WEF Technology Pioneers 2011 announced: GetJar, foursquare, Knewton, Layar, Scribd, Spotify etc.

The World Economic Forum has announced the Technology Pioneers 2011. 31 companies have been named Technology Pioneers. I met Rodolfo Lara Torres who is in charge of the Technology Pioneer Program a few times and posted an interview in 2009.

This year a few New Media and Web companies are listed aswell, e.g. foursquare, Knewton, Layar, Scribd, and Spotify. However, Cleantech is dominating the Pioneer List. Here are the WEF Technology Pioneers 2010:

CLEAN TECH
Digital Lumens, USA
Digital Lumens integrates LEDs, networking and software into a single “smart” system that promises improved efficiency, control and operational oversight of lighting at industrial facilities. The system can reduce customers’ lighting-related energy use by up to 90%.
http://www.digitallumens.com/

Ecovative Design, USA
Ecovative’s vision is to grow sustainable products that directly replace plastics. Its products require far less energy to create, can be grown from many different regional feedstocks and can be composted without processing in backyards and gardens.
www.ecovativedesign.com

Ferrate Treatment Technologies, USA
Ferrate Treatment Technologies (FTT) makes a patented reactor small enough to fit into the back of a pick-up truck that can disinfect up to 20 million gallons of water a day and do the job more cheaply than harmful chemicals or competing technologies. The ferrator strips electrons from liquid iron to make ferrate; the most powerful, multi- purpose environmentally-friendly water and wastewater treatment chemical known.
www.ferratetreatment.com

Flexoresearch Group, Thailand
Flexoresearch has developed a series of novel blended enzymes that recovers pulp/fibre from laminated paper waste, such as milk cartons, and uses it to replace the virgin pulp now used to make new paper. The recovered pulp/fibre can also be used in building materials and to make vehicle brake pads for the automotive industry.
www.flexoresearch.com

Novacem, United Kingdom
The cement industry alone is responsible for 5% of man-made CO2 emissions and, up until now, has not had low-carbon solutions to deploy at scale. Enter Novacem, which has developed a new type of cement which absorbs more CO2 than it emits during production.
www.novacem.com

On-Ramp Wireless, USA
On-Ramp Wireless’s Ultra-Link Processing (ULP) System enables the low-power monitoring and control applications used in smart grids, industrial sensing and location tracking.
www.onrampwireless.com

OPOWER, USA
OPOWER has designed a behaviour-based, energy- efficiency program that helps utilities motivate their customers to save energy.
www.opower.com

Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies, Canada
Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies has developed a new generation of wastewater treatment systems that not only helps treatment plants run more efficiently but also solves major environmental issues and provides a new revenue stream for municipalities: commercial fertilizer.
www.ostara.com

Quintas Renewable Energy Solutions, Nigeria
Founded by a physician dismayed at the loss of life when power outages occur during childbirth and surgical operations, Quintas develops inverters specially designed to meet the challenges that poor and erratic power generation and distribution pose to people in Nigeria whose businesses and daily activities require continuous power supply.
www.quintasenergies.com

TaKaDu, Israel
Water scarcity is one of the biggest issues facing the world. There is not only not enough clean drinking water to go around, the world loses much of what it does have through leaks in ageing water networks. More than four and a half billion gallons of water are lost in transit every day in the United States, according to the US Geological Survey, and 25% to 35% of water is lost every year worldwide, according to the World Bank. This is where TaKaDu comes in. It is tackling the multibillion dollar problem by bringing a smart grid approach to the water sector.
www.takadu.com

Tendril, USA
Tendril helps both consumers and utilities manage energy consumption. Its smart grid technology helps utilities achieve better load balance. And, the company’s technology, a software-as-a-service model, provides a two-way communication link between energy utilities and their customers, giving consumers more specific information about their energy use.
www.tendrilinc.com

Topell Energy, Netherlands
Topell Energy has developed a highly efficient method of making solid biofuel from woody biomass, a process known as torrefaction. Torrefaction of biomass cuts transportation costs and renders the conversion of biomass into power and heat more efficient. Torrefied biomass is an environmentally-friendly and practical alternative to fossil coal.
www.topellenergy.com

Transonic Combustion, USA
Transonic Combustion makes a fuel injection system that offers automotive manufacturers a near-term, cost- effective solution to vastly improve fuel economy of new cars and trucks, and help meet stringent emissions regulations.
www.tscombustion.com

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AND NEW MEDIA
Aster Data, USA
Companies are now amassing terabytes and even petabytes of data. As volumes explode, traditional databases have become bottlenecks, hampering corporations from getting deep insights into consumer behaviour, real-time fraud analysis and patterns and trends that could improve their business. Aster Data, founded by three PhD students at Stanford University, is helping companies overcome this challenge by providing an innovative new technology to store and rapidly analyse huge volumes of data.
www.asterdata.com

Atlassian, Australia
Atlassian builds software to help technical teams collaborate more effectively. The company, which has made seven acquisitions in the last eight years, raised an additional US$ 60 million in venture capital in July 2010. It has over 20,000 paying customers in 134 countries, including Facebook, Oracle, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, major investment banks and Formula One teams.
www.atlassian.com

foursquare, USA
Foursquare is a popular online service combining location, gaming and social networking that lets people “check in” and report their location to help find friends or tips about the place they are visiting.
www.foursquare.com

GetJar, Lithuania/USA
GetJar is the second largest apps store, after Apple’s. The company’s key point of difference is its open market approach, which allows it to deliver applications to telephone across all major platforms such as Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, iPhone and Symbian. It offers more than 70,000 mobile applications to consumers in more than 200 countries. The company has so far generated more than 1 billion application downloads.
www.getjar.com

Knewton, USA
Education is beginning its Internet moment. Within 10 years all educational textbooks are expected to be digital, delivered through powerful e-readers. Students everywhere will be able to take accredited Web-video classes led by some of the world’s best teachers. Knewton’s mission is to bring data mining to this transition, by offering analytic tools for teachers and adapting concepts to the way individual students learn.
www.knewton.com

Layar, Netherlands
Fancy knowing what the Berlin Wall looked like before it fell? Thanks to Layar you can, by simply pointing your mobile phone at the location. The company helps people better understand context through an emerging mass medium called augmented reality.
www.layar.com

NetQuin Mobile, People’s Republic of China
Today’s smart phones are tiny computers, complete with operating systems, storage and wireless access to company’s internal networks, making them an enticing target for hackers and Internet criminals. That is where NetQin Mobile comes in. Based on a cloud security platform, the company delivers mobile security services, including anti-virus, anti-spam, privacy protection, data backup and restoration, and online virus scan to 51.5 million users worldwide. The company controls 68% of the market in China for mobile security – it is the only provider of anti-spamming service to China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile operator ? but some 30% of its user base is outside of China.
www.netqin.com

OpenDNS, USA
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a 25-year-old crucial part of the Internet’s infrastructure, which encompasses the routing system used to transfer data, such as e-mails. OpenDNS’ mission is to push control of the DNS to the periphery, enabling consumers and network administrators to secure their networks from online threats, reduce costs and enforce Internet use policies without the use of software or costly appliances.
www.opendns.com

ReputationDefender, USA
ReputationDefender specializes in helping consumers and business shape how they are seen online. It sells different security products on a monthly subscription basis, allowing consumers and businesses to monitor information about themselves across the Web, bury undesirable information and promote vetted content to the top of research results.
www.reputationdefender.com

Scribd, USA
John Adler, Founder of 2008 Technology Pioneer Accuray and inventor of the CyberKnife, encountered a lot of barriers to publishing one of his papers in a medical journal. The peer review process and glacial pace were frustrating. Adler realized that what he really wanted was to quickly make his paper accessible to as many people as possible. Adler’s complaints led his son Trip and his classmate from Harvard to create Scribd, a Web 2.0 document-sharing site that aims to make it easy for anyone to publish original work on the Web and find a readership.
www.scribd.com

SecondMarket, USA
In the last decade, the time from company formation to initial public offering has extended from five to 10 years, leaving employees, founders and venture capitalists with limited means to get liquidity in the interim. SecondMarket gives the marketplace an alternative
to going public or selling companies. It is the world’s largest centralized marketplace and auction platform for trading illiquid financial assets that cannot be traded in the public markets.
www.secondmarket.com

Spotify, United Kingdom
Spotify, founded by European serial entrepreneur Daniel Ek, is a digital music service that works across multiple hardware platforms, offering music fans an alternative to the two other main options now available: Apple’s iTunes and piracy. It has rapidly grown from a small Swedish music service to an international company with 7 million users across six European countries, generating more revenue for rights holders than Apple iTunes in some territories.
www.spotify.com

Vortex Engineering, India
Vortex Engineering develops automatic teller machines for rural environments, adapting them to run on lower amounts of power and to dispense soiled banknotes.
www.vortexindia.co.in

LIFE SCIENCES AND HEALTH
Adimab, USA
Adimab was founded by two of the world’s leading yeast biotechnologists, Dartmouth’s Tillman Gerngross and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Dane Wittrup, with the goal of significantly speeding up the drug discovery process while improving the overall quality of therapeutics. The two professors have built an antibody discovery and optimization platform that is broadly applicable to all disease and can be accessed by the entire pharmaceutical industry.
www.adimab.com

Ion Torrent, USA
Ion Torrent is pioneering a radically faster and cheaper approach to gene sequencing by marrying simple chemistry to powerful, proven semiconductor technology. The company is the third headed by Rothberg to be named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer. Rothberg is credited with inventing massively parallel sequencing. His team at 454 and the Baylor Genome Center was the first to make public the sequence of
an individual human genome. He is also credited with initiating the Neanderthal Genome Project with Svante Paabo.
www.iontorrent.com

Medicine in Need (MEND), South Africa
Millions of people in the developing world die needlessly each year because of infectious diseases such as TB, HIV and malaria that could otherwise be prevented or treated. Medicine in Need (MEND) aims to ensure the world’s poorest people get access to effective, life-saving drugs and vaccines by reformulating existing products to make them more suitable to administer in developing countries and by assuring that new discoveries in these areas yield sustainable products that can be commercialized.
www.medicineinneed.org

Molecular Partners, Switzerland
Molecular Partners is working on novel medicines based on designed ankyrin repeat proteins (DARPins), a promising class of non-immunoglobulin proteins that can offer advantages over antibodies in drug discovery and drug development.
www.molecularpartners.com

Neuronetics, USA
Despite major advances in treating depression, nearly 30% of patients do not benefit from drug therapy and more than one-half report side effects that lead to non-compliance with medication such as sexual dysfunction, weight gain and sleep disorders. Neuronetics has developed the NeuroStar Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) Therapy System, which uses magnetic field pulses to stimulate nerve cells in an area of the brain that is linked to depression. This stimulation increases brain activity and releases neurotransmitters which are known to elevate mood. The treatment is typically administered daily over four to six weeks to patients who have not responded to traditional treatments; it is free of systemic side effects.
www.neuronetics.com

Infographic: Tracking Google’s Acquisitions.

Ever wondered what companies Google bought during the last couple for years. There is a complete list of acquisitions by Google on Wikipedia, but I also like the following Infographic “Tracking Google’s Acquisitions”.

Facebook Places

Mark Zuckerberg has presented the new location based service “Facebook Places” yesterday. Facebook is addressing the market Foursquare, FriendTicker etc. has opened up.

Facebook Movie - New Trailer

Samir Arora, Founder & CEO of Glam Media

Samir Arora, Founder & CEO of Glam Media took part at a panel about the future of branding at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit 2010. Right after the discussion I met talked him about his key issues.

Glam Media is a distributed media network comprised of both Glam-owned-and-operated properties and a publisher network of 450+ lifestyle websites and blogs. Glam Media aims to bring high-quality print content to the online medium, instead of the usual online trend of having print magazine-lite content. The Glam Media network also includes a slew of fashion websites, blogs and magazines.

Founder Samir Arora wants to gear the site’s online advertising towards the female market in the same way that traditional print has. Glam Media is working with publishers, content owners and media companies to reach readers in effective ways. Glam officially launched in September 2005 at Fashion Week, New York and quickly grew from there. After signing a partnership with AOL in October, Glam created the Glam Network consisting of style websites and blogs later that year. Since then, Glam has partnered with the women’s magazine Cosmopolitan, signed a content syndication deal with the Hearst Corporation, and completed a multi-year advertising deal with Google. With more than 53 million unique monthly visitors, Glam Media, Inc. is clearly proving itself as a leader in the online industry for women’s lifestyle and fashion.

A Digital Business Card for Events

Would you use a digital business card? The participants at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit 2010 did. During the two day conference the participants where getting used to connect their digital business cards, called “Poken”, instead of exchanging printed address cards. In the following interview Stéphane Doutriaux, founder of the innovative Social Business Card company, explains the technology and gives you some insights about the company.

Poken is a technology that utilizes a proprietary Near Field Communication (NFC) technology to allow the exchange of online social networking data between two keychain accessories. It is a perfect tool for Events and Conferences. Each person involved in the exchange must have his or her own poken. The primary information exchanged via the poken is a ‘social business card’, a digital replacement for a physical business card. By touching two devices together, a unique ID is exchanged that links to contact information on the Poken website. Contact information acquired by use of the poken can be uploaded to the poken website using a built-in USB connector.

In addition to the contact information found on a typical business card, links to users’ social networks can also be added. Examples include Twitter, Facebook, StudiVZ, LinkedIn and 40+ other social networks. Users of the Poken website can use a ‘social dashboard’ to manage, and interact with their contacts. Pokens are used for social networking, personal identification and as a device for loyalty programs. Bloggers and social media addicts have taken it up for networking event such as tweet-ups. Corporations such as BMW and IBM use pokens at their conferences, to enhance interaction with the conference attendees and to facilitate business networking.

Entreprenurs need to listen to this song!

THE NEW DORK - Entrepreneur State of Mind (Jay-Z ft Alicia Keys Spoof)

How to make money with Twitter?

If the Twitter Management is not inventing advertising on Twitter.com the users just do it themselves.

Twitter users inetgrating advertisements in their stream of updates have begun adopting new standards for disclosure.

Many ads are now being marked with tags — “#spon” for sponsored tweets, “#paid” or “#samp” for those who received sample products — based on guidelines released Thursday by the Word of Mouth Marketing Assn. (WOMMA). The new instructions are a response to the Federal Trade Commission’s call for more explicit disclosure from bloggers.

Lukasz Gadowski: “Mobile will take off this year”

Interview with Lukasz Gadowski, Partner of Team Europe Ventures, Founder of Spreadshirt and creator of Gruenderszene at LeWeb’08.
I asked him about this key-predictions for 2009 and he said:
- there will be a lot of great new startups during this economic down-turn
- a lot of cool startups will need to find ways to exists
- and existing trends will keep growing: Software as a Service, Cloud Computing, Mobile will take of this year.

Lukasz said “Germany is a great place to start a company”… so let’s get going.

The WEF Technology Pioneers 2009

The World Economic Forum selects a few companies to become Technology Pioneers.
I met Rodolfo Lara Torres, Head of Technology and Knowledge Integration at the World Economic Forum, at Le Web 2008 in Paris and talked with him about the latest developments at WEF.

Tech Pioneer are those companies who are working on technologies and innovation that have the potential to change the world. The WEF screens the market worldwide to find the most innovative companies and selects around 30 companies every year to become Tech Pioneer. The WEF started in 1999, so this year it is the 10th edition of the Award.

The main criteria for the Tech Pioneers are
1. Innovation: Is the technology new?
2. Impact: Which impact will this technology have on business and society?
3. Sustainability: Will the company exist in the long-term, too?
4. Not a Member of the WEF already.

The award winners will be integrated in the activities of the World Economic Forum and will be invited to events, such as the Annual Meeting in Davos.

Rodolfo explains a lot of very innovative companies come from emerging markets like India, Africa or China.
He also sees a major Trend of the combination of Health and Technology, like chips inserted into your body.
And by the way, Google won the award in 2001.

The World Economic Forum has announced 34 visionary companies selected as Technology Pioneers 2009 for their accomplishments as innovators of the highest calibre, and whose technologies will have a deep impact on business and society.

Company Profiles

Continue reading The WEF Technology Pioneers 2009…

Gary Vaynerchuk about his secret of success

I met Gary Vaynerchuk at Le Web in Paris last week and he gave a “little bit of thunder to the crowd”.
Gary is founder and host of Winelibrary TV. He reaches over 80.000 Viewers daily, has over 25.000 Twitter Followers and his keynotes are watched on Youtube hundreds of thousand times.

Gary talked about Authenticity, Community and Branding. He believes that 2008 and 2009 is so different than 2006/07, the world is changing and there a lot of opportunities out there if you know how to leverage the tools and the community. And Gary really cares about his community, which is one of his key-success factors.

This year he got over 50 offers of television deals in the United States, published his first book and did a lot of speaking engagements. He love building brands or repositioning brands like the brand of his dad’s liquor store or his personal brand. From his point of view it is more challenging and fun to work with the followers like MySpace or Yahoo, rather then to work with the leaders like facebook or Google.

His recommendation for you is simple
“Do it. Have business model. And care for your audience and clients.”

Here you can watch the Video Interview:

Suranga Chandratillake: Online Video Search - Will it change the TV industry?

Interview with Suranga Chandratillake, CEO, Blinkx at the Monaco Media Forum 2008.

Re-Imagine Online Advertising with Calvin Lui

Calvin Lui, CEO of Tumri, is talking about new opportunities for Online Advertising. Tumri is already serving over one billion impressions per month. They are currently only active in USA, but will expand to Europe and Asia this year.

One key advantage of Tumri is that “the platform delivers highly relevant advertising messages to consumers while lowering creative production costs and timelines.”

Here is the Video, filmed a the MMF 2008.

Alvin Wang Graylin about Mobile Search in China

Minfo is the leading mobile / wireless search platform in China. Alvin Wang Graylin is the CEO and Co-Founder of Minfo. They started four years ago and have already reached over 13 million users. They have just signed a cooperation with China Telecom to be the exclusive mobile search and mobile advertising provider. This will give Minfo access to over 350 million China Telecom subscribers, over 100 million with mobile internet access.

Alvin told me about the differences to Internet-based search and how the satisfy the mobile users. Mobile Search is not entering one keyword and get a list of links back, it is more about answering one question. Minfo is offering SMS-based and Mobile Internet based services. Searches via mobile web are taking around 50% of all searches (and 50% via SMS), but is increasing rapidly. They developed a semantic search method and support several languages.

Here is the Video Interview filmed at the Monaco Media Forum 2008:

Omar Hamoui about the Status Quo of Mobile Advertsing

Interview with Omar Hamoui, CEO, AdMob at the Monaco Media Forum 2008.

Igor Smirnoff about Digital Newspapers, Online Publishing and ePaper

Interview with Igor Smirnoff from Pressdisplay.com at the Monaco Media Forum 2008.

Esther Dyson is one of the Investors of Pressdisplay.

Where do all the Fotos go? Flickr vs. Facebook.

If you talk about a Foto-Community, you might talk about Flickr. But things are changing and Social Media is changing the way people use their content.

Flickr and Facebook launched in February 2004, but facebook kept its platform only for a closed user-group. In Mid 2007 facebook opened its platform to the public and the success story of facebook began.

Flickr reached 2 billion fotos in 2007 and now hit the 3 billion mark in 2008. The quality of fotos on Flickr is great and a lot of professional fotografers us flickr to publish their fotos.

On the consumer generated content side, facebook is growing rapidly. Within the last two years Facebook has become THE biggest Foto-Community worldwide. Its Foto-Application is one of the most favorite application. A year ago there had been 4 billion on facebook, today there are more than 10 billion.

Links:
Facebook Statistics
3 billionth Foto on Flickr (see comment)

Twine, a Web 3.0 platform, is now open to the public

“Twine is a smarter way to keep up with what you’re into.”

Collaborate, manage, organize and share information using Twine, a Semantic Web or Web 3.0 service created by Radar Networks.

I am testing Twine since June 2008. The theme oriented “Twines” (Groups) are very useful to share ideas and save important information on one place. Yesterday they opened twine to the public.

I created three Twines with already over 60 members and I would be happy if you join and share your links and ideas:

Twine: Digital Conversation & Social Maps.

Twine: Marketing 2.0.

Twine: Ahead of Time.

The Top 20 of Social Networking Platforms

Here are the latest numbers of the Top 20 Online Social Networks.

Besides the well-known platforms like MySpace or Facebook there are some important trends and changes happening right now.
Elsewhere in the social networking space, Facebook continued to narrow the gap on MySpace, a trend we also noticed last month. Unique visitors to the site grew to 38.2 million, representing a more than 10% month-over-month increase and a 100% jump year-over-year. MySpace saw 61.3 million unique visitors – up slightly from last month, but still essentially flat compared to the same period last year. And business network LinkedIn grew 146% year-over-year to 10.8 million unique visitors.

Twitter is apparently growing rapidly. According to stats just released from Nielsen Online, Twitter recorded 2.3 million unique visitors in August (US-only), an increase of 422% from the same period last year. Moreover, visitors to Twitter spent 55% more time on the site on average – a total of more than 7 minutes per user. Those numbers point to rather robust growth for the site, especially considering many of its most rabid users access it through a third-party client like Twhirl or Tweetdeck.

The Ultimate Electro-Driving Experience

This week the brand new Tesla Roadster created by Tesla Motors was in Munich for exclusive test-drives.

The electro-roadster has enough power to race with a Porsche 911. The Tesla shows his 250 horse powers in an acceleration from 0 to 100 km/h in 3.9 second. With a reach of over 400 km it is the perfect sports-car for a trip to the bavarian alps.
Tesla Motors has already over 1100 reservations (and down-payments of 50.000 USD) in California. In Germany they will first offer a signature series limited to 250 cars delivered in 2009.

While George Clooney is already driving his Tesla in Hollywood (he was the first customer), Arnold Schwarzenegger will get his electric Roadster next month as the 10th customer.

Tesla Motors is creating huge attention and plays an essential part for the way to an emission-free future.

Tesla Motors develops and manufactures electric vehicles with exceptional design, performance and efficiency, while conforming to all U.S. safety, environmental and durability standards. The Tesla Roadster is the only highway capable production electric car of any kind for sale in the United States. With a 0 to 60 mph acceleration of 3.9 seconds, a 13,000 rpm redline, and the fastest top gear acceleration of any production car tested by Car & Driver magazine in 2007, the Tesla Roadster is unique in providing super car performance, zero emissions and extraordinary efficiency. For more information, visit www.teslamotors.com.