imCMS - Role based open source content management system

imCMS is a powerful open source role based content management system that can easily be used to manage complex websites, intranets and works with mySQL and other webservice applications. imCMS is a product from imCode Partner, a small Swedish kind of startup (has been around since 1998) but kept itself small and nimble as a software startup. The company is based on the beautiful island of Gotland in Visby, Sweden and has a number of customers. Check out the software from the website, http://www.imcms.net/1273.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for help with contacts with Swedish startups and the Sweden market.

Tweetake - Easy backup of Twitter information

It is interesting to see all the new convenient Web 2.0 applications coming out. Since the rise and popularity of services such as Twitter, there is a real need for how do you backup your information including your friends and followers. Well, now you have a service, brand new, I have tried to use it earlier today but getting due to the number of requests from applications to use Twitter API, no luck in getting my backup. But I know there is a demand for a service like this so please try it, I will later tonight. Tweetake is the name of the service. Credits go to Nikki Pilkington and Alfred Armstrong. I can also really recommend Nikki for her Google SEO services. You should use them to really improve your search engine rankings regardless of website or blog.




I am now just waiting for some creative services around Google backup of common services (unless Google will do something, I have seen rumors about that for quite some time).


Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

Neo Technology - A new mySQL company but noSQL

The startup company for today is maybe a sleeping giant. Neo Technology is probably not the most exciting name but I have feeling that these guys are onto something important in the area of database engines. Neo Technology is more known in the Java open source areas under the Neo4j logo and the community under which it is being developed. Neo Technology is focusing on databases that are much more efficient for semi-structured data than traditional SQL. Neo is a is a graph database based on an embedded transactional Java persistence engine storing data structured in graphs rather than in tables. For those readers that would like to read more technical details around this subject, read the whitepaper, http://dist.neo4j.org/neo-technology-introduction.pdf. In todays webservice and internet networked data world, the Neo database technology can become a significant improvement over the commonly used approach, a JBoss (r) webserver running using MySQL (r) database. The Neo Technolgoy company has been working on this for a number of years already, I know it takes a lot of time to fine tune the development of database engine, I was part of introduction of SQL based real time databases in telecom systems a long time ago. Neo Technology is a Swedish startup company.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

TwitterFeed - Auto feed your blog to Twitter

This is a great and convenient tip for you if you routinely like to twit in Twitter about your new blogposts. Sign up for TwitterFeed and in three easy steps you are up and running and TwitterFeed will take care of your Twitter blog post announcements. Really an easy and covenient service. You need an OpenID to register and if you don't have one, this site will help you get an OpenID url.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

YouNoodle - Your startup social and university networking site

Well, here's a Vator.tv competitor. YouNoodle.com has started with a bang taking off recently. YouNoodle has put together a nice social networking platform, easy classification of your social data. Not that obvious though in some cases where the information you provide will be displayed once you get to view your profile. I think getting the text from the "short bio" used as tag line to your name was not obvious to me at least. But I guess brand new beta services, you have to put up with some odd things.

Since I have recently covered and used for a little while Vator.tv, I have to conclude that from a social networking point of view, YouNoodle is better, I like the ease with which you can go from following company, contact and network and also join groups. Vator has somewhat stricter distinctions between startups, service providers and contributors on their site. I do like Vator's company information better though plus the push they have that you should provide a video pitch and/or demo. I guess time will tell which one that will grab the major share of users. One thing to consider is also, what's the key benefit each site is going for? What I am actually looking for is, do you provide a service just to facilitate and hoook up people and then leave it up to them to figure out what to do, or do you intend to enable and encourage an efficient exchange of needed services between all parties involved?

So far, most social networking sites fail to do the latter. The big danger in easy to use for everybody netwoking sites is the same all the time. You get way too many people that are somehow going to find the few that will make sense to communicate and do business with.

YouNoodle does have an interesting approach in trying to provide analytical tools to help your startup business. See the startup predictive tool, http://younoodle.com/predictor that will help you analyze what will your startup be worth in three years.

See home page of YouNoodle below and feel free to explore my page, http://younoodle.com/people/thomas_lidforss




Also, contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

Vator for your startup company- Use TV style networking

Here's a tip for all of you working with startup companies and have not found the Silicon Valley startup company, Vator.tv. You are missing an important opportunity to present, demo and get a following of people (investor and service providers) who are interested in your company. You can also find possible partner companies buy browsing other companies' video presentations and profiles.

See a snapshot of the home page below;


And, also see myVator page, and as you can tell from the right side of the page, I have not made my own video presentation yet. This post is just another reminder that I have to add this.



See, http://www.vator.tv/user/show/ThomasLidforss

Donya Labs - Simplify my virtual 3D objects

Donya Labs is a hot Swedish startup in Linkoping enabling speedy 3D generation in design tools for gaming, architecture and engineering. Donya has developed patented technologies that are addressing the need for simplification of polygons and mesh reduction without losing quality. They have two products, Simplygon(tm) that does the simplification without losing quality and XPRSS(tm) that is used for automatic creation of stand-in objects.

See a demo from VideoTrace using technologies from Donya(tm) for this video.

There are more cool demos of the superior impact from using Donya technology in your design on their blog. http://donya-blog.blogspot.com/

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services.

Cinside - See you but you don't see me

Cinside is a Swedish startup in Linkoping developing personal hand held motion detection radar products that can easily be used in cases where you have a need to "see through" a wall to detect a person on the other side. The company's CEO Dan Axelsson is targeting defense, police, emergency and security businesses. The small and easy to use product can detect a person up to 3 meters (100 feet) behind a 20 cm (8 inches) concrete wall. The product also supports wireless communication for remote monitoring of one or several devices.

See picture of the personal radar below;

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services.

Actiwave - Active wave processing for your sound systems

If you like your HDTV in your house, you would love to have an audio system enabled with Actiwave technology. Actiwave is a Swedish startup located in Linkoping. This comany has developed patented audio processing modules for efficient integration in audio systems. Among their patented features, daisy chaning reducing wiring need, acoustic compensation, self configuration, uncompressed digital audio. They also cover products for wireless transmission made at a similar cost as for a passive system. See audio processing module pictur below. I would recommend this company to any consumer electronic company into products for audio systems and HDTV/DVD solutions. An interesting note, Prof. Gianpaolo Evangelista is the research head.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for startup business services.

Ice.net - Digital reuse of Europe's no 1 mobile network

If you have seen ads for ice.net without knowing what it is, you are not alone. I thought myself, maybe just another MVNO company. No, this time it is the rebranded new CDMA mobile operator company which used to go under the brand Nordisk Mobiltelefon.

Ice.net is using what was once known as NMT, the best mobile network in Europe that started already in the late 70s and had from the beginning full support for roaming and handover throughout the Nordic region countries. NMT operated in the 450 Mhz frequency band when introduced and got because of lack of capacity introduced in the 900 Mhz band, better suited for small city cell sites providing better capacity. NMT got superceded by the introduction of digital mobile services based on the GSM standard in the 900 Mhz and later in the 1800 Mhz (850 and 1900 Mhz in North America). The analog NMT 450 system lived on for awhile until abandoned and spectrum relicensed. The new NMT.net now Nordisk Mobiltelefon with subsidiaries throughout the Nordic countries got into using this spectrum with the Qualcomm developed CDMA2000 standard.

So, as a result now you have a Swedish startup operator providing 3G CDMA 2000 based services in the 450 Mhz frequency band with the advantages of excellent coverage in rural areas where you in many cases cannot get the UTMS 3G services and also in a number of places NO fixed line internet broadband access. Ice.net also as a result provides fixed wireless services for internet broadband access.

See snapshot of coverage from company homepage.

PS. For international readers, see the 199 SEK/month which is approx. $30/month

Mobile Control Nordic - Wireless M2M and CDMA 450 Networks

Mobile Control Nordic is a Swedish startup answering an interesting question; How do you get to wirelessly control and monitor remote control products with good data thruput? You combine the excellent radio coverage of CDMA2000 based networks in the 450 Mhz frequency band with M2M data modems. This allows for 3G CDMA 2000 dataspeeds to remote locations.



Mobile Control Nordic is a spin off from DST Control, a control systems company in the aircraft, space and defense industry. Mobile Control has two product lines for data modem, one USB modem and one for embedded use.





Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business services needs.

InView - Ippi an ancient greek mobile messenger

InView is a Swedish startup addressing the need for a convenient way to watch multi-media from mobile phones on a standard TV. This is made possible through the patented consumer interactive device called ippi(tm). Ippi works as a pre-paid mobile phone hooked up to your TV set with a remote control device. The stationary device has the SIM card, USB port, memory and microphone and docks with the remote control. This setup makes it possible for anybody to send an MMS message to you and just like you check for messages on a home voicemail, you check for message on your TV.

I like this concept, the only drawback is a lot of vacationer notice when they get back home after having sent MMS messages from their cameraphones and get the telephone bill, not good with todays pricing from mobile operators, that is something that has got to change. Within the European Union countries it is really crazy. Many countries in Europe are quite small so in many places you go through three or four countries in notime, thus making international MMS mobile phone messages.

As a fallback though, you can use the ippi box as a viewing connector to your mobile phone once you are home and view everything using the remote sitting back in your sofa.

InView as a company is a spinoff of Ericsson Business innovation. Contact Thomas Lidforss International for you business services needs.

QuviQ - Automatic test tools for your software

QuviQ is a small software test tool startup company. The software is written in the somewhat niche laguage Erlang. The CEO John Hughes has a long history in computer science at the Chalmers University in Gothenburg and the Erlang language. He has been awarded the software of the year award at the Erlang users conference. Quviq's product is to enable auto testing by focusing on users writing formal Quviq specifications instead of test cases. The Quiviq system is using contolled random testing against your code. The analysis of failure cases are also simplified by extracting information in such a way that analysis afterwards gets much faster. The QuviQ specification language, Erlang is open source but the QuviQ libraries are company proprietary.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business services needs.

myFC - a planar and flexible developed high-efficiency fuel cell

myFC is a very interesting Swedish startup company combining "green- tech with high-tech" to provide the element needed for fuel cell based batteries for power hungry portable devices. Just read about heavy iPhone users using 3G wireless, WiFi, Bluetooth surfing internet and doing social networking and of course talk, you kill the phone battery in no time. myFC has developed a patented process for a flexi fuel cell called FuelCellSticker(TM). The product, myFC 1636 Chip is a 0.5-0.75W modular fuel cell for integration into electronic products like cordless chargers and/or other portable devices.

This is a perfect opportunity for a mobile phone, laptop and accesory product manufacturing company to develop something I think could become very popular. I have personally always wanted to have twice the capacity in laptop and mobile phone batteries, they never last long enough when you need to use them.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business services needs.

Locify part 2 - Twitter from mobile phone with geo tagging

Here are some Locify twitter application pictures.

Start up Twitter on mobile phone






Update your status "I'm here"













Check Twitter update for yourself

Get Twitter update for friends




Check friends.

Locify - Great example of how location is adding value to applications

If you have not heard of Locify and you have a Java capable mobile phone you are missing something. Locify is a service that has location enabled services such as twitter, wikipedia, geo-caching, fireeagle. You can design a new service or "locify" an existing one. The service works with most ordinary Java capable browser equipped mobile phones. Is of course to you advantage to have the mobile phone with built-in GPS but it works without. Locify applications also synch with the web.

What all of this means is that you can walk around in a city and get to look up and explore interesting places on Wikipedia, save interesting places, track and map your way and twitter about all of it to your friends.

Locify works with external through Bluetooth connection GPS devices, server side GPS, the built in GPS and without GPS. See the mobile waypoint example allowing you to save your way.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business services needs.

Adolphson and Falk - From here to eternity

This is a tribute to space exploration and mankind. Enjoy the soundtrack from the 80s and the images.

The Outlook Agent on an Industry Outlook Mission

It's time to introduce the industry outlook agent. He has been on a mission to find out what is going on in the mobile industry in particular. Here's a first taste of things to come.

The trend for 2008 is clearly,

• Location enabling of existing services
• Designing new vertical services benefiting from location information
• The big push for mobile social networking and community services that really can become enriched by using location information

Years ago, people in the industry talked about location based services and not very much has happened. This year, 2008, it seems like we are finally going to get the needed prerequisites in place for a wider commercial use in 2009. The dominating 2G GSM mobile networks and phones in use around the world were never designed having GPS like satellite navigation and positioning in mind. As a result, later due to emergency phone needs for 911 or 112 services required some kind of support for location information. Several different soluttions have been developed and kind of introduced, measuring time delay of arrival of radio signals from different cellsite towers, triangulation measurements based on radio signal strengths to simple just geo tagging of cellsites. When you are in a dense metro area, the cellsite radius is small enough to locate a user with a reasonable accuracy but in rural areas, just forget about the information, you cannot locate somebody like that. The other systems all require extra equipment to be installed in a radio network something few companies including consumers have been willing to pay for.

In North America, the situation has been different for about 60% of all digital 2G users, using the North American CDMA mobile phone standard which was by Qualcomm designed from the beginning to include GPS receiver capability to enable synchronization from cellsite towers.

As a result North American users have had turn-by-turn navigation services from their phones whereas the rest of the world have had to depend on stand alone GPS devices. The introduction of 3G (North American CDMA-2000 and UMTS/WCDMA) systems have finally resulted in GPS and its newer enhanced cousin assisted GPS to become widely available.

Now the roles can be reversed in favor of WCDMA users. One drawback in using CDMA 2000 devices is that you cannot use voice and data mode at the same time, a live data session gets suspended while you use voice whereas you can have several sessions in WCDMA devices.

The chicken and the egg comment about this is though that mobile operators outside USA charge way too much in most countries for mobile data use, so now when we have finally got to the point where most people can have devices capable of interesting and user friendly location enabled services, many people will not be able to pay for their use.

A big shift is needed for mobile operator companies, more about that to come in a follow up.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business services needs.

VideoPlaza - Cool Interactive online video overlay advertising

This is a very interesting new Swedish startup creating solutions for online video advertising. Videoplaza does provide a solution for your video ad campaigns overlayed on your videos using Flash or Silverlight and works on JW Open source flash player. The users license the use of the platform for serving, managing and presenting ads. There is a flexible web campaign manager allowing to control (CPM, CPC, CPA or time and categorizing/tagging) and targetting your campaign. VideoPlaza is also hosting your ad content.

VideoPlaza has gained a lot of attention from big players and have got companies such as Warner Brothers, GM Opel, H&M and Swedish Cable TV channel5 as users. There are a lot of players in this space trying to do simple monetization schemes from text overlays on Youtube from Google to TV focused companies. The VideoPlaza team I think has got their eyes focused on TV quality ads but in an interactive online environment, good for them.

As always, when it comes to video demo, since I don't have embed code, I recommend you go to the website, http://www.videoplaza.com/ and play the demo. Use the ad control options and also think about pre-, mid- and post-roll of ads in a video plus try the full screen of ad on top of the playing video.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business startup services.

Kartena - Geopositioning for Transportation and Logistics

Following the trend of location enabling whatever you do, Kartena is a Swedish startup company based in Gothenburg that provides system solutions and products based on their Geosition Navigator (tm) product. Interactive tourist maps, mapping services for transportation and logistics optimization are areas targetted.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for startup business services.

Phone and Twitter equals Phweet - Cool new service

The Phweet alpha service launched making it possible to talk to your Twitter friends. Here's an excerpt from site "Sign-in with your Twitter name and password at http://www.phweet.com/. Select your preferred channel (Browser, SIP ID or number/Mobile Phone which will be enabled later) for hosting/accepting a Phweet. Add the Twitter username of the person you want to talk to, and send them a message (public or direct/private)." This is service by Mosoci LLC, the strategy and research group that also does the Skype Journal and is heavily involved in VoIP applications.

Give it a try, talk to me on Twitter id: tlidforss (see my profile: http://twitter.com/tlidforss)

Green Clip - Quick labeling of products with little material used

Here's another green tech company, GreenClip. GreenClip develops products for a patented labeling process and machines for attaching labeling to products using as little material as possible. GreenClip is a Gothenburg based Swedish startup company.

Contact me for a discussion about your business needs, see http://www.lidforss.com for details.

Xylophane - Green tech packaging material

The first startup post for today is looking at high-tech green tech products from a Gothenburg based Swedish startup, Xylophane. Xylophane has developed a new material acting as a barrier against oxygen, grease and aroma. The material is renewable and biodegradable and can be mixed with water, a big advantage. The material itself consists of the natural carbohydrate xylan and additives that are approved for food contact and patented. Xylan can be extracted from common agriculture by-products.

Contact me for a discussion about your business needs, see http://www.lidforss.com/ for details.

iLinc - Secure and feature rich web conferencing

Karrie Rockwell, head of Channel Sales at iLinc Communications made me recently aware of all the rich features that iLinc provides in the conferencing area. The iLinc software is a comprehensive package that covers the following areas; Webinar, eLearning, Web conferencing, Audio conferencing and customer support services. iLinc has a different angle to SaaS services too, instead of paying monthly fees, you can buy as a hosted service with maintenance fee instead of monthly subscription. You can also get installed services behind your own firewall. Either way of the two alternatives, you get the best security services around. AES encryption is used. The security aspect is a part often forgotten by iLinc's better known competitors. iLinc is a Phoenix based US company.

Register for a Free daily demo of iLinc features.

Ribbit - Mobile VoIP finally here?

There has been a lot of talk about Ribbit, "embed voice" in your web application company today with the announcement of an acquisition by BT. Ribbit is a startup company in Mountain View that has focused on building or enabling voice applications from any computing device using VoIP and Adobe Flash/Flex technologies. From a technology point of view, a key new trend with VoIP and Adobe is that allmost all devices have (or can have) the technology embedded thereby avoiding the giant hurdle of designing and getting new VoIP applications into a mobile phone. From a businss point of view, there are questions around the business model. Paying Ribbit to "go through" their softswitch gateways is together with the fact that paying in most countries for mobile data access using a mobile operators radio network is way too expensive.

It will be interesting to see though what BT will make out of this acquisition having bailed in and out of having their own mobile phone network. More to follow about this and future outlook for mobile phone operators.

Emotiv Systems - Get your mind to control your communications

Emotiv Systems is a cool San Francisco based startup with Australian roots. I think it is about time UI design gets to be innovative and creative. 30 years have passed since the early creative days at (Xerox) PARC center where graphical user interface and a computer mouse became famous developments. Emotiv is into using your own brain and mind to control how you interact with machines. This would be fun to try out writing a blog or a tweat on twitter or a new game on PS3, Wii and Xbox 360. See the "high-tech mouse" below.

Contact me at http://www.lidforss.com/ for help in analyzing your business needs.

Food Radar Systems - Unique security method for food control

While reporting on security related Swedish startups, here's one addressing the safety of our food supply. Food Radar Systems has developed a patented non-intrusive microwave system to detect foreign elements in food. A first systems has recently gone commercial. This company is a Gothenburg based company providing a really useful product. On a quick personal note though, their logo design sucks, new marketing ideas needed.

Mindmancer - Advanced image processing for intelligent event recognition

Here's another interesting Swedish startup addressing the security space by focusing on advanced image processin systems for intelligent event recognition. Mindmancer software detects and alerts automatically security intervention when needed. The software used is also protecting the integrity better than other systems thus making it better to use.
See http://www.mindmancer.com for more information. Mindmancer is a Gothenburg based startup.

Great marketing tip for your Youtube ads

Do you still think, YouTube and other sites are for nothing but playing around or sharing music videos? Then this is great news for you and your company. Video marketing can be as efficient as a good TV commercial but you have to make it interactive and easy for a user to do something while watching your video. Bubbleply by PLYmedia is an interesting startup company making it extremely easy for you to add "bubbles" to your video and include url links. Plymedia is a Silicon Valley startup focusing on video web media services. The best way to understand how this is working is actually to look at an example. See the embedded video below.

Contact me at http://www.lidforss.com/contactus.aspx for help in analyzing your business needs.

Brunch at sea in Stockholm

InterCare Connexion - P2P communications for hospitals

InterCare is a Gothenburg based Swedish startup company using P2P communication services specifically for hospitals speeding up the processing of patients. The P2P Communicator is based on a J2EE web services platform that can easily be adapted to be plugged into existing environments. Good to see a P2P solution being used for such a good purpose, usually we have read about P2P mainly when it comes to illegal filesharing services.

Contact me at http://www.lidforss.com/contactus.aspx for help in analyzing your business needs.

Lamera - Layered materials and Stainless ultralight composites

This blogpost is not about ceramics but a new Swedish startup, Lamera that does world class ultralight composites of metals. Perfect for design flexibility and saving weight without compromising strength useful in aircraft and automobile design.

Lamera is a Gothenburg based company.

Contact me at http://www.lidforss.com/contactus.aspx for help in analyzing your business needs.

Ballistic protection going high-tech and mobile

In the dangerous world of today, this must be a "safe" startup company. Protarius develops and provides a new patented bullet-proof protection material based on ceramics. The material stops multiple bullets in the same hole and is even efficent against armored piercing explosives. Among products that can be provided are mobile safes, in-door shooting rooms protection and safe rooms in general. The guys and gals from DHS, US Dept. of Homeland Security should knock on their doors. Protarius is a Swedish startup based in Gothenburg.

Contact me at http://www.lidforss.com/contactus.aspx for help in analyzing your business needs.