Meet the webspider - Happy Halloween from Stockholm

A good friend of mine in Silicon Valley sent me a cool "Happy Halloween" card, with the "webspider" meets internet.


To all of you, Happy Halloween from Thomas (aka "Tom")!

Scour your searches and get Visa gift card vouchers

Scour is the new shape of the old aftervote search engine company launched in 2007. Scour lets you search by aggregating your serach engines (Google, Yahoo, Live) and adds community and social networking power to their service. I guess the driver to attract new users is the reward system collecting points per search plus 25% from your friends. The service works nicely, noticed though that you have to live within any of these countries; Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, U.S., and U.K. If you the reward system is pretty useless.

If you want to play with you are welcome to use the following invite link:

http://scour.com/invite/tlidforss

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

Meet me at Omniture Digital Marketing Event in Stockholm Oct 28

I am going to attend this Omniture event about digital marketing in Stockholm, Oct 28. Please feel free to contact me to meet for a chat during this event.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International to meet for this event.

Whitelines - Make my lines disappear, interesting new cleantech paper product for your writing needs

If you have ever got irritated about the black (usually) lines on a writing pad stand out too much and distract your design, here's the perfect solution from you. Buy Whitelines paper products available in all sizes and shapes. Whitelines is a Swedish, Stockholm based startup company where Roland Elander (the founder) and his team have come up with a great product. The company has recently got 6M SEK in VC funding and is looking for introduction opportunities in other countries such as USA.

Whitelines paper products are environmentally friendly produced and include carbon footprint information. The paper products have white lines on a light grey background which makes the lines "go away" when you scan, copy or fax the documents. See the flash intro on the homepage.

Congratulations to Roland and his team for the success so far.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

Meet me in Stockholm at the StartMeUp - A conference for how to start your own company (site info in Swedish)

The "Starta eget" conference is taking place at the Stockholm fair ("Stockholms Massan") Oct. 21-23. I am going to attend and would be happy to meet at this event.

Contact me at Thomas Lidforss International to make an appointment to meet at this event

Touch UIs for your next phone?

In addition to previous post about the new update to Nokia S60 released in the new Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic, here comes select videos for Samsung Omnia, LG KC910 (Renoir), BlackBerry Storm, SonyEricsson Xperia X1 and Google G1 demoing the UIs of these devices. When it comes to evaluating the user interfaces you have to consider different aspects such as; formfactor, input and output methods, touch and feel, visual impression and convenience.

Formfactor: All the models have pretty much the same typical "candy bar" shape, some are wider and two (G1 and X1) are sliders with "real" keyboards. If a device is too wide, not good for one-handed operation and the BlackBerry Storm may be in that category as are the G1 and X1 when you use the keyboard. I prefer the soft keyboards (even if they take away screenspace), you get a lighter phone, more flexibility (vertical and horizontal keyboards).

I/O: Easy to use with one hand I think is again to prefer vs. two-handed friendly slider models. Some interesting differences, "roller" mouse on G1, "optical" mouse on Omnia vs. touch and touch and hold only. Easy to find connectors, micro SD style memory slots and rich Bluetooth profile support including audio/video controls also important.

Touch and Feel: Touch with a tactile feedback function is usually better than "sound" feedback, I prefer features you can operate without somebody noticing, silent operating mode. Interesting to see, screen "vibrate" key clicks on Nokia 5800 vs. screen "mechanical" key click feedback on BlackBerry Storm. On the overall feel feedback is also the need to easily find and operate the controls on the device.

Visual impression: Since you deal with small devices, screen resolution, color richness and possibility to see things in daylight are all important. Higher resolution and more colors preferred.

For global travelers, BlackBerry Storm stands out as the only phone that will work in USA on a CDMA (Verizon Wireless) whereas all the others will work on AT&T with the exception of Google G1 which will also work on T-Mobile in USA (T-Mobile is using 1700 Mhz which only G1 supports so far).

Samsung demo:

LG 910 demo:

BlackBerry Storm demo:

SonyEricsson Xperia X1 demo:

Google G1 demo:

Bloglovin for all you blog loving readers

The Swedish startup Bloggkoll.com who provides the easy to use with a nice clean interface blog reader with subscription and search based on among others things most subscribed blogs has launched the English version of their service called Bloglovin'. Check out this service and register at http://www.bloglovin.com/

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

Gadget review of Touchware mobile phones

Now when the new generation touch mobile phones are all out (not everywhere yet) but it is time to take a quick look. One Apple OS, one Symbian (Nokia), one Android (Google/HTC G1) and three Windows Mobile (LG, Samsung and SonyEricsson). Two with "slider style" qwerty keyboards (G1 and SonyEricsson X1) the rest with touch qwerty keyboard. The pros-cons of this is real qwerty ones are easier for traditional computer style functions such as browse and type but I personally favor the touch on a device that you use most of the time as multi-media mobile device different than a laptop plus you avoid the additional weight from the mechanical slider keyboard. The G1 and X1 are about 40 grams heavier than the rest, with an exception for Samsung who has a beefed up battery as standard. Some noteworthy differences between all of these devices;

LG 910 Renoir: 8MP camera, video, dolby, slim but with a relatively small battery, a little bit odd though that for a phone that emphasizes photo and video, screen resolution is not the best 240 x 400 pixels, 3.0 inches

Samsung Omnia: 5MP camera, video, beefier battery than others, really good UI layer on Windows Mobile. Same screen resolution comments as for LG, 240 x 400 pixels, 3.2 inches

SonyEricsson X1: 3.15 MP camera, video, different UI layer than the LG and Samsung with "panels" as different default layers on top on Windows Mobile. Don't know about that one until I have used one myself. Good screen resolution, 480 x 800 pixels, 3.0 inches.

HTC G1: 3.15 MP camera. Android OS. Very cool "Apple like" UI with the exception of the keyboard. One of the most interesting aspects of this device is how much the developer community will pick up the mobile app store and the openess of this device vs. all the other ones. Screen resolution as Apple but with less colors, 320 x 480 pixels, 3.2 inches.

Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic: 3.15 MP camera, video, the lighest device of all of these models but still with a high capacity battery. Good screen resolution, 360 x 640 pixels, 3.2 inches.

Apple iPhone: 2 MP camera, still the reference standard for the new generation UI. Featurewise, it shows that the other phones are newer, they have richer camera and video services. Good screen, 320 x 480 pixels, 3.5 inches

An overall conclusion, I like the formfactor of the Apple, LG, Nokia and Samsung. Pricewise, Nokia is the clear winner (for an unlocked not tied to a contract), the others are about $200 more. I like the Samsung UI layer for Windows Mobile, they have done a good job hiding the traditional layers. My take is though, regarding feature content, size, shape, weight and price that Nokia is the winner. The catch maybe the dependence on Symbian and its ongoing support and Nokia will have to make sure of that they do not repeat initial troubles they had with N95 when that came out. But as I said in previous post, the driver will be war between the ongoing developments for each OS software package whether you believe more in anyone of the following; Apple, Microsoft, Google and OHA and Symbian. Also to fully be able to compare these devices with the different screens and UIs, you need to use them next to each other to see with your own eyes what will a certain function look like on a particular device, it is not enough to watch a company demo video.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

Touch is now everywhere - The battlefield is getting set Nokia vs.Apple and Google

I guess now when Nokia has finally taken the wraps of the rollout of their "iPhone killer", the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. My take on this new phone is that showdown is going to depend a lot on the openess and ease for application developers to get to the different devices and the business models offered. The second issue is the availability of cheap mobile broadband, and since there has not so far been enough competition among mobile operators, I think we can all cherish the fact that Nokia finally has a device that compete with Apple iPhone, Google G1, Samsung Omnia, LG, HTC Touch and SonyEricsson X1 touch phones. The competition now becomes more of Apple OS X like OS vs. Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian. From that point of view, I think Google has an advantage from their close connections and understanding of "cloud computing services" and cooperation with companies such as Amazon.

Nokia though has put together a pretty interesting device, I like personally the formfactor of the iPhone and the new Nokia. From a technology point of view, I cannot wait until all these new mobile phones will finally push mobile VoIP services to the front in an open style making true mobile multimedia IP services available in as many places and countries as possible from any device and any wireless carrier.

Check out the demo video from Youtube.



Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

Vironova - Nothing to sneeze at, virus image analysis and diagnostic services

Time to get blogging again, I have had an ugly cold lately slowing down work needed to be done. But today's first blogpost is about anti-virus in a different way. When you hear virus image analysis in the IT business, you almost all the time think, anti-virus software for your computer, but in this case we talk about the real viruses that affect our bodies. Vironova is a hot Swedish startup combining digital image analysis software and Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) to quickly analyze and identify key parts of a virus. Vironova also provides diagnostics services. The company has been funded so far by EU research grant and private investors. They are presently open for additional funding, see home page for details (available both in Swedish and English). If the cross-over between IT and medical research is of interest for your investments, I suggest check out this company right now!

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for you statup business services needs.

Got Greenbucks to spare? - Goto Thinking Green with Al Gore Oct 15

On Wed. Oct 15, 2008 Al Gore will be in Stockholm at the Thinking Green seminar. If you have got 2995 SEK (approx. $450) to spare you can listen to him.

Preliminary agenda;

Location, Factory at Nacka Strand, Stockholm

Date: Oct 15

18:00 Opening
18:05 Mingle with Green friends VIP
18:30 Meet Al (VIPs only)
19:10 Sweden environmental minister from government, Andreas Carlgren will speak
19:40 Al Gore speaks
21:30 Q & A
21:40 Closing

My first comment on reading the ad earlier today, weird ad, poor website, ZERO info about "who is a VIP??, the select few, proud and only or? And, even though I still can read Swedish perfectly, I think information about an event like should also be provided in English plus with map of location and information about the place. Now they assume everybody know or you have to call them or google around for awhile...

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business services needs

PlugandPlayEXPO 2008 - Get Exposed for funding

This is an excellent opportunity for startups in or who can be present in Silicon Valley next Thursday. The Sunnyvale based PlugandPlayTechcenter For those of you who do not know who these people are; PlugandPlayTechcenter is a Silicon Valley business incubator company with buildings in Sunnyvale and Redwood City. The building in Sunnyvale where this event will take place next Thursday, September 25th, 2008 is housing about 120 startups.

According to PnP staff, an average 4 of the EXPO presenting companies have received term sheets after getting “EXPOsed” at each of our events.

Keynote speakers will be Scott McNealy, Chairman and Co-Founder of Sun Microsystems and Tim Draper, Founder and Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Agenda Fall 2008
11:30am – 12:45pm Registration, Networking and Lunch
12:45pm – 1:00pm Welcome / Introductions
1:00pm – 1:15pm First Keynote Speech - Scott McNealy (Sun Microsystems)
1:15pm – 2:00pm "Extreme Pitching" 20 companies
2:00pm – 3:30pm Exhibition
3:30pm – 4:15pm "Extreme Pitching" 20 companies
4:15pm – 5:00pm 3 Power Point Presentations + Awards
5:00pm – 5:15pm Second Keynote Speech - Tim Draper (DFJ)
5:30pm – 8:00pm Reception / Cocktail

Please feel free to contact Ryan Stevenson (email to ryan at plugandplaytechcenter.com) or visit website to register. Last day to register is September 19th, 2008.

http://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com/events/expo.php

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business services needs.

Meet Strands - A recommender engine based social media service

I have started using Strands. They have an interesting approach to use rating of information and a recommendations suggested about hot topics of interest for you. Too early to tell for me the usefulness of this service, I got some issues adding service feeds from different sources, so I will follow with more comments later once I have more data. Strands is an interesting company covering social media products, mobile products and financial products all with the recommender based software engine as a base for the products.

I would suggest start using and see how well it will work for your needs. See http://www.strands.com/tlidforss to follow me on Strands.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business services needs.

Twitter Grader - New tool by Hubspot for twitter stats

Hubspot has released a new tool Twitter Grader that easily lets you check your twitter activities to see how you grade. Check it out, instant results. See http://twitter.grader.com/ Since I am not such a super twitterer, my stats were just 59 out of 100. Nice little tool, another one adding to the popularity of Twitter. See screenshots below;

You can also follow them on Twitter, http://twitter.com/grader

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business services needs.

Snapping with Snappr - QR Codes everywhere

Here's a new service most people I think have not used. Snappr allows you to easily create QR codes for your personal information, websites, blogs or whatever info you would like to get digitally coded with the standard QR code. This is an easy to use site allowing you to create QR codes for different information that you can download and distribute. See screenshots below of home page and my http://www.lidforss.com site:

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business services needs.

The return of GoingGreen - Top 100 Winner List

The Top 100 companies have been named by the AlwaysOn organization. The companies will be honored at the GoingGreen event at the beautiful Cavallo Point (just before Sausalito on the other side of Golden Gate bridge) on Sep 15-17. I attended last year's event but I will not be able to that this time. I can recommend this event to anybody interested in new high-tech companies and green tech.

For more details, see http://alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/28868

Overall Winner

Synthetic Genomics

Biofuels

Amyris Biotechnologies***Category Winner***
Biofuel Box
Bionavitas
Ceres
Coskata
Greenfuel Technologies
LS9
Mascoma
Mendel Biotechnology
Range Fuels
Sapphire Energy
Solazyme

Clean Energy

CoalTek***Category Winner***
AltaRock Energy
Bloom Energy
General Compression
GreatPoint Energy
Luca Technologies
Mariah Power
Nordic Windpower
Oorja
SpaceX
Sway

Clean Manufacturing and Clean Products

GlycosBio***Category Winner***
Artificial Muscle
EoPlex Technologies

Energy Efficiency and Energy Management

Silver Spring Networks***Category Winner***
Albeo Technologies
BPL Global
BridgeLux
Carina Technology
d.light design
Eka Systems
eMeter
Greenbox Technology
Ice Energy
Naverus
SmartSynch
SuperBulbs
SynapSense
Verdiem

Energy Storage Systems

Premium Power***Category Winner***
Angstrom Power
Boston-Power
Deeya Energy
GridPoint
Mobius Power
Pentadyne
PowerGenix
ReVolt Technology

Green Automobiles and Transportation

EcoMotors***Category Winner***
Aptera
Better Place
Fisker Automotive
PML Flightlink
Tesla Motors
Transonic Combustion
Venture Vehicles

Green Materials, Green Buildings

Serious Materials***Category Winner***
ARXX Building Products
Hycrete
Integrity Block
Perform Wall

Green Nanotech and Synthetic Genomics

Genomatica***Category Winner***
Codon Devices
Nanogram
Novomer

Resource Recovery and Waste Management

Ze-Gen***Category Winner***
Earthanol
EnerTech Environmental
Lehigh Technologies
TechTurn

Solar Energy

BrightSource Energy***Category Winner***
Ausra
Energy Innovations
eSolar
GreenVolts
HelioVolt
Infinia
Konarka Technologies
Plextronics
Quantasol
Signet Solar
SolarCity
Solar Systems
Solaria
Solel
Solexel
SolFocus
Stion


Water Technology and Water Management

AbTech Industries***Category Winner***
Agua Via
Bio Pure Technology
HydroPoint Data Systems
Microvi Biotech
Miox
NanoH2O
Purfresh
Windesal

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business services needs.

Twiggit - Marriage made in heaven?

I have started using Twiggit a new handy feature combining the power of Digg and Twitter. Easy to register your digg and twitter ids, choose whether you only want to update twitter with articles you submit or always update twitter. Reminded me right away when I saw my surprise twitter post from 56 days ago, that I have not submitted an article in Digg for quite some time. See screenshots below. Twiggit does Digg for Twitter just as easily as Twitterfeed does blogpost for Twitter. I like it, check it out. Also, you can follow Twiggit on Twitter, http://twitter.com/twiggit



Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

Mobilize 2008 - 4G wireless and Ajax devices

Are your plans taking you to San Francisco in September? If so, don't miss the opportunity to participate in GigaOM's Mobilize conference which is taking place at the beautiful Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco on Sep. 18. Here's the interesting list of speakers;

Ian Freed - VP of Amazon Kindle, Amazon.com
John Roese - CTO, Nortel
Fred Kitson - Corporate Vice President, Applied Research and Technology Center, Motorola, Inc.
Russ McGuire - VP of Corporate Strategy, Sprint
Lee Ott - Global Director, Yahoo! oneSearch, Yahoo!
John O'Rourke - GM of Mobile, Microsoft
Marc Davis - Chief Scientist of Yahoo! Connected Life, Yahoo!
Matt Murphy - Partner on iFund, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
John Forsyth - VP Strategy, Symbian Software
Dan Mason - Sr. Product Mgr, ESPN Mobile Web
Ted Morgan - CEO, SKYHOOK Wireless
Clint McClellan - Sr. Dir of Market Dev, Health & Life Sciences, Qualcomm
Rachel Hinman - Mobile Design Strategist, Adaptive Path
Jason Devitt - CEO, Skydeck
Ryan Block - Editor-at-large, Engadget
Rich Miner - Co-founder, Google's Android
Padmasree Warrior - CTO, Cisco Systems
Scott Richardson - Chief Strategy Officer, Clearwire
Richard Wong - Partner, Accel Partners
John SanGiovanni - Co-founder and VP, Product Design, Zumobi
Scott Raney - Partner, Redpoint Ventures
Jake Seid - Managing Director, Lightspeed Venture Partners
Rick Segal - Partner, JLA Ventures
Paran Johar - CMO, JumpTap
Jeff Belk - Managing Director, ICT168 Capital, LLC
Rick Robinson - VP, Products & Services, XOHM
Vincent Rerolle - Sr. VP & GM, Linux Product Division, Wind River
Raven Zachary - Research Director, Open Source, The 451 Group
Greg Sterling - Analyst, Sterling Market Intelligence/Local Mobile Search
Gary Kovas - Vice President and General Manager, Mobile and Devices, Adobe
Ken Kershner - Senior Vice President of Engineering, Dash Navigation, Inc.
Michael Copeland - Senior Writer, Fortune
John Koller - Director of Hardware Marketing, Sony Computer Entertainment America
Ken Fisher - Founder and Editor-in-chief, ArsTechnica
Chetan Sharma - President, Chetan Sharma Consulting

And finally (I am late posting this blog), today is the final day for the $100 early bird special.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

MoFuse - Mobi-lize your blog or web in 5 seconds

This is a great new webservice from the MoFuse, Rhode Island, US startup company. In 5 seconds you can get a nice looking .mobi optimized blog or website (or if you like, you can of course create a new one). I decided to use this blog to make a .mobi version, works very well, I am impressed. MoFuse also generate your QR code that can be used by camera phone scanning software to launch your browser. See the result at http://tlidforss.mofuse.mobi/ and MoFuse screenshots below. David Berube, the founder and the staff have a done an excellent job. It's a pity, I have not got an iPhone yet, would like to use a real one instead of a browser emulator.

Hitta.se in 3D better than Google Earth

An update to Google Earth made me testdrive again the "Swedish Google" company Hitta (which means find in Swedish) and their new see your city in fantastic 3D views as if you are flying over the buildings and cars. The 3D engine used is provided by the Swedish startup company, Agency9, 3D Maps (tm) EX engine. To appreciate the quality you should testdrive it here. See a snapshot below.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business services needs.

Iterasi - Weave and share your own webhistory

I started using http://www.iterasi.com/ an excellent bookmarking service that also does complete web clipping of web pages you visit and would like to bookmark and share. Got the tip from Michael Arrington's http://www.techcrunch.com/ and I agree with Mike, this is definitely a convenient and useful service. I tested on my blog, see the result at http://www.iterasi.net/public/users/tlidforss and a snapshot below.

OculusAI - Computer AI for face recognition

Oculus AI is a Swedish startup based i Stockholm that recently won the Sweden Venture Cup award. OculusAI is a new company with a lot of promise in the image and video processing field based on the latest computer research in vision recognition.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

Posterous - Revival of email by blogging

This is an interesting blogging services site, http://posterous.com/ You email, attach what you want and out comes a newly created blog for you. I like the simplicity of it. Not bad at all.
Posterous also has autopost service for Flickr and Twitter.

See a snapshot of the homepage below:


See my first blogpost and the resulting autolayout, http://tlidforss.posterous.com/

Tweetake - Take 2 speedy follow up on Twitter backup

This is second take on the new Twitter backup service from Tweetake. I just used this service and like it a lot, you get to choose, your Twitter followers or following (called friends on Tweetake) or all of your twitter info. I used the followers and friends and got right away, excel csv files to save with the twitter profile info and urls. An excellent little service that should really be a standard twitter feature.

Follow me on Twitter, http://twitter.com/tlidforss

MobileSorcery - Meet the sorcerers of mobile development tools

Mobile Sorcery is a Swedish startup company focusing on easily enabling making mobile phone applications for J2ME and Symbian environments even if you start out using your standard C/C++ library of software. Mobile Sorcery and the MoSync development tools have been used 100+ mobile devices. I have met with several of the guys behind Mobile Sorcery and I have seen that they live up to their promises. Mobile Sorcery as a company has roots from the mophun mobile game development areas.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

TerraNet - Wireless P2P using your mobile phones

TerraNet is an interesting wireless P2P communications company developing solutions for e.g. mobile phone to mobile phone communications using ordinary phones without the need to use radio basestations. This is a concept that has been explored and developed for quite some time in the WiFi area. TerraNet is a Swedish startup in Lund in Southern Sweden. I like this area, I think there is a lot of potential here, Red Herring has recently listed TerraNet as a company on their watchlist. I do think Anders Carlius, the CEO should have a chat with (if he has not so far) Francis DaCosta, founder of Santa Clara based Mesh Dynamics, a pioneer in mesh networking for voice and video using multi-radio wifi hardware. I met Francis at an early stage of development but I have seen what you can do with smart radio software when it comes to QoS and throughput. TerraNet is I think working on something similar using regular cellular/mobile phone radio technology. Keep an eye on the this company.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startups business services needs.

Infviz Labs - Making sense out of large amounts of data

Infviz Labs is a Swedish startup specializing in Microsoft based software environments for efficient data analysis tools. Pattern recognition and data analysis is the speciliaty of the software from Infviz. Infviz is based in Norrkoping in Sweden and part of Swedish initiative for startups in the eastern part of Sweden, Linkoping and Norrkoping. Infviz Labs are specialists on C#, .NET, 2D/3D presentation methods. Please have a look at the demo about Swedish counties, statistics and trend analysis demo, http://www.infviz.com/demo/index.html

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

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/

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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;

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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.

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