LIFT in Geneva selected 8 winners among 35 start-ups competing. They presented their companies today. Here is my personal ranking, starting with my favourite. Don’t ask me how I ranked them : gut feeling based on my personal interest.
Barry Schiffman, co-founder and COO, presented Viewdle Video indexing platform. It can search videos based on visual – textual – audio recognition providing a fulfilling user experience. You can type Barack Obama, get videos where he spoke, then type Irak and refine your search. The facial recognition technology looks really cool. The “Name Cloud” is also impressive: it can relate to all the people connected to Mister Obama in his speeches, like friends of friends on Facebook.
Pixelus Entertainment, Raphael Arrigoni, creates an authentic environment in video games. Created in 2003, they wanted to reduce the cost of producing video. . For example, it normally takes 4 days to simulate a vase crashing with traditional technology. With their DMM technology, they simulate any material in real time once the data are entered. They started a partnership with LucasArts in 2005, where they provide them their technology 1 year in advance, ahead of Lucas’ competitors’ studio.
Holistis, presented by Cyril Lamblard, helps decode and profile intentions, behaviours and environment, pro-actively adapting webs sites pages content to the visitors. It’s about personalization for web sites to increase consumers’ purchases on e-commerce web sites. For Nespresso US, they helped increase coffee machines sales.
Khaled Bazzi presented coComment, which connects comments and conversations on the web. They claim 1 million users, 40 million conversations tracked and their average user comments four times more than the average internet user. I installed it to track the comments I post on other weblogs, to see, on one single page, how all the conversations evolve. They have fixed some bugs – normal on the web – and wait for your comments to improve their UI.
Dominik Grolimund, co-founder Wuala : A free and simple online hard-disk. It’s a peer-to-peer technology, with no limit in storage, traffic, delay in access. You can share it with friends but it’s totally confidential, even for the providers. Will it be the Skype of online storage?
iO, Alessandro Valli, wants to bring the digital life into real life. Their activities are advertising, space redesigns and other special projects. They have customers like Fiat, Nissan, Decaux, Citroën, are self-financed and claim €3.5 million in revenues.
Clipperz, presented by Marco Barulli, targets the security of your datas, passwords, credit card numbers, in the digital environment. It acts like a trust authority, where you store and manage your most confidential information. You can create an online password manager. It is a zero-knowledge web application. I am very attracted to the concept, but very concerned my owned page being cracked by hackers.
Nicolas Dengler presented Mixin. It is a real life, shared, agenda which helps you transform your desires into real activity. Colors on your shared agenda indicate whether you’re “available” “have wishes”. You can invite your friends to join on some of your activities.