Best European start-up technology recognised in Malta

Last week Red Herring, an American media company that covers innovation, technology, financing and entrepreneurial activity worldwide, chose Malta to award prizes to the best technologies of start-up companies in Europe.

The conference was attended by over 200 entrepreneurs, industry executives, venture capitalists and journalists. It focused on the challenges of entrepreneurship in Europe. It explored the market's appreciation of innovation as a fast-track to success, how European firms are leading the charge in many tech sectors, the drivers for successful entrepreneurship in Europe, and how innovation is creating business opportunities for challengers and incumbents alike.

Red Herring reports that some of the winners of the coveted prizes included a Danish company that provides switchboard services for corporate mobile phones, a Czech startup that organises internet news into more than 650,000 categories, a Swedish technology maker that lets users control their computers just by moving their eyes, and a French start-up that simplifies the problem of creating content for hundreds of different brands of cell phones. These were given the Red Herring 100 award and were thus recognised as being some of the best startups in Europe this year.

Celebrated winner Newstin, the Czech upstart, started out developing knowledge management systems, but it now focuses on aggregating news in 10 languages, ferreting out content from 150,000 news sources around the world. Tobii, based in Danderyd, Sweden, has developed products enabling the severely handicapped to use computers but foresees much wider application in the mass market. Streamezzo, based in Paris, provides a development platform that reduces the headaches of publishers who want their content to appear on mobile phones that use a broad and growing diversity of operating systems and technologies.

Malta was not among the winners.