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I arrived in Zaragoza with a set of expectations about how this conference would go. I expected that we would uncover some very difficult problems – changes that would be hard to make. I expected that we would identify obvious challenges that would be easier to overcome.

And perhaps, what I heard was that the hard things will be easy – at least easier than I expected – and the easy things may, indeed, be very hard.

We might have expected that this conference would issue a bold cry for massive change in the business and political infrastructure–- a call, for example, for more homogeneous regulations to make cross-border businesses easier. In fact, there was very little of that.

As we heard from Mårten and our panelists this morning, there are diverse and effective strategies for building global businesses, and these strategies are working. Transatel consolidates an international team in one location; MySQL is highly distributed with employees working in 100 countries. Both strategies work, and we can learn from them.

We might have expected to hear about specific business practices that must be learned and adopted, and indeed we did. This is neither hard, nor easy, but simply work that must be done. European businesses must learn the art of product management, we were told several times yesterday. And this afternoon the point was well made that innovation must be driven in collaboration with customers to be truly valuable.

And we expected, of course, to talk about culture –- the culture of entrepreneurship and of risk. And we heard from Sven yesterday, Marten this morning, and in one way or another from almost all of our speakers, that entrepreneurs must learn to embrace risk.

This, of course, is a very hard thing. In fact, it may well be easier to reform regulations throughout Europe than it is to encourage just one individual to step off the cliff of entrepreneurship – and for his European colleagues to catch him if he falls and applaud him if he flies.

If, as Mårten suggests, society’s values are reflected in the heroes it chooses, then we must celebrate entrepreneurs and turn them into heroes in order to build a society that values and honors technology and business innovation.

Perhaps one thing I did not expect – at least in the measure that I witnessed this week – was the individual empowerment and connectedness among each of you. No one here is wrestling with these issues alone.

While we recognize and agree that the European Technology Innovation Ecosystem is fragmented, it is clear that through open and candid dialog, these fragments can come together.

This morning, Mårten talked about the value of this wonderful heterogeneous continent as a driver for innovation. As entrepreneurs learn from one another’s cultures and experiences, they see new ways of designing products, serving customers, solving products, building businesses.

The not-so-subtle theme that underlay each of the speakers at Innovate!Europe is the need for change.

Change is, indeed, very hard. But, I am feeling optimistic that change can happen.

I am confident that this will not be a conference where important ideas are discussed and, I quote again Mårten Mikos, “Absolutely nothing happens.”

I believe the people in this room have the desire to make change happen, the willingness to teach others, the willingness to lead.

As you reflect on these last two days, I remind you of the three questions we posited at the beginning of the conference:

More importantly, as you ask yourself, “what can I do to change the ecosystem?” I hope that you will, indeed, do it.

I thank you for being a part of this important dialog.

And again, I thank our sponsors for making this dialog possible.

Lastly, and most importantly, I thank the 20 showcase companies who shared with us their excellent innovations and I thank all of you for being here to share your stories, your ideas.

There is energy and optimism in this room, and I trust that you will, indeed, change your world.

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To see more of what happened at Innovate!Europe, to view the presentations, and to contribute to the conversation about European Innovation and Entrepreneurship, visit the White Paper Wiki.

I have been waiting for nearly eight years to say that! It was that long ago that I conceived the idea to create a conference to celebrate Europe’s best ICT technologies. Over the past eight years, Europe’s fractured markets have begun to come together. The Internet bubble accelerated European entrepreneurship . . . and then, when that bubble burst, it slowed the pace again.

In eight years, we have talked to thousands of entrepreneurs, investors, public administrators, customers, academics . . . and we have always agreed that the technology in development throughout Europe is first rate, world class.

Yet we have also seen that there are huge gaps between innovation and commercialization. And that, ultimately, is what this conference is about. We will look into that gap to try to understand how to fill it.

We are not alone in this effort. Over eight years, many wonderful people have welcomed me into their confidence and helped define the issues that we will address these next two days. They – like you – have had the vision to see that the challenges in the European Technology Innovation Ecosystem are real, yet can be overcome.

They – like you – know that technology and innovation can be leveraged for great economic benefit.

Among the new supporters of Innovate!Europe is the Government of Aragon, which through the development of technology centers and the creation of venture capital and other programs, is indeed working to transform this beautiful region into a leading information society.

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To see more of what happened at Innovate!Europe, and to contribute to the conversation about European Innovation and Entrepreneurship, visit the White Paper Wiki.

Founder:
Thomas MADSEN-MYGDAL

Company Description:
We’re photo geeks, parents and bloggers. We love photos because they are about stories and relationships.

Our goal is to build the world’s best photo sharing service—giving you the best range of possibilities to share and use your photos. As many others we've seen an explosion in the number of photos we take without having any tools to easily share and organize all the pictures.

We love photos because they’re about people, stories and memories. They are our life stories—they are a representation of who we are.

Product: 23 PHOTO SHARING
23 is a new global photo sharing service for those who wants to do more with digital photos than just print them. Offering unlimited storage and unlimited possibilities. Upload, backup, send, share, organize, show, view, print or interact with your photos — the choice is yours.

Market Opportunity:
Worldwide, 325 million camera phones and digital cameras were sold in 2004. Only about 5% of households with digital cameras utilize photo services at this point.

Competitors:
Kodak, Webshots, Snapfi sh,Yahoo, Shutterfl y, Sony Imagestation

Founders:
Alfredo SANZ-MOLINA, Jose Ignacio GARCIA-NICOLAS

Company Description:
ADD is a company dedicated to design and to commercialize digital electronic systems. We focus on communication systems using narrow band Power Line Communications (PLC).

Product: ADD1010
This technology is applied to a System On Chip (ADD1010 digital integrated circuit) for electric power meters. This SoC includes the metering function and Power Line Communications. The PLC allows remote reading of the consumption and the implementation of any kind of remote control function.

Market Opportunity:
We target the electrical power meters market, providing integrated circuits to the electrical power meters manufacturers. The market is huge because the life of a meter is around 20 years. In Spain more than 750 thousands of meters are replaced by new ones every year, in the EC the number of replacements is in the 10 millions. Moreover, the liberalization of the electrical market in all Europe could force electrical meter substitution of all the meters in Europe in five years. With average prices of $17 unit this supposes a market of about $3400M.

Competitors:
ITRON, IAD, AMS, ST Microelectronics, Analog Devices

Founders:
Joaquin GONZALEZ, Javier ORTEGA, Emilio MARTINEZ, Javier CASTAÑO,
Daniel TAPIAS.

Company Description:
Voice is part of a human biometric signature. We use it to make life safer and simpler. AGNITIO’s products can verify a person’s identity or find a person in a large database of audio records. Biometric Speaker Recognition technology allows identity verification in situations where only the voice is available. Scientific police use AGNITIO’s products for crime investigation, where voice traces such as telephone conversations are found, or for forensic verification reports. Contact centers can use it to increase security in phone transactions at the same time that it reduces the need for remembering passwords and PINs.

Product: BATVOX AND BATPHONE
BATVOX is a product designed for Scientifi c Police and Forensic Labs. It provides tools to perform thorough research on voice records, fi nding or confi rming the identity of the unknown speaker. It complements experts’ forensic reports in several countries. BATPHONE integrates into Contact Center platforms, providing quick and easy authentication over the phone. After a simple registration of a user's voice, the system provides automatic identity verifi cation in subsequent calls. It can also be used for background speaker recognition while talking to a phone operator.

Market Opportunity:
Speaker recognition market is currently above US$70 million, with an expected annual cumulative growth of more than 40% in the next 5 years.

Competitors:
Persay, Nuance, Scansoft, Loquendo, Voice Vault

Founder:
Ralph SHAW

Company Description:
Asavie Technologies is a leading provider of customer remote access solutions for mobile and fixed line operators. By using Asavie solutions, operators generate higher revenues by delivering innovative new products to their customers. Passbridge is a product that simplifies the once-complicated process of connecting remote users to their offi ce network. It supports a wide range of client devices and access technologies. Passbridge is completely deployed from a web site and can be provisioned in minutes. Passbridge provides a full Virtual Private Network (VPN) experience to remote users connecting from laptops, home PCs, PDAs and cell phones over broadband, WiFi, GPRS and 3G.

Product: ACCESSMYLAN
Asavie’s mission is to be the leading provider of seamless and secure remote access for people on the move. With its primary focus on mobile operators, fixed-line operators, ISPs and enterprise software vendors, Asavie deploys a subscription based managed service that removes barriers to VPN deployment. No cables, no hardware and no hassles, this application increases ARPU and dramatically reduces churn.

Market Opportunity:
The Yankee Group states that “mobile service revenue is expected to rise from $121Bn in 2003 to $142Bn in 2007, with 30% ($42Bn) coming from mobile data.” Analysis Research states that the sweet point in the market is SMEs expecting “Western European businesses to be spending US$10Bn across all mobile data services by 2008, and for SMB to account for 78% of that spend.” Data services and applications are essential to slowing or reversing the slide in average revenue per unit (ARPU) associated with the voice side of the business, IDC anticipates data will grow to better than 15% of total service revenues in the years ahead.

Competitors:
GotomyPC.com, Logmein.com, Research in Motion (RIM), Cisco Systems

Founders:
Brian MORAN, Mark SUSTER

Company Description:
In the 1990’s large companies installed in-house document management systems to deal with the explosion of fi les created with the mass adoption of the PC. These expensive systems often required 12-18 months to implement, required a large number of IT professionals to customize and install them, and required expensive hardware to operate. Importantly they only solved the problem of how to manage information “inside the fi rewall” at a time when most companies were increasingly relying upon trusted supply-chain partners to help them deliver value. BuildOnline was developed as an On-Demand document system to allow rapid rollout though the supply chain.

Product: BUILDONLINE
BuildOnline’s On Demand document management and collaboration platform allows teams from different departments, companies or countries to manage corporate knowledge without the need to purchase hardware, install software or perform an expensive implementation. Our 100% Internet-based solution was designed from day one to work across the fi rewall and has therefore revolutionized the way large physical asset managers work on a daily basis with their supply chains. It has been used by some of the large civil engineering projects in Europe including the London Underground, SNCF, the Highways Agency, the Ministry of Defence and BAe Systems

Market Opportunity:
BuildOnline’s target markets are those that require document sharing, collaboration and workfl ow across large and complex supply-chains. Our core markets include transport, utilities, health care, retailers, oil & gas, defense and construction civil engineering. Gartner Dataquest predicts that global revenues for document management software will reach $1.7bn by 2008 and those for collaborations will reach $1.1bn in a similar time period. It also estimates that that by 2010 30% of software revenues will not be derived from packaged applications but from a “payas-you-go” externally hosted approach. BuildOnline is a leader in this new breed of “On-Demand” software for document management and collaboration.

Competitors:
Documentum, Opentext, Hummingbird, Filenet

Founder:
Markus J.B. VRIELING

Company Description:
Creative Intermedia SRL. is the development company of CI-CIS, the Corporate Information System that works entirely over IP. Creative Intermedia is based in Romania and provides R&D, system maintenance and help desk services for CI-CIS users. Creative Intermedia is also the Romanian sales representative offi ce for local CI-CIS users.

Product: CI-CIS
CI-CIS is a web-native modular information system, developed to work entirely over IP using web servers rather than local servers. The system covers virtually all areas of activity in a company or organization. It provides solutions for Human Resource Management (HRM), Customer Relationships Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Accounting. CI-CIS is especially suitable for small and medium enterprises and NGOs. By supporting collaboration throughout the system, the system lets business partners cooperate and share data in an easy and effi cient way, allowing companies to produce at lower costs and be more competitive.

Market Opportunity:
The unique architecture of CI-CIS is especially designed for—yet not limited to—the European markets, providing a true multi-lingual solution for Information Management and making cooperation between organizations easy and effi cient. The all-in-one solution provides powerful applications without the need to interface with other programs. CI-CIS is a hosted solution and has a competitive price per user per month. With CI-CIS the second generation of Software on Demand programs is available for a broad range of clients and extremely well suited for small and medium enterprises, thus addressing the largest markets.

Competitors:
Siebel, Peoplesoft, SAP, Salesforce.com, Exact Software

Founders:
Lennart HANE, Stina EHRENSVÄRD, Jakob EHRENSVÄRD

Company Description:
Cypak is a Swedish technology innovator turning simple objects and packaging into secure data capturing devices. Since the company was founded in 1999, the technology has enabled a range of new products, including intelligent and disposable pharmaceutical packaging, electronic tape with time-tagged tamper detection and contact-less smart cards with integrated PIN pad—all in use by customers today Our business is to license our technology, sell components and provide design services.

Product: CYPAK TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM
Cypak technology combines RFID with microprocessors and printable sensors enabling timetagging of events within the object itself; open seal, broken seal, pressed surface etc. It could also be combined with external sensors such as chock, blood bio sensors etc. When placed on a contactless reader, a Cypak powered object can automatically connect to the Internet, identify and authenticate itself and transfer event data with highest level of security.

Market Opportunity:
Growing need for secure authentication and monitoring of people and shipments both in the digital and physical world, where we see RFID as an emerging technology.

Competitors:
No direct competitors

Founders:
Jean-Marie AYER, Serge AYER, Victor BERGONZOLI, Martin VETTERLI,
Emmanuel REUSENS

Company Description:
Dartfish specializes in the development of performance enhancing video applications. The technology was originally developed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. Today the company has a staff of 30 employees, is headquartered in Fribourg, Switzerland and maintains fully owned subsidiaries in Atlanta USA and in Nice France. In addition, Dartfish is represented in all continents through distributors.

Dartfish is currently concentrating on broadcast and training solutions. The company has an installed base of over 7’000 clients in the sports, educational and physical medicine markets. The company has also partnered with a large number of the high performance sports organizations

Product: DARTFISH SOFTWARE SUITE
Dartfish software integrates video into training and education. It uses video during training for immediate visual feedback and as a basis for trainer-athlete communication. After training tools analyze, compare and highlight performances, techniques, trajectories, and positions and allows shared analyses across different formats.

Market Opportunity:
The untapped market of process and performance improvement using video technology in a number of market segments such as sports expert markets, physical education, classroom education, physical therapy and recovery, and podology markets.

The company is currently concentrated in the development of the high-end expert markets. It then plans to “move down” market to larger consumer markets, this in close interaction and cooperation with its expert clients. It will then integrate content and “domain knowledge” into its product and market range.

Competitors:
Pinacle Systems, V1, Astar, Gasp, Simi

Founders:
Jean-Michel FORESTIER, Gerard CHALOM

Company Description:
To truly communicate with someone, you need to share the same references and the same culture. The Internet considerably increases the volume and the speed of communications, but does not provide a shared context. How do we select among voluminous content, how can we be sure we’re understood?
This question may be divided into simpler questions:
1. How do we represent computer-based knowledge in a durable manner?
2. How do we share it?
3. How can we integrate Internet exchanges into everyday life?
The answer: e.story’s LinkedMinds

Product: LINKEDMINDS
LinkedMinds indexes and discriminates on search engine results. Results are presented in a global view with spheres and bubbles. This helps to select documents, or to eliminate the documents that are not relevant. Emails are analyzed and presented the same way. Work can be shared and directly emailed along with the dictionaries and indexes. Emails and documents are synchronized independent of the computer on which they were received. “For your eyes only” prohibits forwarding or printing. “Mission : Impossible” destroys emails after they’re read.

Market Opportunity:
The 2005 KM market is forecasted to reach $13 B USD (IDC) LinkedMinds is a Personal Knowledge Network, desktop solution. Gartner, Inc. defines personal knowledge networks as “individual knowledge worker’s solutions to networking and knowledge sharing” that provide role-, device- and location-based connectivity and information.

By 2009, personal knowledge networks will be the predominant channels for KM in enterprises.
Through 2007, three-quarters of enterprise productivity gains will be attributed to KM and other knowledge-work enhancements.

Competitors:
No direct competitors

Founder:
Robin SHEPHARD

Company Description:
Eleksen Ltd. is the world leader in smart and interactive textiles for consumer electronics. Eleksen’s unique fabric knows where it is being touched and how hard it is being pressed and can translate those actions into instructions for electronic products. The company’s core product, ElekTex, is based around a patented conductive material that is 100% fabric. It contains no wires or buttons and as a fabric it is durable, washable and easily tailored to meet a variety of challenging applications where hard sensors would fail to perform. Eleksen licenses its technology for incorporation into the products of electronics manufacturers and also sells its own solutions.

Product: ELEKTEX
The company’s core product, ElekTex, is based around a patented conductive material that is 100% fabric. It contains no wires or buttons and as a fabric it is durable, washable and easily tailored to meet a variety of challenging applications where hard sensors would fail to perform. At only 0.6mm it is lightweight, low power and can be configured for purposes ranging from postage stamp size up to the size of a tablecloth. This flexibility sets it apart from more brittle flexicircuits and less predictable conductive polymers and makes it more adaptable than solid-state sensors.

Market Opportunity:
The market for smart and interactive textiles is growing with applications in wearable consumer electronics, industrial and military applications, telematics, healthcare and toys.

Competitors:
No direct competitors

Founder:
Gervase CLIFTON-BLIGH

Company Description:
Fractal:Edge develops visualization software to help you access and understand large, complex or fast-moving information sources quickly and accurately. Founded in 1998, the company is backed by private and institutional investors and was recently selected as one of the Red Herring’s top 100 European private companies. Fractal:Edge’s technique is unique, allowing users to see the detail, overview and intermediate summaries of data all in one picture. This helps them understand overall performance more completely and see areas of concern more quickly resulting in better analysis and decision making. The company has patents granted in the USA, UK and other territories.

Product: FRACTAL:INTELLIGENCE
The volume of data that can be processed and delivered has grown exponentially but the ways in which this data is presented have not kept pace. This creates a bottleneck for any data-intensive activity. Better data visualization is the answer and Fractal:Edge offers the “class-leading” alternative according to a recent report by The Butler Group. Fractal Edge products are based on a patented visualization technology that allows huge volumes of data to be displayed onscreen. The technology improves access speeds and comprehension resulting in a faster, more accurate line from data to decision.

Market Opportunity:
The Fractal Edge visualization software is in essence horizontal in applicability – in any area where large amounts of complex or fast moving data must be understood there is an existing and growing need to represent this data more effectively. While Fractal Edge has focused on the Financial Services market to date – pull is now coming from industries as diverse as Telecom, Retail, Transportation, Manufacturing and Policing for financial, sales, IT, inventory and process management purposes. A recent report by analysts IDC forecasts a potential data visualization market of $6.7bn by 2007. Of this, data driven interactive tools, like Fractal Edge’s technology, were estimated to comprise $2.2bn.

Competitors:
Inxight, NeoVision, Panopticon, Compudign, Spotfire

Founders:
Jean Marc LEVY DREYFUS, Marc SACCHETTI, Haim MAMOU

Company Description:
GOTAPP’s Mission: Provide a web-based infrastructure that empowers sustainable development. GOTAPP is a software licensing company, partnering with ITC industry leaders, government institutions and NGOs, that is the trusted supplier of the first integrated web services infrastructure package, TAPP. TAPP transforms the Internet into a global transactional platform regardless of the terminal’s software or computing capacity.

Product: TAPP - THE TRANSACTIONAL ACCESS POINT PROTO
TAPP-based services make the Internet as simple, ubiquitous and secure to use as utility networks such as the telephone and banking system. TAPP-powered Transactional Internet services are delivered to each subscribed user regardless their hardware, software or computer skills. With TAPP-based services every user is empowered with a personal network anytime, anywhere, any device.

Market Opportunity:
Accompanying the mobile phone worldwide revolution (1.5 billion users now – 3 billion in 2010), TAPP reduces the digital divide by resolving the human adoption issues and unleashing easy and cost-effective sustainable and profi table solutions. For example, TAPP-powered virtual banking services provide each subscribed individual with a unique digital identity and an easy, costless way to benefi t from his personal secured digitized bank account. Each user may activate and use his services from any PC (web café), mobile phone (WAP) or even in a call or a face-to-face transaction with a teller.TAPP dramatically reduces individual cost of transactions, which unleashes new sustainable development patterns in the developing world – and for the people in developed societies who have no bank accounts (50 million in the US and 5 million in France).

Competitors:
No direct competitors