MediSapiens Bets On Big Data To Cure Cancer
"Harvard spinoff promises genome sequencing for $30"
This was the headline from FierceBiotech Research, a biotech journal. It's also a game changing development for the industry as a whole and part of a bigger trend of personalized cancer medicine. The first time scientists sequenced a human genome it cost $ 3 billion. Then it went to $ 6 million (2006), then $ 60,000 (2008), in June 2009 Illumina pushed it to $ 20,000, Nov 6 2009 Complete Genomics promised $ 4,400. The prediction for the coming year? $ 1,000 in 2-3 years and further down to $ 100 in 5-10 years.
Finnish Electric Vehicle Industry Speeds Up
The revolution on transportation industry starts speeding up also in Finland and other Nordic countries. Electricity, if produced by renewable energy (like wind, solar, hydro or nuclear power), could provide the needed low emission power source for transportation industry.
Earlier this summer, Swedish Volvo and state-owned Vattenfall launched a joint venture for plug-in hybrids to market by 2012: the target is to develop a hybrid car for households which could be charged from a common household electric outlet in about five hours ( a press release). On May, City of Copenhagen and Better Place launched a plan to build up an electric vehicle pilot project with electric-car reharging infrastructure (with battery-switching stations) in Copenhagen Region (a press release). US based Better Place has been partnered globally with Renault-Nissan and will create a battery-switching station network allowing drivers to charge with five minutes.
Tori Innovations Comes Out Of Stealth
Tori Innovations has come out of stealth mode and announced they have developed an internet-based social media service aimed to enhance firms' innovation processes. Tori Innovations aims to lower the costs of their customers by allowing the firms to enhance their internal communications and bring the end users' and stakeholders' opinions faster and more efficiently into the R&D processes.
With Tori Innovation's product it's possible to collect feedback and ideas from widely dispersed communities of users, stakeholders, and employees, information the collection of which is something not previously possible on a large scale. This is achieved by placing widgets on the sites to allow people to create ideas and post them to the firm. The ideas coming outside the firm can then be collected on the company's site, and then refined, reorganized, and processed for decision making.
Tori Innovation's technology is based on spinoff from research of VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. Tori Innovations has a pilot project in the works with a high profile Finnish customer, which will be announced shortly. Then we hopefully get more details and can review the actual product as well.
Interview with Envault Corporation after strengthening board
These days when extremely confidential data left behind on USB sticks or hard drives both by companies and governmental agencies constantly hits the headlines, Finnish startup Envault Corporation, founded in 2007, sets out to help save the top management from losing sleep.
Envault's also just been able to secure some well-known professionals to their board. Read more below as Envault's Business Developer Tuukka Autio reveals how the company got started and what kind of plans they have.
1. Could you introduce briefly what Envault does and why you will be successful?
Envault Corporation develops and sells remotely controllable, ultra-secure, and password-free protection service for all USB-connected mass storage devices. The product category in which we operate is data security and especially data leakage prevention.
We have good chances to be successful because we are producing a unique service that offers real benefits to our target customers. Then again, it’s a crowded market space with very large established competition with broader product offerings. I would say that as a specialist vendor our job is to focus on a small category and be the world’s best in it, rather than try to become the next one-stop-shop of all data security like Symantec or McAfee.
it?
The roots of the technology lie in protecting payable content streams in mobile TV and IPTV broadcast. The original inventors are VTT’s (the Technical Research Center of Finland) researchers. The company was originally spun off from VTT to commercialize the stream protection technology under the name "Splitstreem". But very soon it was found out that the technology fits superbly with protecting file storages as well, and the market potential of such product would be far greater. We call this novel protection technology “envaulting”, hence the company’s new name “Envault Corporation”.
Envaulting, in brief, is a new, password-free data protection technology that we like to speak of as an evolution from encryption. Envaulting is virtually unbreakable, has no single point of failure, and allows you to monitor and control your data unlike any other security system. You can for example remotely disable a lost USB flash drive without requiring any connection to the drive - no matter where on Earth (or Moon, makes no difference) the drive is.
We have quite recently launched our first product based on the innovation, the Envault USB Storage Protection. To scan the market and find out what our potential customers expect from such offering, we have been actively talking to domestic customers already since last November, and the reception has been very positive. Several pilot implementations of our protection system are already up and running at our customers’ premises, and we have a very long list of interested customers and distributors we hope to serve in the near future.
3. Can you tell us a bit about the kind of supporters and financing you have?
Our main financiers are VTT, naturally, and Ilkka Hiidenheimo, the founder and CEO of Stonesoft. Other than that, we’ve utilized TEKES funding in our R&D.
We have managed to enlist seasoned experts to our board as well, as Mr. Ari Hyppönen, former CTO and board member of F-Secure, and Mr. Mikael Honkavaara, the software entrepreneur of year 2005, recently joined our board.
4. The solution seems to be aimed to large corporations and government agencies. Do you have foreign customers already and how do you plan to reach new ones?
We expect to eventually extract most of our sales from abroad, namely the EU and the US market, but as a small company we really want to do our homework well on our home turf before we go after the big game – so currently we sell directly to domestic customers that are close to us and that we can currently support with our local infrastructure. We are, however, working on establishing channel network in Central Europe, and expect results already later this year. The North American market is also very interesting to us
and we have identified several potential partners with whom we’ll continue to discuss about sales co-operation.
5. What can we expect from Envault in the future?
I can tell you that we’re working on something that can really transform the way companies and government agencies secure their most precious data.
Otaniemi Forum to foster new business
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland among other organizers arrange Otaniemi Forum event in Otaniemi, Espoo on November 1st. Purpose is to offer a yearly meeting place especially for young technology, business, and design professionals and scientific community in order to facilitate new emergent ideas and their commercialization. The event is a mix of presentations and networking. Speakers include Francesco Cara, a Principal in Nokia Design, and Yrjö Sotamaa, Rector of the University of Art and Design Helsinki.
Participation is free of charge, but you need to enroll by October 19th.
