All-Island SeedCorn Competition Winners Announced
30th of November 2007 by conor
The Seedcorn winners for 2007 are Movidia as Best International Emerging Company and Openplain as Best Emerging Company.
Movidia won the €100k prize due to their mobile processor technology which is targeted at activities like mobile gaming. I worked many years ago in S3 with their CEO Sean Mitchell and I'm not surprised to see him do so well. After S3 he worked in Parthus and Silansys so Movidia is a logical progression for him. You can expect to see some unique IP from these guys. Of course the challenge (as in Parthus) is to secure licencees. Competition in this space continues to be intense and it is not necessarily the best IP which gets the deals.
Openplain which won the €50000 prize provides productivity tools so that employees and employers can track and manage their time and application use more efficiently. They can also use it to compare their work performance to that of peers, team, department and company averages. Businesses like call centers live and die by productivity and require tools like this to constantly monitor and refine. It'll be interesting to see what unique benefits this tool brings as I have seen similar in the market for many years. On a side note, as a blogger, seeing a product called JournalLive really grates!
It's good to see that Seedcorn has overcome their slight obsession with life sciences and is looking again at both hardware and software. A useful exercise each year would be for them to look back and see how all the previous winners are doing.