Interesting winners at Irish Software Association Awards
12th of November 2007 by conor
From a private-beta social network to a VC to a just-bought company, the ISA awards were certainly not predictable on Friday night.
New company of the year was Ammado. This is a semi-stealth social networking start-up co-founded by serial entrepreneur Peter Conlon. Its focus is on connecting charities and non-profits to people. I've seen the private-beta in action and I expect the full launch to get a lot of attention. Obviously the ISA guys got a good look at it too.
Brian Caulfield, ex Trinity Venture Capital, won Technology Person of the Year. Brian is one of the few VCs here who really gets it, having built and sold his own tech start-ups in the past. He really reaches out to the tech community here and has had several successful exits in Trinity.
The partnership award went to Allfinanz for their insurance underwriting automation software. This award proved timely as they announced today that they have been acquired for €48m by Munich Re!
The still uber-cool Havok won the technical innovation award as unfortunately there wasn't an award for Most Kick-ass Exit to Intel given their sale recently for $110m.
Finally, company of the year was Arantech which recently got a €3.5m investment from T-Mobile. They make 'customer experience management' software, which they say allows mobile operators to monitor all customer interactions with the network.
It's great to see such a wide spread of winners and an awards process which is all about the companies and not about the organisers. I'm looking forward to next year already.