Starmind, dacadoo and Manuel Grenacher among the winners of Swiss ICT Award

The Swiss ICT award ceremony is one of the most important events of the Swiss ICT industry. 800 people attended the event yesterday – representatives of small and big companies, politicians and start-up founders.

Several start-ups stood in the spotlight. All five finalists of the “Newcomer” category were young companies. BugBuster, Mobino, Newscron, rightclearing.com and Starmind. The winner: Starmind.

Starmind, founded in 2010 in Switzerland, Zurich, has its roots in robotics and artificial intelligence. Self-Learning network algorithms allow employees to access internal company know-how in real-time. Questions are entered into the Starmind system and are then automatically forwarded to selected experts. All questions and solutions are documented, thus making employees’ know-how available building up a unique company brain. The solution is independent from location and industry and brings competitive advantage to know-how intense businesses such as client advice, IT, technology, pharma or other.

The second start-up among the winners is dacadoo which was awarded the People’s Choice Award. Dacadoo is a secure health platform which inspires its users to live a healthier life. The platform calculates the personal dacadoo health score (1 – 1000), the indicator of the current health status. By integrating gamification and social networking principles, dacadoo motivates users to be active in a fun and easy way by tracking and comparing their personal health, lifestyle and sport. The founder of dacadoo, serial entrepreneur Peter Ohnemus had the initial idea on a ski trip in Switzerland. He realized that nowadays we can measure everything – except good health. Driven by this he strove to develop a model to understand the health in real time. That was how the dacadoo health score was born.

A third young entrepreneur won a People Award: Manuel Grenacher, founder of coresystems and Mila. Launched in 2006, coresystems provides mobile cloud solutions for small, medium, and large enterprises to let them better serve their customers. Customers span a range of industries and sizes, including global power generation equipment supplier Alstom, global automated storage supplier Kardex Remstar, and construction crane specialists Wolffkran to smaller companies, including family-owned timber and joinery business Kalt and medical products provider Fleming Medical. Last week coresystems had announced that the company has closed a first financing round of CHF14 million.

Mila is an online market place for services that connects people from the same neighbourhood to help each other getting things done. The cross-sector platform allows users to offer services either for money or in exchange for another service. Users can access Mila on their PC, tablet and iOS or Android smartphone. Mila is being used in Berlin and Zurich.

The prize for the best newcomer was presented by Hans Hess, President of Swissmem and Board Member of Economiesuisse. A clear sign that the importance of start-ups is also recognised by representatives of the traditional industries in Switzerland.

And it was also encouraging to see that some members of parliament have built up a group that is focussing on issues affecting the ICT industry. This “Gruppe Digitale Nachhaltigkeit” received  a special award at the ceremony.