Maxygen, Qminder, and Zonear all won the Fall 2011 Startup Sauna Demo Day here in Helsinki. It was an interesting event, with a nice Keynote by Om Malik the founder of GigaOm. On top of that there were some solid and entertaining pitches, and the StartUp Sauna guys put on a good show.
Maxygen is producing an interesting product on the social level. From what I understand, they do cheap and quick DNA testing through a device they built, which can tell doctors whether or not you have an infectious disease. Currently hospitals provide this service through their laboratories, but not every hospital has this access in developing countries.
Qminder allows you to start queuing in line before you get somewhere so you can stop wasting your time waiting in line. It provides this functionality through their mobile app, which can integrate with certain numbered ticket machines.
Zonear provides automatic HTML5 application optimization. To use Zonear, you just need to drag your zipped HTML5 application onto their webpage and it will optimize it automatically, so the application is quicker and lighter for users.
Wavesum won the popular vote for “best pitch” for the rock performance they put on stage. When the song was over, I don’t think anyone had any idea what they did, but I got the impression they didn’t care. Wavesum does music processing that’s lightweight enough to run on mobile devices, and I believe their signal processing is the guts behind Ovelin’s Wildchords.
Here are links to all of the pitching companies coming out of Startup Sauna:
