SVOX

In October 2009, Google unveiled the latest version of SVOX’s text-to-speech technology as part of its Android 2.0. release. The embedded Swiss software is now in more than a million phones, with licenses in other devices to be announced soon. SVOX is a spin-off of ETHZ and began its US operations at the CTI Start-up desk at swissnex San Francisco. The company quickly grew when it entered the automobile GPS navigation market.

Hot on the heels of the Google announcement, Kurt Fuqua, VP of Professional Services USA for SVOX, visited swissnex San Francisco to fill us in on the company’s success.

Amazee

Amazee, a start-up company supported by the swissnex CTI mandate, is the first online platform to combine standard social networking tools, online collaboration management tools, and the ability for project initiators to promote projects, offer sponsorships, and sell advertising. It was built to channel activism by providing powerful tools to help project initiators organize, collaborate, track, promote, and fund projects of any size with participants from anywhere around the world.

The company was founded in 2007 by Dania Gerhardt, Gregory Gerhardt, and Prodosh Banerjee. Headquartered in Zurich, Amazee shared our office in San Francisco in November of 2008.

“swissnex San Francisco is one of the first addresses I would recommend for Swiss startups to pay a visit," says Gregory Gerhardt, Amazee’s co-founder and CFO. "Every time we go [there] we meet new, interesting entrepreneurs and people. swissnex is very valuable in bringing people together that can help each other. Birgit Coleman has one great mission: to connect people that can benefit from each other. She helped Amazee in many different ways and we met great people through her introduction.”

On September 17th, 2008 Amazee formally launched its free platform designed to make it easier for any individual or group to initiate and collaborate on public and private projects. Amazee got second place for “Best Social Innovation” at the 2009 Europas, the inaugural TechCrunch Europe Awards. And they were nominated by Swiss ICT, Switzerland’s leading association for information and communication technology, as one of five newcomers of the year. There’s even an Amazee iPhone App, and the buzz continues to build around their company.

Alliance

Catherine Jean, the industrial liaison officer for Alliance at EPFL, was already an experienced networker when she came to swissnex San Francisco in 2007 for a six-month sabbatical. Still, she was fascinated by the ease of connecting in California, and she enjoyed the opportunity to see and learn how networking is done in a different culture.

While in California, she got the opportunity to participate in 070707, a very special Berkeley Center for New Media conference organized by local Swiss professor Greg Niemeyer, about the role of change in new media, which included a seven-mile hike North of San Francisco with rest stops where participants listened to short presentations on the subject of change in others’ work. “It is only in California that you can live such experiences!” Jean says.

She worked on two main projects while at swissnex: organizing and accompanying a road show of flying robots, and an exhibition by artist Ariel Ruiz i Altaba. Jean, who always worked in the technological field, says it was an exceptional experience and an enormous personal pleasure to be able to organize an art exhibit. A bit more in line with her normal work was the road show for robots, which gave her the opportunity to visit many institutions and laboratories and meet many new contacts. She says she hopes to find a way to adapt the networking model she learned at swissnex into her work and local cultural environment.

Kyte

swissnex San Francisco welcomed the digital broadcast company now known as Kyte to our offices for a short-term stay in 2005. The in-house Swisscom Innovations team, one of Kyte’s early investors, was essential in facilitating extensive early round funding campaigns and sharing their space with Kyte.

Kyte is an online and mobile video platform for live and on-demand content. At swissnex, Kyte co-founders Daniel Graf and Erik Abair discovered a unique home base that allowed them to maintain operations while on the road securing series A funding. Now situated in their own offices just off Union Square in San Francisco, with a European office in Zurich, Switzerland, Kyte continues to be very successful in receiving funding and acclaim for their powerful platform that allows instant video content broadcasting. swissnex San Francisco enjoys an ongoing relationship with Kyte and continues to add value to their business by introducing them to potential partners and contacts for benchmarking.

Pro Helvetia

Pro Helvetia and swissnex cooperate closely on many projects. In 2006, Pro Helvetia’s Angela Wettstein came to work at swissnex San Francisco to better understand our organization and how she might take advantage of the many synergies to surely come in the future. She found many inspiring ideas: In the Silicon Valley, for instance, she noticed that art and technology cannot be separated; companies and researchers need artists’ help to present their results, particularly in the nanotechnology field.

While working on swissnex’s etoy.CORPORATION project in 2006 and participating with the group at the ISEA Congress, she met Zhang Ga, a Chinese curator who was on the faculty at the Parsons for Design in New York City. He told her of his plans to curate a new media exhibition in Beijing in 2008, and, Angela was scheduled to spearhead the new Switzerland-China Program for Pro Helvetia, she was happy to take advantage of this networking opportunity upon her return to Switzerland.

From this outreach, a long-lasting, sustainable series of activities followed: in 2008 the new media art gallery, plug.in in Basel, invited some of Zhang Ga’s artists to present projects for the first time in Europe. Ga later selected four Swiss projects, among them the etoy project Angela worked on at swissnex San Francisco, to be part of the huge Mediart 2008 exhibition at the National Art Museum of China.

Mobile Mantra

Naveen Varshneya, founder and CEO of Mobile Mantra AG, came to San Francisco in 2004 to bring the power of his company’s innovative mobile CRM tool to the American market and to transform the way individuals and businesses connect.

Through word-of-mouth in Switzerland, where Mobile Mantra was founded in 2000, Naveen learned about swissnex as a nexus for innovation in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. When he arrived, he worked with Alex Fries at the CTI Start-up desk at swissnex and discovered both a turnkey office infrastructure and the opportunity to tap into swissnex San Francisco’s unique network—an immediate head start in finding his economic niche in the U.S.

“Globally, we have diplomatic posts, we have chambers of commerce, but there is no outpost focused on innovation, science, technology and start-ups. swissnex is clearly one-of-a-kind,” Naveen says.

swissnex continues to share a special bond with Mobile Mantra following the contributions it made to Naveen’s success. Mobile Mantra has evolved by providing services to help consumers connect with companies and governments using interactive web 2.0 and mobile technologies, and the company has created three additional, successful media properties aimed at bringing societal reforms and transforming lives. They’ve moved their base of operations to India and are ready to actively support the new swissnex outpost in Bangalore.

According to Naveen, “it is time to build global mindshare by utilizing the power of technology to help evolve human life for the better, and swissnex is an excellent initiative to cultivate innovation.”

Swiss TV

The Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, also known as Swiss TV, is the largest provider of electronic media in Switzerland. In 2004, looking to expand on their experiences and contacts at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference to the broader Silicon Valley, Swiss TV representatives contacted swissnex San Francisco for strategic support.

swissnex San Francisco tailored a four-day study tour for them, consisting of a visit to the fully digital KQED public television studios (one of the most-watched in the U.S.) and a roundtable discussion with KQED’s president and technology experts; a closed-door presentation at Stanford University by Swisscom outlining their strategy to extend consumer services beyond telecommunications; a tour of Microsoft and confidential discussions around a joint Internet TV pilot project with Swisscom in Zurich; and a public panel discussion at swissnex titled, The Future of TV, or the TV of the Future with a venture capitalist, a research analyst, and a journalist specializing in new media.

“The way the swissnex people work is amazing,” says Bernard Rappaz, Head of New Media at the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation. “They don’t only organize; they get personally involved with the ideas. We explained our goals for the trip, and they gave the plan an enormous amount of thought, explored things, and came back with suggestions and a lot of very useful and intriguing questions. They introduced many ideas we hadn’t thought of, and it challenged us in a good way. After a few weeks, we had an excellent plan for a great mix of face-to-face meetings, on-site demonstrations, and events.”

Today at Swiss TV, new media is a vital element of overall company strategy as the company looks ahead. The channels of communication stay open between Swiss TV and other organizations met during the study tour, including Swisscom and Logitech.

“The quality of the work was what really impressed me about swissnex,” Rappaz says. “They put together the best minds they can find, and when it’s all together it’s an amazing value.”