Cambridge celebrates startups

Cambridge Wireless has awarded five new technology companies as part of its Discovering Startups competition.

The five, who each received £2000 at the awards last night, were chosen from 25 entrants and range from medical sensors and imaging systems to mobile phone apps. The group of twenty judges included Tim Regan from Microsoft; Frederic Rombaut of Qualcomm Ventures Europe; Simon Bond of SiliconSouthWest; Carson Bradbury of Cre8 Ventures; Jamie Urquhart of Pond Venture Partners and co-founder of ARM; and Glenn Collinson, co-founder of CSR.

"The quality of entrants was very high and choosing five winners from the 25 pitches proved very difficult," said Leo Poll, business development manager at Philips Research and one of the competition adjudicators. "It is good to see that innovation is still thriving in the East of England and we are confident that the Discovering Start-Up winners and many of the other finalists will go on to be key players in the rapidly growing wireless industry."

The five companies voted as the best startups were:

•    Cambridge Temperature Concepts, set up in 2006 by students from Cambridge, has used its novel analogue design technology to develop a highly accurate sensor to predict fertility as accurately as IVF treatments.

•    Augmentra has developed a mapping, navigation, tracking and information tool for smartphones that provides real time mapped location and information for outdoors activities through its ViewRanger software. The Cambridge company, founded in 2006, won a best application award that year from Nokia for its S60 platform.

•    Magic Solver has over 20 iPhone apps and 2.5m customers in 90 countries in just one year developing its own apps and those for partners. It was set up by three Cambridge students and now has a presence in Silicon Valley.

•    PneumaCare's PneumaScan technology observes chest movements and calculates volume changes over time based on Structured Light Plethysmography (SLP) technology. This works by projecting a grid pattern onto a patient's chest area while two cameras record the changes in the projected pattern on the chest from different perspectives. The result is a moving 3D model of the chest. The company was set up in mid 2009 as a consortium which includes the Cambridge University Engineering Department, local consultancy Plextek and Addenbrooke's Hospital, and is backed by the Cambridge Discovery seed Fund and the Cambridge Capital Group of business angels.

•    The only non-Cambridge company in the list, Oxford Electromagnetic Solutions, has developed a fast, efficient and accurate way to detect buried pipes that seamlessly links to existing work practices and systems. The OXEMS systems uses buried RF Tagging Units, a detector and an Integrated Identification System to do this. Tagging Units identify the utility type, asset diameter, fittings and provide barcode access to remote asset databases. Automated recording adds depth, GPS location, time/date, user and detector ID to create a totally unique identifier. The company spun out of Oxford Universities Isis Innovations in July.

The winners of Discovering Start-Ups 2010.Craig Wareham from Augmentra; Kevin Gooding from OXEMS (Oxford Electromagnetic Solutions); Kevin Coleman, Discovering Start-Ups Project Director; Shamus Husheer from Cambridge Temperature Concepts; Soraya Jones, EO at Cambridge Wireless; Ward Hills from PneumaCare; Deborah Cadman, Chief Executive at EEDA; Emmanuel Carraud from MagicSolver.com.