Mobile Gala is an event when the year’s most successful Swedish mobile businesses and innovators praised in connection with a major industry party in Stockholm. According to the nominations announced on Monday, some companies from Skåne are listed in several major categories.

Zimpl is one of the four nominees of the category “Innovation of the Year”. The company, which was founded in Lund in 2010, uses a patented technology to make it easier to enter text on mobile phones and computers. This fall, the company has moved its office to Malmö.

Mobile payment has been a hot issue throughout the year and in the category “Mobile Payment of the Year”, Malmö company Mobill, is listed as one of the five nominated companies. The company is including the technology behind the mobile operators’ payment service, WyWallet. The finesse with Mobill’s technology is that it brings together merchants and consumers in the mobile networks, whether by an app on a smart phone, or in the case of SMS payments.

App company Fivestarday from Malmö is one of the five nominees in the category “Best Mobile Marketing of the Year”. Nominations for the campaign Lifebuoy hunt took place in cooperation with Trygg-Hansa.

Malmö company Foap, which has created a picture app for individuals who want to sell mobile photos to businesses, has been nominated in the category “Best Business Service of the Year”. A total of five companies are nominated in this category, but the title of “Best gold mobile of the Year” can just belong to one company.

Mobile Gala is arranged by newspaper companies Tidningen Mobil and Mobil:Business.

Previous Mobile Gala winners which come from the Öresund region, include Lund company Doro and Malmö company TAT .

It will be interesting to find out the final winners and see if any of the companies from the Öresund region can win the top honor. Thus we will continue to follow up with the Mobile Gala final competition in Stockholm in early November.

Click here for the original news from Sydsvenskan (in Swedish).

When: Early November, 2013
Where: Stockholm

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“We need more room because we are growing and need more space for our projects,” says James Haliburton, CEO of Topp, to Sydsvenskan.

Topp was founded in January 2013 by The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) team of seven, those responsible for design and development of the Blackberry 10. By late November they hope to grow to fifteen employees. With freelancers and other partners, there will be upwards of twenty people on the premises.

James Haliburton says they’re happy with the new building of 380 square meters on Ängelholmsgatan in Malmö.

“It’s a great, big workspace that we will be able to develop in a creative way. It may not be the place companies in our industry traditionally move to, but there is a lot of energy around Möllan, it is an exciting place to be and we will be able to grow in the premises for a few years.”

Topp’s customers come from Asia, North America and Europe. Among other projects they’ve worked for Samsung on the development of Android apps for the Galaxy smartphone and in the exploration of future smartphone experiences.

“We have a good mix of customers. We work not only for mobile manufacturers but also with major automotive manufacturers, record companies and smaller companies like Crunchfish.”

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The money comes from the co-founder of The Astonishing Tribe, Hampus Jakobsson, and Johan Lenander who serves as chairman of TAT.

According Qnekts CEO, Finnur Sverrisson, the cash contribution will be used to hire staff, create more features and develop the app to work on more platforms than Android and iOS. Qnekt started last spring and now has seventeen resellers in eleven countries.

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Mobile Heights has moved into the former Sony Mobile office in northeast Lund, bringing the group and cluster manager and CEO, Mats Ekstrand into Lund. The new research centre Mobile and Pervasive Computing Institute MACPI (which we’ve mentioned earlier here and here) bringing a focus on cloud technology, Tech Mahindra and Sigma Connectivity have also all moved into the ‘Greenland-house’.

‘It is brighter than ever. We play the cards right, the future may be really good, says Mats Ekstrand, Head of Mobile Heights cluster organization.

Sigma Connectivity is the collaboration which has come about between former Sony Mobile head Bert Nordberg, and Dan Olofsson’s Sigma taking over of the Sony Mobile hardware development unit (details here), with more than 200 hardware consultants from within Sony, to advance the ‘internet of things’.

Former Minister Sven Otto Littorin has been working as consultant and special adviser in the growth area Mobile Solutions since last September. The mission involves coordinating national and regional efforts in research, education and innovation with the aim of strengthening Skåne and Sweden’s position in these areas (see Region Skåne news desk for details).

Sony’s facility in Lund are now-a-days completely software-oriented. The business is also no longer just about mobile phones, but the development done for them is just as important.

‘The next few years will see machines starting talk directly to each other over the internet. It opens up business opportunities. Mobile communications will be important and Swedish industry needs to embrace the technology and develop new business concepts,’ says Dan Olofsson.

The primary customer group is no longer just mobile manufacturers, but rather companies that want to build online services for other equipment.

‘The Group’s overall strategy is all about convergence, to use the same services on different devices. Sony Mobile in Lund is part of a much larger unit,’ says Site Manager for Sony Mobile, Bengt-Arne Molin.

‘Mobile technology is now used in more and more industries, such as automotive and medical technology. The trend is driven by 4G network, which is a pure data network,’ adds Bert Nordberg.

The journey started in Lund, 30 years ago, with mobile phones, but those have become a relatively small part of the pie. Mats Ekstrand remarked that the recent changes moving Skåne’s telecomms industry further towards the user side, compared to places like Stockholm’s Science city, Kista, where the focus is still on networks and larger systems. The Skåne cluster is getting positioned as a supplier of everything from hardware expertise to applications and services.

Key companies in the Skåne cluster today:

Technology companies like Polar Rose, the TAT and Scalado have in recent years been bought up in profile. Among the new starters are Crunchfish and zimpl.

image from sweden.se

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