Collanos

Swiss startup nominated for prestigious international award

Zurich, January 7, 2009 – Collanos Software, the developer of Collanos Workplace that allows teams to collaborate electronically over the Internet, was nominated as a finalist for Red Herring 100 Global Award. In April of last year, Collanos Software was selected as a 2008 Red Herring 100 Europe winner. With five other Swiss startups besides Collanos being nominated for the award, Switzerland can truly be considered a prime location for innovative, up-and-coming companies.

In professional circles, the awards given out by Red Herring, an international media company, are considered the ultimate prize for innovative technology and are thus highly coveted. Red Herring 100 winners and finalists from North America, Europe, and Asia of the last three years are eligible for the prestigious “Global” award. Using an elaborate process and drawing from a pool of eligible, promising companies, Red Herring’s editors select 200 finalists for this award. Their assessments are based on quantitative as well as qualitative criteria, including financial performance, innovation, management, global strategy, and environmental integration. The finalists, elite executives, and venture capital decision makers will meet in San Diego, California from January 14-16, 2009 for the presentation of the Global 100 awards.

Red Herring nominated five other Swiss startups besides Collanos. These six nominations put Switzerland in 9th place – an outstanding ranking – on the Red Herring list for the Global 100, after the U.S., China, U.K., India, France, Germany, Finland and Canada.

Exceptionally pleased to have his company on the list of finalists, Peter Helfenstein, CEO of Collanos Software, said, “For us and five other emerging companies to represent our country and Europe in San Diego makes me very proud of Collanos and Switzerland as a technology location. Collanos’ nomination highlights our innovative strength and confirms the course we have taken using our special, highly attractive freemium business model.”

In December 2008, Collanos launched the latest version of Collanos Workplace 1.4 as a comprehensive unified collaboration solution. Existing teamwork support services are now supplemented with new voice, video, and project management functions. The company also announced that it had registered its 22,000th active Collanos user.
For additional information about the Red Herring 100 Global, please go to: http://www.herringevents.com/global08/index.html

About Collanos Software
Collanos is a global start-up that focuses on the collaboration needs of teams who demand a secure, cross-platform, server-less solution, on- and off-line. By leveraging open-source technologies, open standards, the familiarity of existing tools, and a global development model, Collanos delivers a friendly, all inclusive team-based solution that combines the benefits of classic client/server, web, and peer-to-peer architectures.

In 2007, Collanos was selected as a candidate for the Emerging Tech Award by Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal. Also in 2007 Collanos at CeBIT was awarded with the Innovation Prize ITK for Collanos Workplace and in 2008 for the new Collanos Phone. The company was also selected as one of the 2008 Red Herring Europe 100 winners in April of 2008.

Collanos was founded in November 2003 and has offices in San Francisco and Zurich, Switzerland.

The free software can be downloaded from www.collanos.com