QlikTech named European High-Tech Entrepreneur of the Year
...The winner of the Next Gem award, an award given each year by Audemars Piguet to the best young company, is Britain's Alfresco. The company, which makes open-source content management software, was founded by two veterans in the software sector: John Powell, the former chief operating officer of Business Objects, and John Newton, the co-founder of Documentum, a traditional content management company. Before Alfresco came along only 25% of companies could afford content management software. Some 60,000 organizations use Alfresco's software for free, and around 700 pay to subscribe to use the service more effectively. The company aims to be profitable by next year.
Audemars Piguet's Changing Times awards are the initiative of the European Tech Tour Association, a 10-year-old not-for-profit association that connects Europe's best start-ups with investors. The winner of the 2006 Changing Times award was MySQL, which was sold to Sun Microsystems for $1 billion in January of this year.
