nowEurope

In late 2005, we published a list of Central European ‘companies to watch’ which you’ll find at the top of the nowEurope links page. The list consists of technology companies based in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. The main selection critera was the subjective opinion of the NETIES consortium team members in each of these countries.

It’s now time to review the list and consider whether those companies are still worth watching. And what better way than CoolSW, a new service launched by Intel which Wired Magazine describes as a DIGG for software companies.

The burning question: Are Central European software companies ‘cool’?

Here are the criteria posted on the CoolSW FAQ page:

[Cool SW is] an online community of people passionate about software. Members post information about an interesting new software company and the community votes on whether they think a software company is, well, “cool.” The site is designed to engage anyone interested in identifying and ranking innovative new software companies and applications that are pushing the boundaries of compute technology and/or forming compelling new usage models - in short, cool software.

I choose three companies from the nowEurope Companies to Watch list that I know to be reasonably successful - meaning that they make money.

You can see the profiles I created at CoolSW, and you can vote and comment:

Grisoft (CZ)
Anasoft (SK)
IndexTools (HU)

We’ll check back in a month or so and see how these companies fare.