Hot summer brought hot news from Russia’s number one innovation center, Skolkovo.
Two budding Russian start-ups gained traction of the “Silicon Valley of Russia” - the firm ‘granted’ their wishes and invested in them handsomely. Jelastic, one of the companies at the famed special economic zone, specializes in developing cloud environments, and is soon to release a prototype version of a “private cloud” service – they have received funding of USD 1 mln. RealSpeaker, the other beneficiary, received a USD 150,000 grant to continue their development of a highly accurate speech recognition product; if successful, the system will incorporate audio as well as video analysis for speech-to-text applications. But not only the innovator hub welcomed new-comers, the rapidly growing hub attracted international attention and the number of investors in Skolkovo Fund also reached 45 last month.
The Montreal-based clean tech firm, Inerjys has announced strategic partnership with Skolkovo Innovation Park. According to the agreement Inerjys will invest USD 20 mln into cleantech firms based at Moscow’s high-tech innovation centre. The aim of the partnership is to strenghten Canadian-Russian business relations and help clean-tech companies’ commercialization.
Jelastic Private Cloud makes up a part of the cluster of companies operating in Russia’s new Skolkovo technology and innovation hub. The main cog in the wheels of Jelastic is the ‘private cloud’, which will be a service that cuts IT infrastructure costs for private companies and help them manage their IT resources in a better way. Cloud technology is somewhat suspect within business circles due to the obvious security risks when using public clouds, but the new generation of cloud services, called Jelastic Private Cloud, will offer completely private as well as ‘hybrid’ cloud environments that are increasingly being sought out today. Jelastic is headquartered in Silicon Valley, and has set up the Skolkovo facility specially to develop the private cloud platform.
RealSpeaker Lab is currently in the ongoing research phase of its major project, which has the support of the Skolkovo, Microsoft BizSpark and IT Business Incubator. The software company plans to develop a speech recognition package that will improve accuracy of audio transcripts by up to 40 percent. The unique approach incorporates the use of mouth movement capture into the analysis of audio signals, but has come under fire recently because video is invariably never available for analysis. However, the RealSpeaker team is confident that their product will tremendously expand speech recognition applications and new uses in voice control.
Source: invest-iq.net