Focus Digital Star Award: Outstanding Innovations Made in Germany

MUNICH, January 20, 2015 /PRNewswire/ --

- Focus and DLD honour Kreditech, relayr and moovel

With the Digital Star Award, Focus acknowledges cross-sector digital innovations that demonstrate the creative power of Germany's digital economy and confirm the country's future viability.

     (Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150120/726712 )

On Monday, 19 January 2015 at the DLD (Digital, Life, Design) digital conference, the news magazine presented the award for the third time to innovations whose "German engineering" may shape the markets of the future.

A distinguished jury led by Ulrich Reitz considered more than 100 applicants in their search for innovations by German companies, research institutes and start-ups. Focus correspondent Susann Remke from New York presented the ceremony and spoke with the winners about Germany's situation as a place of innovation.  

"With the Focus Digital Star Award, we recognise pioneers who are driving the German digital economy with their vision. Digitalisation is having a fundamental impact on the economy and our aim is to promote outstanding ideas by presenting them to a wide domestic and international audience," says Focus editor-in-chief Ulrich Reitz.

The main award for "Digital Innovation of the Year" went to financial technology company Kreditech, which now has more than 200 employees and a successful market presence. "Our goal is to use big data, complex algorithms and automated processes to make banking better for everyone around the world," explains founder and CEO Sebastian Diemer. On the basis of 15,000 data points, this technology can calculate a score for anyone worldwide, including the four billion people with no credit score and thus no access to financial services such as credit cards and instalment loans. The group's subsidiaries are currently establishing the technology in nine countries.

The "Digital Perspective" category went to relayr, who have developed a unique architecture to allow the Internet of Things to be integrated into many aspects of life. The "WunderBar" module kit allows developers to build apps that interact with special sensors to track things via smartphones, for example. This enables temperature, humidity and movement data (for instance) to be recorded and linked with almost any object. "In ten years, all products will be linked with the Internet. As one of the leading platforms for the Internet of Things, relayr offers manufacturers and their developers a very easy, secure and cost-effective way of doing this," says founder and CEO Harald Zapp.

The "Editor's Choice", the award for an innovation that the editorial team believes may prove decisive in Germany's future strength, went to moovel GmbH. A fully owned subsidiary of the Daimler Group, moovel bundles new mobility concepts combined with interactive, digital services. These include the MyTaxi app, car-sharing market leader Car2go and the moovel mobility platform, which brings together several mobility providers to show the best route from A to B. This makes moovel an impressive example of how existing industries and DAX-listed groups use digital innovations to establish new business and service segments in addition to their core business and that dynamic adaptation to new market conditions is not restricted to start-ups.

The jury for the Focus Digital Star Award includes experts such as DLD founder Steffi Czerny, Stefan Winners (Member of the Executive Board - Digital at Hubert Burda Media), Gesche Joost (Professor of Design Research and Internet Ambassador for the Federal Government), Markan Karajica (Chairman of the Board at ProSiebenSat 1 Digital), investor Lars Hinrichs, Dr Alexander von Frankenberg (Managing Director of High-Tech Gründerfonds) and Claudia Nemat (Member of the Board at Deutsche Telekom AG). 

Winners in previous years have included Auctionata, MyTaxi, ResearchGate, SAP/HANA and the big data company Blue Yonder, which has recently received one of the largest financial investments of any German technology start-up.

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SOURCE Hubert Burda Media