Straub Ventures' company Truphone wins Red Herring 100 Global Award

The Venture Capitalist Straub Ventures is pleased to announce the outstandingperformance in this year's Red Herring 100 Global Award of two of its startup investments. Truphone is one of the winners of the prize, previously awarded to well known companies like Google, Skype or YouTube. Among the runners-up is also Straub's company PIXSTA, which in March already won the Red Herring 100 Europe Award.

With this prestigious award Red Herring, the well-known magazine for technology and business, annualy celebrates the 100 leading technology firms in the World. Truphone made it into the final list after a tough selection procedure involving 1,800 other contestants. Evaluations were made on both quantitative and qualitative criteria such as financial performance, innovation, management and global strategy. The winning companies were announced and celebrated at the Red Herring Global event in Seattle, USA, in December 2007. „This prize vindicates Truphone's innovative business model of building a global mobile phone network where people can call each other for free over the internet and call other phone numbers for very competitive prices“, says Alexander Straub. He works as a Venture Capitalist for new ventures with groundbreaking new ideas in their respective industries (in the areas Internet & Telecom, Software and CleanTech).

Since March Truphone (www.truphone.com) customers can make free calls to fixed line numbers in more than 40 countries with their Wifi capable cell phones. Incoming calls outside Wifi are forwarded over the cellular network so that Truphone users never have to miss a call. Straub Venture's other awarded investment, PIXSTA (www.PIXSTA.com), has developed a revolutionary patented search engine for finding digital images on the basis of their visual content, rather than associated text. Pictures and graphics are analysed at a per-pixel level and even very large image collections can be browsed instantly.