A Springtime For Techies.(Brief Article)

Once upon a time, baby-faced Jonas Svensson was the very image of Sweden's new generation of information-technology entrepreneurs. He and a handful of other twentysomethings founded Spray, the hot Internet portal that, by 2000, was worth more than $4 billion--on paper. Then the dot-com bubble burst. Newspapers no longer referred to Svensson as the upstart who battled Yahoo. After a Stockholm bank sued him for allegedly not repaying a loan--an accusation he denied--he wound up on the police blotter. spray founder hunted by police and creditors, blared a headline in late 2001.

These days Sweden has a new new face of IT--Gunilla Alsio, bespectacled and graying, a fiftysomething grad student and mom making her first foray into high tech. Alsio worked for eight years as an ergonomics consultant, and her invention grew directly out of her practical experience. Her company, Senseboard Technologies, is now struggling to launch the Virtual Keyboard--an innovation of keyboardless typing that takes the stress out of repetitive stress injury, or RSI. The product consists of two lozenge-shaped pads that are strapped to the user's palms and "read" finger movements; imagine touch-typing in the air and seeing the words appear on a screen. The Virtual Keyboard, which won the best-new-technology award at the Comdex computer fair in Las Vegas in November, will be priced between $150 and $200. In January, she squeezed a modest sum out of one investor, turned out the first prototypes this month, and just last week procured additional funding.

From Svensson's heyday to Alsio's trudge through the postbubble wilderness, the Swedish IT industry has had a hell of a ride. But there's good news: the worst seems to be over. And if Sweden is coming out of its dot-coma, then so should the rest of the high-tech world. Sweden has historically been on the global digital economy's leading edge--on the way up as well as down. Sweden was the fastest-growing venture capital market in the world during the late 1990s. Wired magazine ranks Kista, the "Wireless Valley" outside Stockholm, as the world's third most innovative IT cluster, after Silicon Valley and Boston. The 2002 IDC/World Times Information Society Index ranks Sweden as the most advanced information economy in the world. As if on cue, with Sweden looking up, other IT hothouses--in Israel and India, Britain and France--also appear to be on the mend.

For the first time in what seems like an eon--a year ago--seed money is slowly becoming available in Sweden again. Steffan Truve of CR&T, a Goteborg-based incubator, says his backers have just authorized first- round financing for the first time since the bubble popped. Industrial financing of new technologies--such as General Motors and Ford investments in telematics research at Saab and Volvo--has picked up even more strongly. Companies like C Technologies that weathered the bad days (sales are up 95 percent in 2001) are positioned particularly well. This spring, the firm's technology will appear in a new Sony and Ericsson product called ChatPen, which converts handwriting to digital form. Strikingly, employment in the IT industry has been rising sharply; among other things, Old Economy brick-and-mortar ...