SmartThings collects Spark of Genius award

A company which “adds intelligence to everyday things”, allowing users of its product to control daily activities via their smartphones, has won this year’s Electric Ireland Spark of Genius award.

SmartThings, which connects physical everyday items to the internet via smartphones, allowing them to do things like lock doors and turn on lights remotely, picked up the €100,000 prize at the close of the 2012 Dublin Web Summit.

Beating 1,000 start-up companies to the prize, SmartThings was described as “a well deserved winner” by web summit founder, Paddy Cosgrave.

Yesterday also saw PCH International, a Cork-headquartered supply chain management specialist, sign a partnership with Intuitive Automata, a firm creating socially-interactive ‘robots’ for healthcare uses.

PCH’s accelerator programme, which helps items get to market on a large scale will allow the product, called Autom, be shipped across the world. Both companies featured at yesterday’s concluding session of the web summit.

Meanwhile, as this year’s biggest ever staging of the event drew to a close, 200 of the most influential firm founders in the global technology industry converged on the capital for the annual Founders event to discuss issues such as economic growth and investment, entrepreneurship, philanthropy and innovation.

Now in its third year, the event featured Moshi Monsters creator, Michael Acton-Smith; JP Rangaswami of Salesforce; Google Ventures’ Kevin Rose and YouTube co-founder, Jawed Karim.

Also popping up today and tomorrow will be film director, Barry Sonnenfeld, Bono, and former US treasury secretary and adviser to Obama, Larry Summers.