The Baseball World Cup qualification series started this week over here in Sweden, as well as in several other countries in Europe. South Korea, Canada, the Dutch Antilles, and Sweden will meet each other at a field in the Stockholm suburb Sundbyberg. The finals will take place at the end of the month in Italy.

Since baseball lost its place in the Olympic Games, the world championship is supposed to be the most important international baseball event, even if you Americans are more interested in your not-so-global World Series. Even though I root for the home team, I have to admit that Sweden’s chances are slim against both Canada and the big favorite, South Korea. To be honest, what else could you expect when the game is a very small sport in a small country, with just over a thousand registered players. (The actual Swedish expression is “licensed players;” you have to register for a license to get insurance during the games.)

To give a sense of proportion for those of you who are used to the lines outside Fenway Park; the venue in Sundbyberg normally seats just 100 spectators, although it’s been upgraded with temporary bleachers during the championship to 2,436 seats.

Baseball is just a newcomer on the Scandinavian sports scene, with teams trying to recruit players, fans, and financing, and facing fierce competition from well-established team sports like soccer and ice hockey. (Even though Boston author Robert Skole has written a baseball fantasy novel in which an American bomber crew introduces the game to Sweden during WW2.)

In my opinion, the situation for the fledgling baseball league in Sweden mirrors the challenges facing start-ups and entrepreneurs everywhere. You have a great new idea, maybe even a developed product, and you’re convinced of its great qualities, but now you have to …Next Page »

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In the world of cleantech, there’s a lot of focus on alternative energy sources and power generation. But for Seattle’s Powerit Solutions, the name of the game is energy efficiency. Powerit is the North American division of the company, which also has a European division in Sweden (where the company started). It is a leader in energy management and conservation for industry—one of the major strengths of Washington state’s cleantech cluster.

I spoke with chief executive Claes Olsson last week to find out how Powerit is trying to help companies save money and power, and how the firm plans to grow its business globally, all without working on the power generation side of things. “It’s pretty expensive to build up new sources of electricity,” Olsson said. “Energy efficiency is the low hanging fruit.”

The Swedish part of the company has been around since 1994, and the Seattle division since 2002. Olsson joined the company two years later, and in 2005, he said, “that’s when we really got going on the product.” With $6 million raised last month in new funding led by Siemens Venture Capital and ArcelorMittal (together with @Ventures and Expansion Capital Partners), and an expansion from five employees in 2007 to its current 47 (25 in the U.S.), the company does seem to be on the upswing.

“We have grown immensely,” Olsson said. “Our intention is to continue to grow but be smart about it.”

Powerit makes hardware and software to reduce energy consumption and electricity bills in industrial facilities. Part of the solution is energy efficiency—figuring out where energy is being wasted in companies and reducing it. But another big part is in “demand response,” which means understanding when utility companies’ rates are highest and tweaking a facility’s energy usage to avoid those costly peaks.

For individuals, avoiding those peaks might just mean remembering not to run your dishwasher until the late evening. For large industries, it means setting up an intelligent system to monitor those peaks and dial down expended energy as much as possible. Utility companies will send a warning that rates are …Next Page »

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Seattle-based Powerit Solutions, a maker of energy management and energy efficiency technology for commercial and industrial facilities, announced today it has raised $6 million in new funding. The round was led by new investors Siemens Venture Capital and ArcelorMittal’s Clean Technology Fund, and included existing investors @Ventures and Expansion Capital Partners.

Powerit (pronounced “Power I.T.”) says the funds will be used to speed up its growth into industrial markets, as well as solidify its position in energy management and expand product development and sales efforts. The company makes a comprehensive hardware and software system (including wireless sensors) that monitors facilities’ power usage, predicts the timing and severity of energy demand peaks, and automatically reduces the energy load where possible, to provide savings on utility bills.

Energy efficiency for businesses is a big deal these days. Claes Olsson, the chief executive of Powerit, touted in a statement “the impact our Spara technology can have on the way that commercial and industrial facility operators will address power and data management.” He added that his investors “continue to be excited by Powerit’s performance and market strength.” (ArcelorMittal is the world’s biggest steel company, so that would seem to bode well for the prospects of Powerit being used in new construction facilities.)

Powerit was formed here in 2002, but its original technology dates back to engineers at Sweden’s Lund University in 1994. The company’s first customers were in Scandinavia. Much more recently, in 2008, Powerit’s U.S. and European operations officially merged to create one company, with technology installed in more than 2,500 sites worldwide. Its customers include Ikea, Paul Masson Winery, Benton Foundry, Stockholm Airport, and the San Jose Mercury News.

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A Swedish networking organization that promotes innovation and university startup companies said today it is establishing a beachhead in San Diego to serve as a “soft landing” for Swedish technology companies looking for U.S. partners.

It is the first move overseas for Sweden’s Innovationsbro, or “Innovation Bridge,” which is affiliated with Linköping University and is supported by Vinnova, a government technology funding agency. San Diego was chosen above other possible U.S. sites because of the “high knowledge content” and “very interesting development” in the area, according to Innovationsbro director Peter Strömbäck.

Strömbäck says that by establishing a physical presence in the United States for its Acceleratus program, the group intends to help Swedish growth companies that have a great potential for expanding globally. “It’s not an incubator, it’s a soft-landing office”, Strömbäck says in Sweden’s Ny Teknik magazine. “The companies inside the incubator system in Sweden have an overwhelming challenge in getting access to the international market at a suitable time. This will give them an opportunity to get help and support locally when they establish themselves there.”

The San Diego site is expected to host representatives of Swedish technology companies for as long as a year, said Mary Walshok, a UC San Diego associate vice chancellor who serves on the Acceleratus advisory board. Walshok, who helped establish Connect, the San Diego technology networking group, has strong ties with Sweden and received the country’s Royal Order of the Polar Star for her significant contributions to the development of a Connect organization in Sweden.

Walshok said Acceleratus will be managed in San Diego by Tomas Hagenfeldt of Lead, which incubates technology startups in Sweden. The “USA is by its nature a very interesting market for Swedish start-ups,” Hagenfeldt said. “Not only for its size but also culturally and linguistically, and the industrial infrastructure is very similar to Sweden.”

[Xconomy San Diego Editor Bruce V. Bigelow contributed to this report]

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The mobile search and advertising specialist JumpTap, based in Cambridge, MA, says it will open new offices in Madrid, Spain, and Stockholm, Sweden. The expansion is in response to the rapidly growing mobile market in the Nordic and Baltic regions and in Spain, says the company, which has partnership with several mobile operators, including the Swedish-Finnish TeliaSonera and Telefónica Spain.

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Specialty pharmaceutical company Biovitrum of Stockholm, Sweden said today that it has begun human clinical tests of its new anti-hemophilia drug, a recombinant form of a blood-clotting protein called Factor IX that it is developing in collaboration with Waltham, MA-based Syntonix. The company said it had initiated dosing studies of the drug on patients with Hemophilia B, a hereditary condition in which patients lack Factor IX.

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The U.S. ambassador to Sweden, Michael Wood, wants American investors to put their money into Swedish cleantech. This week he presented his case to New England investors and venture capital firms.

“During my two years as ambassador, I have been emphasizing cooperation between Sweden and the U.S.A. in cleantech. I call this my one big thing,” says Wood.

Nearly 40 major investors, state politicians, and venture capitalists gathered at a meeting hosted by Flagship Ventures on Wednesday to hear Ambassador Wood present his list of the 48 hottest cleantech companies in Sweden—a list he has compiled by traveling all around the country since he was appointed in 2006.

“I have found a great number of small Swedish companies with great ideas for alternative energy solutions. On the other hand, in the U.S., there has been an enormous amount of capital raised for investments in cleantech,” the ambassador says. “In Sweden we have ideas looking for money, in the U.S. money looking for ideas.”

The companies on his list range from small start-ups like biopolymer developer Xylophane, wave energy specialist Seabased, and photovoltaic producer Midsummer to established, midsize firms like heat pump producer NIBE Heating. Commercial R&D into alternative energy sources—especially biofuels for heating and automobiles—has been heavily promoted by the government of Sweden, which has ambitious plans to reduce the country’s carbon dioxide emissions.

According to Wood, who spoke with Xconomy after his presentation, the reaction was very positive. Several investors asked to be included in the “cleantech mission to Sweden” that the embassy is organizing in late May. Wood is also planning for a similar event for the fall.

Wednesday’s meeting was attended by representatives of 22 New England-based venture capital firms, according to the embassy. Wood gave a similar presentation in Silicon Valley a year ago. At that time, he had only 30 companies on his list.

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