Swedish SIP Specialist Hotsip Gets US $3 Million

[London, ENGLAND] Hotsip, a Swedish developer of
SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) based products and
services, announced Wednesday an SEK 30 million
(US $3 million) investment from venture capitalist
Argnor.

The investment confirms a growing industry recognition
that SIP is here to stay — and may be among the
hottest growth areas of Internet technology in the
next few years.

SIP is a signaling protocol for Internet conferencing,
telephony, presence, events notification and instant
messaging. Developed within the Internet Engineering
Task Force MMUSIC (Multiparty Multimedia Session
Control) working group, it is becoming an important
element in wireless 3G systems that enable new multimedia
services.

Emerging from the laboratory into the commercial world,
SIP is finding financial support readily available. The
investment in Hotsip is the first to be made by Argnor
in Scandinavian countries where it hopes to back more
young, promising companies at a similar stage of their
development.

Argnor was founded in November 2000 by Sweden’s
Northstream and Canada’s Argo Global Capital, one of
the wireless industry’s major venture capital firms.
One of Northstream’s founders, Jorgen Lantto, will be
the Argnor representative on Hotsip’s board.

Hotsip itself was founded by Jens Lundstrom and Johan
Liseborn in 1999 and now employs 55 people in Sweden
and Finland.

Chief Executive Jens Lundstrom said that capitalizing
on the opportunities presented by SIP would take more
than funds. He said the market experience and expertise
of its backers would be invaluable in commercializing
Hotsip’s products for the global market.

“It is our ambition to help make SIP accessible to all
users of Internet and mobile phones,” said Lundstrom.

Web sites, books and conferences about SIP are becoming
increasingly numerous, as visitors to sipcenter.com
or sipforum.org will know.

Alan B. Johnston’s “SIP: Understanding the Session
Initiation Protocol” was published during January 2001,
and offers an extensive survey of SIP’s role in
Internet multimedia conferencing architecture.

Forthcoming events include International SIP, to be
held February 20-23 in Paris, France, where such
companies as Ubiquity, RADVision, Longboard,
Genuity, dynamicsoft, Telip, and Trillium Digital
Systems will exhibit.

March 7-9 will see a U.K. event named “Successfully
Deploying SIP In Next Generation Fixed and Mobile
Networks — Market, Technical & Commercial SIP
Strategies” being held at the Park Lane Hotel in
London.

Clearly, it’s time for SIP to sup with the movers
and shakers of the Internet industry.

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