The Class of 2007: Where Are They Now?

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For now, Kolev says he and his 20 employees live by a mantra engraved on a sign that hangs above the entrance to his company's door: "Becoming the best marketing innovations company in Europe!" He hopes to open offices in Vienna and Brussels by the end of next year and to have one up and running in London in 2010.

And what about the nominees who didn't win the 2007 contest? Of the five who got back to us, three are doing quite well.

Swedish entrepreneur Jonas Hombert's easy-to-use video editing Web site, JayCut, has won innovation and entertainment awards from the likes of Google and Internetworld. In April, Hombert shifted his business model to licensing his technology directly to other businesses. The idea is that companies will be able to give online customers the opportunity to upload, edit, and post videos of their experiences with products. (There's nothing like having your customers compose advertising for you.)

Hombert is conducting talks with several multinational retailers, and he expects revenues of a few hundred thousand euros by the end of this year. Next up: He is upgrading his software to make playback faster and interface more "intelligent." Hombert says the new version, which launches next month, "will redefine Web editing."

Even a Paper Success

Italian Michele Finotto's Wonsys, a Web services and consulting company he began with some high school friends, has taken off, too. The company has done consulting work for high-profile clients such as eBay (EBAY) and others he won't name, and it has worked on social networking and media processing for regular clients that include Fortune 500 companies. Although he won't reveal how much, Finotto says Wonsys' revenues have doubled in the last year and adds that he is benefiting from a dearth of venture capital funding available to would-be competitors in Italy.

Sten Saar, who turned a high school class project into a trans-Baltic business selling spiral notebooks, reports that his company, Realister, recorded sales of more than half a million euros in 2007. In the past year he has expanded the company to Finland and has upgraded the notebooks to include rulers and pockets, as well as more complex printed math formulas, for which the notebooks first became popular. Saar says he expects sales to top €750,000 this year, which will help him broaden his consumer target to younger schoolchildren. "We want to make learning for youngsters cool," he says.

But for at least two of last year's finalists, the economic turmoil of the past few months has been less kind. Artemi Krymski's online real estate site, DotHomes, was probably hit the hardest as the housing market in Britain went down the tubes. (DotHomes, a subsidiary of his holding company BytePlay was originally called Extate, but Krymski changed the name when he discovered that Google searches frequently returned a correction: "Did you mean Estate?")

Krymski had hoped that his searchable platform, which trawls other real estate and agent Web sites, would become "the Google of real estate." But "we're still far off," concedes Krymski, who attributes the slow progress to the fact that it's not a self-perpetuating social-networking site. Britain's loan-deprived home buyers are probably the real cause, admits Krymski. "It's not profitable in this environment," he says.

Hard Times Hit GoodMood

Despite winning an award from the International Academy of Visual Arts and being nominated for another one by Esquire magazine, DotHomes hasn't seen consistent revenue growth. Krymski has spent the last few months looking for distributors interested in embedding his search technology into their Web sites, and he has explored partnerships with companies such as Microsoft (MSFT), AOL (TWX), Yahoo! (YHOO), and Google. Krymski has just begun to consider selling the company. But those opportunities, too, are becoming slimmer.

Estonian entrepreneur Karoli Hindriks' company, Goodmood, which makes fashionable knit hats and gloves out of soft reflective material, also has experienced some setbacks. Goodmood showed a minor loss in 2007, owing to rising operating costs and unrealistic growth expectations. Today, Hindriks says she has worked out some bugs and expanded her business to the Netherlands, where dark winters and a bicycle-happy culture make her clothing quite useful. Sales are stable, and she expects to profit this year. But it may not make much difference: Hindriks is considering selling Goodmood in 2009 to concentrate more on her increasing responsibilities (and success) as the country manager for MTV (VIA) in Estonia.

That's how it goes for entrepreneurs. Some make it, some don't. By nature, the ones that don't succeed usually come back and try again. It's gratifying to know that so many of the young entrepreneurs we profiled last year are still in the game.

Matt Mabe is a reporter in BusinessWeek's Paris bureau .