Cisco awards $250K developer prize

Cisco has announced the winners of its I-Prize competition

A team of students from Germany and Russia have claimed the top spot in Cisco's I-Prize developer contest.

As a reward, the team will receive $250,000 from the networking giant and could be offered positions within the company to pursue the project.

The winning entry was designed by a trio headed up by German computer science student Anna Gossen, who enlisted the help of her husband Niels Gossen and her brother Sergey Bessonnitsyn, who was working as a systems engineer in Russia.

Gossen's team pitched a system which used Cisco's networking products as a way to monitor and manage power consumption within a single home or business setting.

The awarding of the top prize brings to an end an I-Prize contest which was first launched in late 2007 to coincide with the opening of the company's globalisation centre in Bangalore.

The idea behind the contest was to uncover a new business opportunity for Cisco which would yield the company $1bn in revenues over a five to seven year period. The company estimates that the contest drew in some 2,500 entries from 104 countries.

"One of the missions of the Cisco I-Prize was to harness innovation and talent on a global scale by using collaborative tools to help brainstorm new ideas and move them from initial concept to a viable business opportunity," said Marthin De Beer, senior vice president of the company's emerging technologies group.

"The Cisco I-Prize is a real-world example of how new technologies are breaking down the traditional barriers of innovation and creating a world forum for exchanging new ideas."