Raspberry Pi founder wins prestigious IT award

The founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Eben Upton, has been named as one of the leading IT innovators under the age of 35 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The organisation praised Upton for his work delivering the £22 Raspberry Pi in helping inspire a new generation of IT-savvy children who will help ensure a strong digital future in markets across the world.

The award was presented as part of MIT's Technology Review 35 Under 35 (TR35), which has included the likes of Jonathan Ive, Linus Torvalds, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey in the past.

Writing in this month's edition of Technology Review, Upton gave some more insight into his motivation for the project.

"Society is in desperate need of a new generation of engineers, not just to design the next shiny computing gadget but to tackle the wider challenges that we face over the coming century," he said.

"Alongside this, engineering and programming can be enormously rewarding both intellectually and financially. Who wouldn't want to equip their children for a life of playing with toys and getting paid for it?"

The Raspberry Pi Foundation congratulated Upton on his achievement in a blog post, noting that it was one of the most prestigious awards handed to the organisation.

"We are disgustingly pleased to announce that Eben is one of this year's MIT Technology Review's TR35 award winners," it said.

"We're feeling immensely proud about the whole thing at the same time as experiencing a considerable amount of disequilibrium."

The interest in the Raspberry Pi has been immense since it was launched, with hundreds of thousands of orders shipped since it was first made available, and V3 readers voting the device their favourite product from the last quarter, over leading smartphones and tablets.