Winners of IST prizes named
The 20 winners of the European IT (information technology) prize have been announced. They will be showcased at the IST 2001 event in Düsseldorf on 3 to 5 December. Each prize winner receives 5,000 euro. The three grand prize winners, to be announced at the IST 2001 event, will however each be handed the 200,000 euro grand prize by European Information society and Enterprise Commissioner, Erkki Liikanen. This grand prize has proved a spur to previous winners to develop their results into marketable entities. 'Experience from the past seven years shows that the prize generates international recognition and huge interest from venture capitalism, facilitating the start-up phase and access to finance,' Mr Liikanen said. The awards were decided by a European jury that had been drawn up by Euro-CASE, the European council of applied science and engineering, which also organises the awards, in collaboration with the IST (information society technologies) programme of the Fifth Framework programme. The stated criteria for winning require that the projects must display technical excellence, innovative content, potential market value and the capacity to generate new jobs. This year's 20 winners are drawn from Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Norway, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. The themes of the winning projects included software applications for medical, object identification and 3D modelling, as well as a tool which can identify child pornography on the Internet. A family of mobile robots which has business applications is also one of the winners.