Commission announces 20 IST Prize winners
The Commission has revealed the identities of the 20 winners of the 2004 Information Society Technologies (IST) Prize. The winners are drawn from Finland, France, Ireland, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the UK. Each will be given 5,000 euro in prize money, as well as the opportunity to exhibit their product at the 2004 IST Event in The Hague from 15 to 17 November. The 20 winners will also all be hoping that their innovations can earn them one of three Grand Prizes up for grabs, along with a check for 200,000 euro. The IST Prize is organised by Euro-CASE, with the support and sponsorship of the Commission's IST Programme. The award is designed to recognise novel products with a high information technology content and evident market potential. This year's winners include French company Systran for their business translation software, Systran Professional Premium. According to the company's website, their product provides dependable translation of web content, PDF documents, e-mail and more, and can draw on five specialised dictionaries - business, colloquial, industries, sciences and life. FogScreen Inc., based in Finland, has been recognised for its futuristic image projection technology that can make objects appear and move seemingly in thin air. The FogScreen creates a thin, smooth fog surface almost instantly when it is switched on and can be used just like a conventional screen for image projection. Unlike a conventional screen, however, viewers can walk directly into the picture itself, or appear from behind the screen simply by walking through it. A further prize went to UK company Babboo, for its product XClone. According to Babboo, XClone provides database administrators (DBAs) with a quick and reliable drag and drop tool for the cloning of Oracle databases and applications running on Unix and Windows NT. The company promises that XClone can help to save between 25 and 80 per cent of a DBA's time. The 20 winning products were selected from 430 prize entries from 29 countries. The three Grand Prize winners will receive the European IST Prize Trophy at an awards ceremony in Brussels in early 2005.