National innovation and entrepreneurship contest BIT held its finale last Friday on the premises of Moscow business incubator Digital October.
LinguaLeo, a web service that teaches foreign languages through popular TV serials, books and contextual dialogues, walked away with the first prize.
LinguaLeo was awarded a prize of 506,297 rubles, slightly more than $18,000, as well as a 3-month stay in Palo Alto tech incubator Plug And Play sponsored by Cisco Systems.
The prize fund totaled just 5 million rubles, approximately $180,000, shared in unequal parts between the 13 finalists.
Among the most acclaimed startups at BIT were Knopka Zhizni (‘Life Button’), a medical alert system designed for the elderly and the disabled, Outdoor Lasers, an optical system that can turn virtually any surface of up to 1,000 sq. meters into a high definition advertising surface, and Lesnoy dozor (‘Forest Watch’), an Internet and software platform presented by a Voronezh team designed to monitor forests using video surveillance, infrared and other detection systems.
Exoman, a project from St. Petersburg presented as “an entirely new class of powered exoskeletons,” was also much acclaimed.
Exoskeletons enable a person to work with heavy objects in situations where physical strength of the person is not enough, and the use of machines is impossible or impractical.
“The Americans spent 10 years and $100 million to make their prototype, but we made our own model in 48 hours using an angle grinder and welding,” boasted young project founder Alexey Sotnikov. “Imagine what we can do in two years!”
Few Russian companies among leading sponsors
Having borrowed its concept from the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, the BIT contest — short for Business of Innovative Technologies — is designed to help innovative projects emerge from across Russia with the participation of leading business and technical universities.
This year, in addition to participants from Moscow, BIT attracted teams from eight Russian regions as well as from Belarus and Kazakhstan.
After initial selection at the regional level — the contest received 700 applications this year — 13 projects were presented in the finale round of judging.
The competition was supported by the Russian Venture Company, the state owned fund of funds dedicated to innovation. MTS, a leading Russian mobile operator, was the only major Russian high tech company to sponsor the finale. Though offering rather modest prizes, international giants Intel, Cisco Systems, and Microsoft gained strong exposure at the event.
Photo credit: Intel Russia
