Opera Software, the Norwegian browser software publisher, announced the results of its Opera Startup Awards contest this Tuesday. The competition, intended to reveal the best Russian student startups, was conducted by Opera Software in partnership with the St. Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics and its affiliated business incubator ‘Quattuor Dimensionis’ (QD).
The contest attracted 17 teams with participants between the ages of 20 and 30 from across Russia. Following the first round of competition in April, seven teams moved on, receiving an opportunity to improve their projects within the walls of the QD incubator from May to October. Ultimately, the top three projects were selected by the contest’s panel of expert judges.
The first prize went to Goodroads, a mobile mapping service that collects data about road surface quality. The project was presented by a team from the St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University.
Online ordering service E-Cook, from Krasnodar, received the second prize. With the application, users can order meals at venues ahead of time and have their food ready by the time they arrive at a restaurant or they can have meals delivered to their homes.
The third prize was shared by two team projects. One was Kwenda, a travel planning service focusing on scenic locations developed by students of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. The other was proFeedback, a browser extension that allows users to comment on and rate websites and individual web pages.
Opera Software also awarded separate cash grants to three teams which intergrated Opera technologies in their projects. E-Cook, proFeedback, and Drugovod, a service developed by a St. Petersburg team which allows users to import contacts from social networks onto mobile devices and set up automatic greetings on birthdays and other occasions. The developers of proFeedback also received an invitation for a summer internship at Opera Software headquarters in Oslo.
