BIT Contest, the largest tech contest in Russia and neighboring countries, held its finale last Thursday at Digital October, a popular tech event venue in Moscow center. This year, more than 1,000 applications were received from all Russian regions as well as from neighboring Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine.
A special nomination, ‘Global Track,’ has been designed to identify startups with the strongest international potential.
iSkyTracker walked away with the first prize. A resident company of Skolkovo, this startup offers a device that performs automatic in-motion searches of non-geostationary telecommunications satellites, with the ability to establish single or multiple connections to a wide range of devices. The startup claims it addresses the needs of a $3.5 billion market for ground, air and marine transport satellite communications at a fraction of its competitors’ costs.
iSkyTracker’s received a prize of 489,499 rubles, slightly more than $15,000, a one-week training session in Finland offered by FinNode as well as other rewards from Intel, Global TechInnovations, and Uspekh TV.
The second prize went to Kuznech. This St. Petersburg based startup is developing a technology for indexing and comparing billions of images online, using a 150-parameter statistical algorithm. Kuznech can find similar images in seconds by comparing them to signatures in its reference database.
CytoDel, a startup created by students from Moscow, got the third prize for its method to reduce the toxicity of chemotherapeutic treatments. The device operates through regulation and optimization of drug levels directly in a patent’s blood stream.
Among the finalists were also 1minute.ru, a website that allows users to fund charities by participating in online marketing actions; LifeTable, a touch screen interactive computer monitor system built into tables designed for restaurant/cafe environments; and SmartMarket, an innovative traffic management solution that uses experimental economics and game theory algorithms across various types of wireless cellular, satellite and other networks.
The contest also displayed Venizol and Penozol, two fire resistant construction materials produced from the ash residue of heating plants, and DenriVax, a new vaccine developed for curing several types of hormone-resistant cancers.
A new generation of inventors
Among foreign guests, Paul Goncharoff, a US tech investor who has been operating between the USA, Israel and Russia since the 1970s, shows confidence in the new generation of Russian inventors. “Russia lags behind Israel but follows the exact same path,” he said in an exchange with East-West Digital News. “Israel initially copied the Soviet system with its state-owned research institutions, but broke away in the 1970s. Its model now is taking hold in Russia: you get one ruble from the government if you can find one ruble from the private sector. That’s a huge change that old guard inventors and scientists can’t handle.”
“The new generation, those under 30 years of age, can understand what a win-win agreement means between an inventor and an investor, while the older school was win-or-lose, just like at war,” Goncharoff noticed.
Inspired by the MIT $100K competition, BIT contests – short for Business of Innovative Technologies – were organized for the first time in 2003 within Russia’s most prestigious business and technical universities.
The competition is supported by the Russian Venture Company, a state owned fund of funds dedicated to financing innovation, and Skolkovo, the world-class innovation hub nearing completion near Moscow, as well as Intel, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, major mobile operator MTS, and Rusnano, the national corporation dedicated to nanotechnology.
BIT has also teamed up with East-West Digital News to offer an English version of its website and raise its profile among the international business community.
