The BIT Contest, Russia’s largest tech competition for innovation startup projects, announced the winners of its Global Track program on Monday. This year marks the 10th edition of this competition, which originally drew inspiration from the U.S.’ MIT $100K and Mass Challenge.
The Global Track, co-sponsored by Intel and RVC, the state-owned fund of funds dedicated to innovation, supports advanced Russian technology startups aiming to commercialize their high-tech products and services on the global market.
This year’s winners include Moscow’s WayRay with its Android-enabled navigation solution for cars. Their project uses a new optical system and holographic film to project hyper realistic information on a car’s windshield, a solution that is believed to be a cut above the existing competition.
The second winner, iBinom, is another Moscow-based startup that proposes a cloud-based genomic data interpretation system for physicians and geneticists. The developers claim that their proprietary algorithms, which tap into Amazon, Azure, and Yandex IaaS services, will enable “single human genome analysis in 30 minutes,” a dramatic reduction from today’s costly 24-hour long procedures.
A third winner is the team from the town of Dolgoprudny, a Moscow suburb, that has developed a fire prevention project chiristened Arc Protection System. This prototype device is smart enough to detect hazardous arcing (electrical discharge) in electric wiring and open the circuit before it catches fire.
The three projects are expected to represent Russia during the final stage of the Intel Global Challenge, an international competition with a $100,000 prize fund that will be held in early October 2013 at the University of California, Berkeley.
A special Global Track prize was awarded to RealSpeaker, a startup from Kazan, Tatarstan that offers a new approach to speech recognition by applying parallel analysis of audio and video streams to enhance accuracy and avoid speech fragmentation. The team is planning a pitch for US investors in September during the Russian Innovation Week.
Earlier this year, RealSpeaker received a $50,000 grant from the Microsoft Seed Fund. In December of last year, it secured its first round of financing from Startobaza, a seed stage fund from Kazan.
The BIT Contest (short for ‘Business of Innovative Technologies’) is sponsored by RVC, Intel, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, major mobile operator MTS, Skolkovo, the international tech hub under completion on the outskirts of Moscow, and Rusnano, the national nanotech giant.
Source: BIT
