Cisco awards second I-Prize

Mexican team wins $250K for connected life idea

Five young Mexican students won the second Cisco I-Prize, a global contest to conceptualize an idea that could turn into Cisco's next billion dollar opportunity. The first I-Prize, awarded 18 months ago, went to a German/Russian team that essentially conceived Cisco's entry into the smart grid business.

The categories contestants have to address with their ideas are: the future of work; the connected life; new ways to learn; and the future of entertainment. This year's winners, a team from the Instituto Technologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, submitted the idea of a "Life Account" that gathers information about users through connected devices in the physical world and online data in the virtual world.

"It's social networking meets the 'Internet of Things,'" says Guido Jouret, vice president and chief technology officer of Cisco's Emerging Technologies Group, and the creator of I-Prize. Together, they combine these activities to create one view of the user's life.  

The winners, announced at this week's Cisco Live! conference in Las Vegas, receive a cash prize of $250,000. The winning team was selected from 3,000 participants in the second I-Prize competition. Panelists of Cisco executives sorted through 800 ideas from 156 countries.

It takes about five to six months to determine the finalists and the winners once the competition is launched, Jouret says. But once a winning idea is selected it's not a slam dunk that it gets incubated within Cisco as the company's next billion dollar opportunity.

"It goes into our ideation funnel," Jouret says. "Elements are combined with other ideas to form the next emerging technology."

Cisco plans to launch its third I-Prize competition in January or February, 2011. This fall, Cisco will launch an I-Prize competition in Russia where it just invested $1 billion to encourage entrepreneurship.

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