Indian teams among finalists of Cisco Developer Contest 2009

Cisco has announced the 10 shortlisted teams from Phase 1 of Cisco’s global Developer Contest - ‘Think Inside the Box’ - which includes two Indian teams. The shortlist of teams for the final phase was from nearly 110 teams and 900 registrants from 75 countries. These ten teams will vie for 3 winning positions at the end of the final phase. This global developer contest gives developers an opportunity to build exciting Linux-based applications on the Cisco Application Extension Platform (AXP), and win a share of the $100,000 prize pool.

Suresh Kumar, Gopinath Bailur and Gokila Sudarshan, members of Team Ideate, and among the 10, have created an Application Suite for IP Telephony (ASIT). This suite is designed to bring savings to organizations by blocking unauthorized voice calls and reducing network operational costs by automating the telephony installation and verification processes.

Rajesh Kotagiri of team Enhancers designed a local Advertising Mesh Networks which is a proposal to create a platform for local advertising management using the Google AdSense network. This platform aims to create a distributed advertisement-serving platform hosted on the AXP, which will help retail stores use their existing infrastructure to display advertisements on LCD screens. The solution also enables a new revenue stream for businesses, as these advertisements would be carried over existing networking infrastructure.

The global contest ‘Think Inside the Box’ began in October 2008, and was an open challenge for engineers to stretch their imagination and create innovative prototypes with the Cisco Integrated Services Router Application Extension Platform, an open network platform. This application developer contest conducted by Cisco promotes the concept of the network as a platform, and aims to recognize outstanding implementation ideas for application development.

A maximum of three members in each team were allowed to participate and the phase 1 closed on February 27, 2009 culminating into the announcement of the 10 finalists. The entries submitted to this contest are judged by a panel of industry experts and academicians for innovation, technical complexity and overall usefulness of the product.

Finalists will develop their proposed applications on the Cisco AXP platform, and will have remote access to a Simulation Lab hosted by Cisco for developing their applications. The finalists will also present their implementations to a panel of experts comprising senior-level Cisco executives along with other industry luminaries. Three winners will be selected based on weighted judging criteria, and they will receive $50,000, $30,000, and $20,000 respectively.