UK company scoops technology 'Nobel Prize'

 

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Posted on 16 Mar 2007 at 17:36

A UK company is one of three grand prize winners of this year's EU 'Nobel prize' for ICT

Transitive Corporation is the only UK company to receive an award this year. It was awarded the prize, which includes a €200,000 bounty, for its pioneering QuickTransit translator that can adapt applications for different operating systems and hardware architectures without the need for changing either binary or source code.

The company claims that the resulting applications run as fast and efficiently as a native port.

Transitive Corporation is located in Los Gatos, California with the Transitive Limited research and development team in Manchester, UK.

Ian Robinson, VP Marketing, Transitive told us: 'From Transitive's perspective, the greatest benefit of winning this prestigious award is that it increases awareness of QuickTransit beyond the traditional IT (desktop and server) markets, because we are discovering that there are huge opportunities for QuickTransit beyond standard computer platforms. The makers of every type of product with an embedded CPU and motherboard (including network switches, storage controllers, PDAs, cars, planes, etc.) will at some point in the future consider moving to a new CPU, and QuickTransit makes it possible to do this without having to re-write an entire stack of existing software applications. CeBIT attracts a huge and diverse audience, and we hope that the attention resulting from Transitive's European ICT Grand Prize will help more of those embedded CPU product manufacturers to realize the benefits of rapid application transportability.'

Transitive is one of three companies to win a grand prize - companies based in Sweden and Austria took the other two. These were awarded to projects in integrating business communications systems and the automative digitisation of books.

A further 17 prizes of €5,000 were awarded to ICT breakthroughs in five other countries. These ranged from virtual training for eye surgeons and AI engines for games to systems for translating thoughts into electrical signals and a search engine for 'invisible' web content.

In all, Germany took home seven of the awards, France took four, Austria three, Sweden two, and Finland, Israel, Norway and the UK all garnered one each.

Transitive suggested that the UK's poor showing may be down to lack of exposure of these awards in this coutnry.

'I can't speak for other companies, but in Transitive's case, we were very excited with the market response to our QuickTransit launch last year, and therefore began proactively searching for competitions that we could enter our product into. That is when we discovered the European ICT Prize, which provides a unique opportunity for UK companies to pitch their technology products against the best of the best from more than 30 countries.

'Clearly, there is no shortage of technology talent in the UK - however, it is possible that other eligible UK companies may simply have been unaware of the opportunity that is available to them each year to enter the European ICT Prize. Hopefully, Transitive's Grand Prize win this year might elevate the general awareness of this impressive competition - it's kind of like the Eurovision Song Contest for technologists,' said Robinson.

This year saw a record number of entries - 425 - from 30 countries challenged for an award. For the first time, the prizes were announced at the CeBIT tech fair in Hanover, Germany.

The initiative is funded by the European Commission's Framework Programme for Research and the Executive Jury was chaired by Professor Wolfgang Wahlster of Germany.

Author: Matt Whipp