Cisco 'Think inside the box' contest winners

David Heath
Tuesday, 13 October 2009 07:02

IT Industry - Development

All prizes were awarded to team entries.

First place and a prize of $US50,000 was awarded to MADNetwork from Spain with an entry called Building Automation Service.

According to Cisco, "BAS is a proposal for remote monitoring and operating of real estate facilities (HVAC, lighting, plumbing, presence, fire, flooding, and smoke detectors) of all branch offices from the enterprise headquarters. This solution will incur no additional costs, other than the cost for the installation of sensors and actuators for functions that are to be controlled. It manages these devices by a set of Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) operations, providing a comprehensive network view to administrators of these control systems.

"This solution reduces the need for external servers to manage these disparate facilities, reduces capital and operational costs by integrating the service management capabilities on AXP. In addition, this solution saves energy costs by detecting facilities breakdowns in real-time."

Second place and $US30,000 was awarded to team Enhancers from India, who created a network-based advertising platform, "Local Advertising Mesh Network." "LAMP is a proposal to create an advertising platform for local ad management. It leverages the Google AdSense network to create a distributed ad-serving platform hosted on the AXP. This platform will reside on routers spread across various branch offices.

"The ad-serving platform will enable local advertisers to create and manage targeted ads for distribution on various rich media devices across the branch office network (ex. Retail stores can display ads on their LCD units). This solution offers the benefit of enabling a new revenue stream for businesses to open up their ad-inventory by leveraging existing networking infrastructure."

Third place (and a prize of $US20,000), and to this author, the most intriguing entry came from BugsBernie from Germany.  The Integrated Surveillance System "is a proposal for fully-integrated surveillance system which leverages Cisco network services on ISR and combines them in a new, smart way to build a security system. With this solution, existing IP phones can be turned on during non-working hours, to monitor any audio signals in the offices. If there are abnormal audio signal patterns, the application notifies external security services or devices such as cell phones, computers, video monitoring systems etc.

"It is a simple and cost effective means to enable a security solution in branch office by leveraging existing network infrastructure. This solution improves manageability of security systems by providing an integrated security framework."

Think about it – this system will open up the microphones on a room full of IP phones and monitor them for unexpected noise.  A very smart application.

The results page also discusses the other seven finalists.