Mar
4
2010

Cisco Developer Contest: the winner is…

An article by Fabio Semperboni

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On October 8, 2009 Cisco announced the winners of its “Think Inside the Box” Developer Contest. Launched on Dicember 2008, the competition challenged application developers around the world to develop applications that run on the Cisco® Application Extension Platform (AXP), which resides on the popular Cisco Integrated Services Router (ISR).

The winning teams were determined by a panel of seven industry experts who selected the following applications as the most innovative, implementable and relevant to businesses. More than 100 qualified teams from 75 countries entered the competition. The finalists demonstrated the business relevance of the AXP in solving real-world problems, in areas of unified communications, security, advertising, cloud architectures and energy management.

Below the winners list:

First Place: Team MADnetwork, led by David Perez in Spain, won US$50,000 for the Building Automation Service application (BAS). Created with branch offices and multitenant units in mind, BAS helps businesses remotely monitor and manage building operations.

By integrating the service management capabilities on AXP, the application minimizes the need for external servers to manage disparate facilities (HVAC, lighting, plumbing, presence, fire, flooding and smoke detectors), which reduces capital and operational costs. The solution also saves energy costs by determining, in real time, which resources are being consumed, and to what degree, by working with a remote management solution.

Second Place: Team Enhancers, led by Rajesh Kotagiri in India, won US$30,000 for the Local Advertising Mesh Network Platform (LAMP) application.

LAMP creates a distributed ad-serving platform hosted on the AXP. This platform will reside on ISRs targeted initially toward retail deployments: for instance, retail stores can display ads on LCD units in various locations. With this solution, businesses can tap potential new revenue streams by shifting some of their advertising efforts to their existing networking infrastructures.

Third Place: Team BugsBernie, led by Bernhard Beckmann in Germany, won US$20,000 for the Integrated Surveillance System application. With this application, Internet Protocol phones can be turned on during nonworking hours to monitor any audio signals in the offices.When abnormal audio signal patterns are detected (crossing a configurable threshold), the application notifies external security services or devices such as mobile phones, computers and video monitoring systems. Sabotage of telephony equipment is also detected.

The Integrated Surveillance System is a simple and cost-effective means to enable a security solution in branch offices by taking advantage of an existing IP-telephony network. The application improves manageability of security systems by providing an integrated security framework to an existing network.