Demo Cup and - Innovation Awards, 2011

Announcing the Winners of the 2011 OWF Innovation Awards

For the 3rd time, the Open World Forum has organized the Open Innovation Awards, a competition designed to showcase open source projects on stage in a lively and entertaining way. The six finalists were invited to present their products on stage for exactly six minutes each, and convince the audience and the jury that their innovation may someday change the world.The jury was composed of:

• Jean-François Caenen, CTO, Capgemini
• Jean-Marie Chauvet, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, LC Capital
• Ludovic Dubosc, CEO of XWiki, and one of the winners of the 2010 edition
• Stefane Fermigier, Founder of Nuxeo and President of the Open Source Software Thematic Group of the Systematic ICT Cluster
• Tom Henriksson, Partner, Open Ocean Capital
• Jean-Luc Raffaelli,  VP of Open Source Governance, Groupe La Poste

And this year, the jury as chosen as winners and recipients of the 2011 OWF Innovation Awards:

• Engineering Group for Spago BI - the only 100% open source business intelligence suite, supports the agile development of Business Intelligence applications, guaranteeing quick development, flexibility and continuous improvement.
• Joshfire for The Joshfire Framework - The first open source multi-device framework dedicated to web, mobile, tablets, TV and specific connected objects
• Seeks for The Seeks project - A collaborative, decentralized with automated expertise extraction search software

Stefane Fermigier, organizer of the Demo Cup, said: "This was a fun and tough competition. The finalists put a lot of efforts into presenting their products in a fun and insightful way. The winners were those who did the best job at articulating the value of their product, and explaining technical features in a way that most people would understand."

Announcing the six finalists for the 2011 OWF Innovation Awards.

As for the previous years, the submissions received for this 4th edition of the Open Innovation Awards were of high quality and diverse. We are pleased to see that innovation remains at the heart of open source projects.

Finalists were chosen based on criteria such as innovation, potential for market success, openness and potential for a compelling demo during the finals.

After synthetizing the opinion of the jury and arbitration, the six selected projects are :

• Enalean -  Tuleap
• Engineering Group - Spago BI
• Joshfire - The Joshfire Framework
• MLState - OpaLang
• Seeks - The Seeks project
• ViFib - SlapOS

Why participate?

The OWF Demo Cup has been recognized as an important showcase and deal-making forum in Europe and worldwide. It is the launchpad for innovative Open Source technologies, products and services.

The OWF Innovation Awards 2011 will be awarded to the top best presenters at the Demo Cup. The contest is open to all Open Source projects and solutions getting ready for commercial launch or already on the market. The jury will be looking at those projects and solutions most likely to have a significant impact on society and on the marketplace.

The OWF Demo Cup is about products; it requires timed, live demonstrations; and does not allow slide presentations! In recognition of the difficulty of communicating the power and value of Open Source projects on stage in a short 8 minutes (indicative length - exact duration will depend on the number of finalists and overall time for the competition), the Demo Cup will honor outstanding presentations. Chosen for their style, passion, clarity, and sometimes for their sheer fun, these Open Innovation Awards reward a unique ability to deliver a great product and position it in the market, to show off its most compelling features, to differentiate it from other products — and along the way to entertain a tough and critical Open World Forum audience.

New this year!

This year, we've chosen to focus the competition on emerging or early stage projects, i.e. projects that have already produced real working code, that are mature enough to provide a demo, that have real users, but are still relatively new or unknown, and need the additional visibility and credibility that an OWF Innovation Award can provide to establish themselves as true market leaders.

The selection process

Our jury will select a number of finalists (less than 10) based on information you will provide them.

The competition is about selecting innovative open source projects with a potential business or societal impact. To assess these points, we need you to provide us with:

• Information about your open source project (the community website of your project - including a link to downloadable sources).
• Information about your business: basically a (simplified) business plan. If you are uncomfortable disclosing confidential information about your company to third parties, don't ask us to sign a NDA, just don't provide the information you think sensitive.

Call for participation

Candidates should submit an Executive Summary (a short version of their business plan, max 5 pages long) with a Logo for their Open Source project or solution, together with an overview of their application, and a 1/2 page text explaining how they expect to perform their demonstration.
A screencast or video of a demonstration would also be helpful for the jury, but not mandatory at this point.

Please download our information package, fill it, and send it to us through our submission form to get started.

The finals

On stage. 8 minutes (exact duration TBC.) — just you and your product in front of the Open World. Your product will be showcased to the audience of the Open World Forum.

Networking. The Open Innovation Summit is uniquely designed to create instant access and fruitful interaction. Open Innovation is different — we focus the attention on your Open Source project or solution, regardless of your team's size or budget. Over the course of three days, the Open World Forum agenda puts you in a position to network with investors from around the world, corporate managers from acquiring companies and the most influential reporters and bloggers in the Open Source communities.

Award Ceremony. The ceremony will take place in the plenary conference room after one of the closing keynotes.

The jury

The Demo Cup Jury includes investors, entrepreneurs, Open Source managers from leading IT services companies, and consultants - all of them experts in Open Source and innovation.

Calendar

• Hard Deadline for submitting your application: Aug. 26th.
• Finalists proclamation: Sept. 2nd
• Demo Cup Finals: Sept. 22nd

Past winners

2010

The winners of the 2010 edition of the Innovation Awards were:

• Disruptive Innovations (for the BlueGriffon project)
• Jaspersoft
• Obeo (for the Acceleo project)
• Talend
• XWiki

2009

The winners of the 2009 edition of the Innovation Awards were:

• BonitaSoft
• Kaltura
• ScaleDB
• SonarSource
• Ulteo

Quotes from past winners

Daniel Glazman, of Disruptive Innovation / BlueGriffon project, said: "I am delighted and proud to let you know that BlueGriffon was today a winner of the Open World Forum Innovation Awards! Many people came to me only to say they found the software impressive and superb and/or its business model valid."

Tom Cahill, VP EMEA of Jaspersoft, said: "We are delighted to receive this award, and would like to thank the Open World Forum and the members of the jury for this honor. It underscores our ability to innovate in the open source space and adapt to evolving market needs. Jaspersoft’s products are constantly being enhanced thanks to our 160,000-strong community of developers, and this prize bears testimony to the entire Jaspersoft ecosystem."

XWiki said: "We are proud to announce that XWiki received one of five awards, given by the jury composed of international experts from the field of open source. It rewards the work and commitment of a team and a community."

Obeo said: "After the Eclipse Community Award in 2009, this prize recognizes the constant efforts of Obeo and the Acceleo community to provide a quality tool."

Olivier Gaudin from SonarSource said: "For SonarSource, this award has been mainly beneficial on two aspects: 1. It has been a good opportunity for us to structure and formalize our business model and 2. It has been a great encouragement on the fact that our business model was innovative."

Thierry Koerlen from Ulteo said: "I was impressed by the level of quality of the different candidates, coming from different countries. The OWF award is beautiful and original and it is a great recognition for Ulteo. The event itself is also worth coming for the networking."