Made In Express Winners Announced
The Winners Are In!
Today we officially announced the winners to the Made In Express Contest including the Grand Prize ($10,000 US), First Prize, and Community Choice winners. The competition was tight and the voting even produced a tie for first place. Rather than breaking the tie, we’ve decided to recognize two First Prize awards! Read on to see who Robert Scoble, Phil Torrone and Chris Pirillo voted for:
Grand Prize Winner
Ernie Hall
Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Project: All terrain self-maneuverable robot
Ernie’s all-terrain self-maneuverable robot was a huge favorite with the judges. “Ernie Hall’s robot just stood out,” says judge Robert Scoble, “His videos, blogs, and the project itself made it a clear winner right away.” Ernie encourages everyone to keep on learning, recently posting “You can learn C# even if you are 65” in his blog. As a professor at the University of Cincinnati, Hall now plans to turn his code and blog entries into a course for my computer science and engineering robotics students.
First Prize Winner (tie)
Ali Khalid Lahore
Punjab, Pakistan
Project: Instant IM Translation
Ali’s idea to help people communicate via instant messaging in different languages came from a personal need, “I have a friend in France whose English is not so good, so whenever we are talking on the MSN Messenger, I copy what ever he says, paste it into a translation service, then type my reply in English, translate it into French and copy it back in MSN Messenger. ” From the start, people loved Ali’s idea to bring people closer together, “ …what i mean to say that your idea will help many people out there, it'll help communicating with people so i wish u good luck with your idea, ” says one commenter on his blog.
First Prize Winner (tie)
Jonas Martinsson
Petah Tikva, Israel
Project: Personalized print newspaper/magazine
Jonas helped us all take a step closer to publishing our own newspaper based on the news we care about. FeedJournal is “actually a little glimpse of the future…it will likely be a common way for readers to ‘roll their own’ magazines in the near future” says judge Phil Torrone, Senior Editor of Make Magazine. Jonas plans to continue development of FeedJournal and even aspires to make a commercial version of the application available.
Community Choice Winner
Sanchez Roman Canlas
Makati City, Metro Manila, Philippines
Project: A curmudgeon chat bot
Roman’s curmudgeon chat bot styled on the popular television show “Dr. House” was a big favorite with the community voters. Clearly, thinking about the larger community is a big deal for him. “The fun thing about this competition are the diversity of people involved in it, ” says Canlas, “We can conclude that technology is universal despite of your race and color”.
Congratulations to the Winners
Big congratulations to Ernie Hall, Ali Khalid Lahore, Jonas Martinsson, and Sanchez Roman Canlas for their hard work in making their ideas come to life!