Seven projects share the DIP contest financial reward

A total of 271,000 Czech crowns will be distributed among the winners of the 1st “DIP – Develop, Innovate, Program” contest.

February 3, Prague - The CZ.NIC association, administrator of the .CZ domain, announces today the results of the first year of the contest for young talents in the area of ICT – “DIP – Develop, Innovate, Program”. In this contest held last year prospective participants could register projects focused on the development of new open-source software or software innovation in the area of Internet technologies, services and infrastructure. Seven projects, which the contestants drafted and submitted to the association by January 15, will share a monetary prize amounting to a total of 271,000 Czech crowns.
A total of 32 projects registered for the first round of the contest. In October, a five-member board selected 12 of them to which financial contributions ranging from 10,000 to 55,000 Czech crowns were allocated depending on the degree of difficulty and importance. Individual contestants were thus able to distribute up to 405,000 Czech crowns among themselves at the end of the contest.
By January 15, the association had received only seven out of 12 selected projects. The board evaluated the degree to which contestants had fulfilled the individual assignments they had selected at the beginning. Starting from today, the information about the contest results is available at: http://www.nic.cz/vip/. The contestants will be ceremoniously introduced to the board members and awarded with prizes on 12 February, 2009 in Prague.
"We have been impressed by the high quality of the submitted projects. What is more, the board awarded three of them, of which two are dedicated to DNS technology, with a monetary prize higher than the originally suggested one. All these three cases involved project completed by university students," says one of the judges of the contest, Ondřej Surý, Technical Director of CZ.NIC.
"We are very happy that young people showed a lot of interest in the contest. Therefore, we will definitely organize it again. We will publish information about the second year of the contest sometime during the year both on the Association website and on the DIP project Internet address," adds Ondřej Filip, CZ.NIC CEO.
The contest receives media support also from its partners - information portals Root.cz, ABC Linux, IT Systems and the magazine Connect.