iRewind and Typesafe founder Martin Odersky among the winners of the Swiss ICT Award

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06.11.2014

The award ceremony for the Swiss ICT Award took place yesterday in Lucerne. EPFL spin-off iRewind won in the Newcomer category. Martin Odersky, Professor at EPFL and co-founder of the start-up Typesafe was honoured with a Special Award.

About 800 people attended the award ceremony of the Swiss ICT Award at the KKL Lucerne yesterday. The prize has been awarded for ten years now and has established itself as one of the most important awards for Swiss tech companies.

Two start-ups were among the winners yesterday:

Newcomer 2014: iRewind with "AirRewind – OnAirCamera"
iRewind convinced the jury as a result of its patented OnAirCamera system, which combines film cameras and software with a smartphone app and geolocation, and streams multi-angle HD recordings directly to smartphones without the need for a server or mobile data connection. The company which is based in Lausanne was founded in

The jury's justification for the award: “Developments in the video market, rising connectivity and the ever growing use of smartphones are unmistakable signs that there is massive market potential to be tapped by combining these elements and that new solutions will stimulate and fundamentally alter the face of the market. This Swiss solution is a technically outstanding project in a hugely popular field and combines perfectly timed innovation with top-quality implementation.”

iRewind is a Swiss Tech start-up, based at the Innovation Park of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, backed up by a development team in Romania and strategic partnerships with several global hardware manufacturers. The company was incorporated in 2013 and has already about 25 employees.

Special Award 2014: Martin Odersky, founder of the programming language Scala
The jury presented the Special Award to Martin Odersky for developing Scala, a programming language which unites the best facets from the worlds of functional and object-oriented programming. A paradigm shift is currently taking place in software development as functional programming comes to the fore. Scala is a typical pivot language: it supports functional programming, but combines it with classical object-oriented methods. Scala – on which platforms such as Twitter are based – is regarded by many as a possible successor to Java on the JVM platform. Odersky's language is platform-independent, extendable and scalable, enabling it to develop alongside the requirements and users of the next generation of software.

Odersky, a citizen of Germany and Switzerland, teaches at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). As another scholar/inventor of international renown, he is representative of the innovative force and successful commercialisation of research projects in the industry in the best tradition of Swiss universities.

Odersky is co-founder and chairman of Typesafe too. Typesafe is dedicated to helping developers build Reactive applications on the JVM. With the Typesafe Reactive Platform, including Play Framework, Akka, and Scala, developers can deliver highly responsive user experiences backed by a resilient and message driven application stack that scales effortlessly on multicore and cloud computing architectures. Typesafe has offices in Lausanne, San Francisco and Sweden. Customers include companies such as Walmart, Twitter or LinkedIn. The company has about 70 employees.

Swiss ICT Award 2014: iart
Winner of the Swiss ICT Award 2014 is iart. The company from Basel was founded 2004 – not a start-up anymore, but rather young. iart was awarded for its project Megafaces. With MegaFaces, three-dimensional objects (faces) can be scanned in a 3D photo booth developed by iart and graphically displayed as illuminated reliefs of up to 8 metres high. MegaFaces was developed for the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi.

About Swiss ICT
Swiss ICT is the primary representative of the ICT workplace Switzerland and the largest trade association in the industry. Swiss ICT connects 3,000 ICT companies, software user companies and individuals and is committed professionally and politically to supporting the industry: Swiss ICT promotes knowledge exchange, bundles needs, publishes the most important salary survey and helps defining the characteristic features of a profession in the ICT industry. The association additionally awards the Swiss ICT Award.

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