Second winners of F1® Connectivity Innovation Prize announced

Tata Communications has announced the winners of the second round of the F1 Connectivity Innovation Prize.

In a ground breaking initiative, Tata Communications, along with Formula One Management and Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One Team, launched a trailblazing contest to award a Grand Prize of USD $50,000 to a winning individual or team that was able to successfully answer one of three Challenges.

Challenge two asked entrants to create a global digital scrapbook that would allow fans to explore and celebrate the richness and diversity of ‘The Silver Arrows’ extensive and successful history in the sport. Following an intensive judging process by a panel including Paddy Lowe, Executive Director (Technical) of the Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One Team, Tata Communications is delighted to unveil the winning entries.

Winning entry 1: Individual entrant Robert Smith, UK

Idea: A timeline of explorable ‘circuit views’ populated and curated by fans. Built using HTML5 and JQuery, the scrapbook could display memories of the Silver Arrows on two levels: The first would have races organised chronologically and grouped into respective seasons, allowing fans to easily find the event they wish to explore. The second ‘circuit view’ would allow fans to view memories and contribute their experiences by uploading imagery to any point of the circuit. This would all be viewable in a 360 degree rendering of the track and explorable via a mini-map or a ‘discover new experiences’ button. The result would be a rich map of user-generated experiences at each race, with a natural convergence of key events.

Winning entry 2: Team entrants Sam Clark, Mark Massarik and Chris Tingley, UK

Idea: A social museum that makes it easy for users to share content across social networks and rewards users for quality submissions. Working across PCs, laptops and smartphones, the website would showcase the most popular content on the landing page, contain frequently updated content, allow rapid sharing and seeding of submissions, and visually display the interconnected nature of the content. A reward system would recognise contributors with different badges including ‘Tech Head’, ‘Photojournalist’, ‘Audiophile’ or ‘Curator’, depending on the nature of their submissions.

Paddy Lowe, Executive Director (Technical) of the Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One Team says, “Going into this challenge we were eagerly anticipating innovative input from fans into how they would like to see the history of our team celebrated online. I must say the quality of entries really blew us away and we are excited by the possibility of some of the ideas coming to fruition.”

The competition, launched by Tata Communications, along with Formula One Management and the Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One Team, is a three-part crowdsourcing platform for innovation that engages international brainpower against the demanding backdrop of Formula 1 racing over the 2014 FIA Formula One World Championship.

Commenting on the winners, Julie Woods-Moss, CMO and CEO of Next Gen Business at Tata Communications says, “Both teams really got to the crux of this challenge and offered up incredibly creative and innovative solutions to what was a very complex problem to solve. Given the standard of entry to both challenges one and two, the judges all have very high expectations for the third and final challenge. It will be a tense race to the grand prize.”

The individual winners and two members of the team winners from both rounds of the F1 Connectivity Innovation Prize will be taking in the sights and sounds of the glamorous Formula 1 Grand Prix de Monaco 2015. They will also qualify for the shortlist of six winners who will compete for the overall Grand Prize of USD $50,000 at the end of the 2014 FIA Formula One World Championship.

The final challenge in the F1 Connectivity Innovation Prize will be announced exclusively on Tata Communications' F1 Connectivity Innovation Prize website on 4th Nov 2014. Keep an eye on the Official Website for updates as well as @tata_comm or #tatacommsf1prize.