A groundbreaking open source project has won the top prize at the 2011 MediaGuardian Innovation Awards.
The judging panel described the Apache Hadoop project as the Swiss army knife of the 21st Century, and having the potential to completely change the face of media innovations across the globe. Overall, the project was seen as a greater catalyst for innovation than WikiLeaks, the iPad and a host of other suggested nominees.
The MediaGuardian Innovator of the Year award – the headline award of the annual MediaGuardian Innovation Awards (Megas) - rewards those considered to have had the greatest impact on innovation in the media in the past year.
The Apache Hadoop project develops open-source software to allow companies to easily process huge amounts of data. This enables companies such as Facebook and Twitter to access a comprehensive ecosystem of tools and partners, which were previously only available to internet giants such as Google.
Doug Cutting, a founder of Apache Hadoop and chief architect at Cloudera – the leading provider of Apache Hadoop-based software and services – said: "Apache Hadoop pushes data management forward by empowering enterprises to make sense of their increasingly large and diverse collections of data. It is great to see the continued recognition for the technology and I am happy to accept the MediaGuardian Innovator of the Year award on behalf of this flourishing Apache community."
The Megas are now in their fourth year, and reward all that's brightest and best across the new media and technology landscapes. Other winners on the night included a "homeless tamagotchi" and a digital top trumps game with a cultural twist. The winners were announced tonight by radio / television presenter and comedian Iain Lee at a ceremony at the Science Museum in London.
TV presenter and the Guardian's Tech Weekly podcast host, Aleks Krotoski – who was on the Megas judging panel – said: "This year's entries reflected the way that new technology is feeding creative content and vice versa. The judges looked at a huge range of different entries; some were heavy, data driven technical websites while others were light and fun - but all shared a common sense that only through innovation can we make a digital future attractive to the public."
