Best of Engineering, Best of the Web

Louis Pouzin, Robert Kahn, Vint Cerf, Tim Berners Lee and Marc Andreessen were announced as the inaugural winners of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (a £1m global engineering prize) this week. They were selected for their ground breaking work which led to the internet and world wide web.

We’re pretty sure we can’t add much to what’s been written about the web (on the web!), and it’s impact on our lives, so instead we thought we’d bring you a ‘best of the web’ and share a few of the things that caught our attention:

• You can read about the winners, and hear from the judges, plus other eminent people, at the Prize’s webpage. This includes a short word from Mr Narayana Murthy, founder of Infosys.
• A film of the event is available on YouTube, and you can hear from the winners too.
• Marc Andreessen congratulated the other winners on his blog, acknowledgedother he saw as instumental in the development and announced that he was donating his share of the prize to charities that promote engineering.
• The Times of India coverage highlighted the international dimmension (the winners represent three countries).
• The prize was supported by an august list of sponsors. As people who promote the UK-India links, it was striking to us how many engineering links existed amongst the sponsors. BAE Systems have a JV with HAL, Shell have one of their major technology centres in Bangalore and the Tata Group features heavily in the sponsors and are one of the largest employers in the UK. A special mention goes to BG Group, who signed a huge LNG contract with the state of Gujarat in the same week as the Prize announcement.
• Finally, TechCrunch found a great picture demonstrating that engineering is nothing new to Her Majesty the Queen!

I’m sure that discussions between the judges will have been intense, because there have been so many hugely influential engineering advances, but the web team are worthy winners. The debate will now, no doubt, turn to who should win the next prize!

If you can’t wait for two years, a new initiative was lanched this week in the UK for people to vote the greatest British innovation. It’s a narrower focus, being only British innovations, but voting closes in two days and there’s some great things on the list! If you want to have your say, voting closes in two days.