Tech Trailblazers Awards: startups from emerging markets encouraged to apply

The inaugural Tech Trailblazers Awards is calling all innovative tech startups to apply, especially those in emerging markets.

The competition has a strong focus on finding “green” startups that help companies or data centres save money while saving the planet, but there are also categories for big data, cloud, infosecurity, mobile, networking, storage and virtualisation.

A separate emerging markets category is open only to countries based outside of the Middle East, North America, Europe, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Israel, Japan, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. This category is open to all private companies both privately funded or VC backed (Series C or earlier) and younger than five years old. Startups that have products, services, or innovations that fit within one of the main Tech Trailblazer awards categories, mentioned earlier, can enter.

The awards are open to entries until 12 September.

The Tech Trailblazers Awards is the first independent initiative to recognize and reward green enterprise technology startups, globally. All entrants will win a “goodie bag” of prizes worth over US$3 000 from an estimated US$1 million prize fund. Winners will also get expert advice in the form of VC mentoring.

The Tech Trailblazers Awards judging panel includes green IT experts such as ex BT Global Head of Operations, Stephen O’Donnell, Sam Johnston, Director of Cloud and IT Services at Equinix; and Harkeereet Singh, Global Head of Energy and Sustainable IT at Thomson Reuters.

“Startups are key to innovation in sustainable or green IT. Energy and resource efficiencies are found in power management, cooling and Software Defined Networking commonly known as SDN. These are just three of the areas where we are expecting to see strong green IT trailblazers contenders,” says O’Donnell.