The computer whizz kid from Mullingar who captured top prize at this year's Esat BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, won with a souped-up way to surf the Internet.
Not only does it download Internet information up to five times faster, it talks to you and lets you watch movies, all at the same time.
The genius behind the new invention is Adnan Osmani (16), a sixth year student at St Finian's College, Mullingar, Co Westmeath. He spent almost two years writing 1.5 million lines of computer code to produce a completely new kind of Internet "browser", the piece of software that allows a user to surf the Internet and find and retrieve information.
Watching most browsers download information is akin to watching a kettle come to the boil, so Adnan's promise of faster speeds yesterday attracted a lot of commercial attention. "So far, five companies have dropped by the stand," he said yesterday.
Eircom had expressed interest and he had a visit from Media Lab Europe, the Dublin-based centre for advanced computer research founded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The browser, known as "XWEBS", includes 50 search engines for finding information, music players and just about any other feature sought by the computer literate. It can run these various features simultaneously and it has a DVD player so you can watch films while Internet surfing.
The judges were highly impressed with Adnan's work. They were also somewhat dumbfounded, so much so that they decided to test run Adnan's software on Thursday night on the big computer systems at nearby University College Dublin.
The UCD team found that XWEBS was just as fast as Adnan had indicated, running at least twice as fast and up to five times as fast, depending on the computer configuration used.
The XWEBS also caters for the cautious Internet visitor. It features a talking animated figure, Phoebe, who chats in a reassuring way to you and lets you know what the web pages retrieved contain.
Adnan did not patent his browser nor its name before the exhibition but said he planned to make a move in this direction soon. After finishing school later this year, Adnan wants to do computer engineering at Harvard University in the US. With a project like the XWEBS he is probably well on his way.
