Today is the final day of the 2007 Imagine Cup world finals and I’m currently sitting in the front of the Vista hall (appropriately named given it’s an MS event). Before going through the winning annoucement I would like to echo the words of Shin-ll Kim that all the students regardless of how far they got in the finals “are winners”. The quality of submissions this year are all of an exceptional standard and really do reflect the cream of students from around the globe.
With 344 students from 65 countries the atmosphere in the room was amazing prior to the announcements. And the excitement increased through the introductory remarks, a traditional dance and a martial arts routine.
The results for the Photography category:
1st – Team Maraqja, Poland (Iwona Bielecka, Malgorzata Lopaciuk)
2nd – Team Black and White, Croatia (Aleksandar Kordic, Igor Matosa)
3rd – Team Awesome, Canada (Patrick Struys, Ryan Marr)
The results for the Short Film category:
1st – Skylined, Poland
2nd – Team Circle, Taiwan
3rd – Papa-Paçoca, Brazil
The results for the Interface Design category:
1st – Team OOT Graphics Studio, Austria (Verena Lugmayr, Claudia Oster)
2nd – Team FrontFree Studio UI, China (Dongjing Yao, Yushi Ma)
3rd – Team Atomnium, France (Manon Gaucher, Flavien Charlon)
The results for the Project Hoshimi category
1st – Team OIA, Argentina (Pablo Gauna, Nicolás Alejandro Rodriguez Vilela)
2nd – Team Arenium, France (Laure Portet, Régis Hanol)
3rd – Team vladan.simov, Serbia (Vladan Simov)
The results for the IT Challenge category:
1st – Zhifeng Chen, China
2nd – Romain Larmet, France
3rd – Llie Cosmin Viorel, Romania
The results for the Algorithm category:
1st – Team Psyho, Poland (Radoslaw Czyz)
2nd – Team Roman, Ukraine (Roman Koshlyak)
3rd – Team SzSz, Hungry (Szilveszter Szebeni)
The results for the Web Development category:
1st – Team APB, France
2nd – Team Red Dawn, Ireland
3rd – Team FrontFree Studio – Web, China
The results for the Embedded Development category:
1st – Team Trivent Dreams, Brazil
2nd – Team Aether, Romania
3rd – Team SEED, China
The results for the Software Design category:
1st – Team 3KC, Thailand
2nd – Team En#605, Korea
3rd – Team ICAD, Jamaica
BT Innovation Accelerator program: In addition to the prizes, the Imagine Cup also acts as a feeder to the BT Innovation Accelerator program to which 6 teams will be invited to participate. This program has been setup as a partnership between BT and MS and seeks to take the student projects and catapult them forward. The top 3 student projects automatically qualify for this program which leaves 3 spots open to any other team at the world finals. Earlier this morning I was fortunate enough to provide my thoughts as to which additional teams should go through to the accelerator. The 3 teams that were just announced are:
Ireland – As I mentioned in my previous post on the final 6, the Irish entry was clearly innovative and represented just the beginning of an idea that can go much further.
Mexico – After not qualifying for the second round a number of judges felt this team had all the ingredients to really benefit from being involved with the accelerator.
Poland – A number of projects included use of Microsofts multipoint technology that allows multiple mice to be used on a single computer. What the Polish team did was truly innovative as it not only allowed multiple cursors (on a single computer) to be controlled remotely across a network and for each cursor to maintain its own in focus window. Of course by itself this wouldn’t be that valuable as the remote user wouldn’t be able to see what they are clicking, so the team also built in remote sharing capabilities. A remote user could connect to any number of desktops and use Shift-Tab to switch between them – very like using Alt-Tab to switch between programs.
Congratulations to everyone who competed in this year’s Imagine Cup. Next year is in France and the theme is the Environment.