Word's out - Aussie Imagine Cup entrants win jobs with Readify

ausic — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 10:34:00 GMT

BIG news for IMagine Cup 2008 - Software Design category entrants in Australia can actually win a job... :D

Readify are Australia's top .NET developer firm. They are also into giving back to the tech community in a BIG way - first came the Readify Developer nights (go along and check one out - they're free!) and now they've come on board as official sponsors of Imagine Cup. Now, we could get Readify to throw some cash at us and buy more prizes for IC, but after discussing it with Readify, we decided we could deliver much more value if we helped IC entrants build skills and get a job.

For those who have just signed up for Imagine Cup, there's 9 ways to enter, but Software Design is always the biggest. In fact, it's so big it is the only category where we have to have local Australian finals to screen entries before the world finals - that means another round of competition that SD category entrants have to go in. Here's the deal - Readify are hiring the first, second and third place teams in the software design category for 2-3 month contracts in their developer centre. That means (A) you get access to some of the expertise of some of the best developers in Australia and (B) give your resume a MASSIVE boost by having Readify's name on it (and who knows, you might even get a fulltime gig if you're good ;D). Many thanks to Readify for this - it's a great opportunity for Imagine CUp entrants.

So that makes the final prize pool for the local Software Design category as follows:

1st - Trip to France, 3 months paid work alpcement with Readify, share in $1000 cash

2nd - 2 Months paid work placement with Readify, Xbox 360 for each students team member, share in $500 cash

3rd - 2 months paid work placement with Readify and a HTC Touch Windows Mobile device valued at AU$699 for each team member

4th and 5th - Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate and Microsoft Office Ultimate for each team member (est. value ~AU$2000)

And then there's the other 9 categories...

By the way, the new 2008 Imagine Cup Australia website will be up very soon - the mockups I've seen look great, so make sure you keep coming back to check out how the entire competition will go down when the site goes live

Oh, and one last thing, there's a launch party for Imagine Cup Australia 2008 coming up this Christmas break - it's going to be a great chance to come, meet other entrants, do some fun activities, find that elusive 2nd/3rd/4th teammate to join up the Software Design or Games Dev competition with, get a free feed (and free drinks, importantly) and just generally get happy. Make sure you're signed up, and make sure your mates are too, otherwise you don't get an invite. Watch this space for more details.

Eric Lam takes out 'Blog for a Box' at ReMix / Imagine Cup finals

ausic — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 05:29:00 GMT

To help generate more attention for this year's entries in Imagine Cup, I ran a 'Blog for a Box' promo at ReMix. The premise was basiclally this - ReMix attendees (truthfully) blog about this year's finalists (whether they thought they were good bad or ugly) to go in the draw to win an Xbox 360. The response was overwhelmingly positive, which is a credit to the standard of work the 3 finalist teams did.

The winner was decided based on i) providing some opinion / insight in the content they included, ii) proof that they were indeed present to watch at least some of the finals and iii) ranking in search engines and blog aggregators (we wanted to show the teams off to as many people as possible).

After all this, and reading some of the great posts people went to the effort of creating, we had a winner by a nose - Eric Lam! Eric, there's an xbox 360 in the mail for you.

The following are permalinks to a few of the other blog entries that came close to winning the Xbox:

- http://blogs.msdn.com/msozacademic/archive/2007/06/29/imagine-cup-australia-winners.aspx

- http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/andrewwhitten/archive/2007/06/26/251992.aspx

- http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2007/06/27/entry-in-programming-contest-a-sight-not-to-see

- http://the-riotact.com/?p=5250

- http://blog.dreambuilders.com.au/journal/2007/6/29/visually-impaired-computer-programming-a-dream-come-true.html

- http://apcmag.com/6514/now_the_blind_can_program_in_net

- http://edwardhooper.com/2007/06/29/imagine-cup-australian-finals/

- http://blogs.msdn.com/frankarr/archive/2007/06/27/imagine-cup-2007-winners-announced-lives-to-be-changed.aspx

- http://geekswithblogs.net/shahed/archive/2007/06/27/113523.aspx

- http://littlevoices.blogspot.com/2007/06/imagine-cup-2007.html

- http://www.ruthellison.com/2007/07/02/visual-studio-2005-accessibility/

- http://dpramudya.blogspot.com/2007/06/imagine-cup-2007-australia-winner-on.html

Nick

Imagine Cup Australia : Australian finals

Word's out - Aussie Imagine Cup entrants win jobs with Readify

Eric Lam takes out 'Blog for a Box' at ReMix / Imagine Cup finals