Ed Dunhill's Blog : Events

Imagine Cup; UK Bags 1st Place in Short Film and 3rd in Games Development

edunhill — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:19:19 GMT

We’re now all back from Cairo and fully recovered from the heat and sleep deprivation. The great news is that across the board the UK teams excelled with both the Short Film and Games Development making it on stage at the final.

Our Short Film team (Fulham Four) were from the London Film Academy and created an excellent short featuring a mummy particularly keen on interior design which went down very well with the judges and bagged the top spot. Once we have their film online I’ll post a link.

Sanguine Labs, our Games Development team haled from Bournemouth University and beat off stiff competition to secure third place with their game DEFILE of Eden.

Both our Software and Embedded teams placed in the top 12 internationally and our IT Challenge competitor in the top 10. Overall excellent results considering at the beginning of the competition there were more than 300,000 students in the mix! For all the results see the official Imagine Cup website.

Everyone had a great time and the highlight was definitely the closing ceremony held in front of the pyramids (see above photo). Next year the Imagine Cup final will be held in Warsaw so start thinking about your entries now and you might be joining us next year! Visit imaginecup.com to find out more.

Technorati Tags: Imagine Cup,Students,Microsoft,Cairo

Student Celebration Day Videos

edunhill — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:13:00 GMT

Just as we’re heading off to Cairo for the Imagine Cup worldwide finals I want to give you a flashback to the UK final event…

Previously I published the slides from all of the Microsoft Research talks delivered on the day and now, finally I have the videos online!

Getting from A to B: Fast Route Finding Using Slow Computers from Ed Dunhill on Vimeo.

Curing Cancer, Halting Global Disease Outbreaks, Preventing Dangerous Climate Change from Ed Dunhill on Vimeo.

Proving that Software Eventually Does Something Good from Ed Dunhill on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Research,Students,Imagine Cup,Route Finding,Computational Ecology,Termination Bugs

Student Celebration Day Slides

edunhill — Fri, 01 May 2009 10:31:00 GMT

To follow on from yesterday’s post I wanted to share the slides from the MSR talks:

MSR Overview - Andrew Herbert
Getting from A to B: fast route-finding using slow computers - Simon Peyton-Jones
Curing Cancer, Halting global Disease Outbreaks and averting Dangerous Climate Change - Drew Purves
Proving that programs eventually do something good - Byron Cook

Videos will follow next week.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Research,Imagine Cup,MSP

Student Celebration Day

edunhill — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:12:23 GMT

Yesterday we held a big event at MSR (Microsoft Research) Cambridge to celebrate the success of UK MSPs and Imagine Cup Contestants.

The day included a series of fascinating talks from MSR and Microsoft (slides and video to follow shortly) and culminated in an award ceremony for MSPs and Imagine Cup winners.

Team TKCL (Kings College) with their route finding application Pioneer won the Software Development competition and will be representing the UK in Cairo later this year. Runners up were Vision Creative from Reading/Aston with their CityCycle application and TravelPrint from Aberystwyth University.

We also highlighted the success we have had in Games, I'm positive that the 22 teams competing in round 2 of the competition will produce some awesome games and we’ll end up taking some of them to Cairo.

MSP awards were as follows:

Imagine Cup Registration Award – Andrew Smylie
Ultimate Steal Award – Andrew Smylie
DreamSpark Award – Gareth Young
Most Innovative Event – Honourable mention – Gareth Young, Winner – Warren Rieutort-Louis
MSP Star Award – Runner up – Sergei Golubev, Winner – Chris Alexander

We encouraged the use of twitter throughout so you can check out the reaction on the hash tag #imaginecup.

Congratulations to all those who won a prize and thank you to all the other students that travelled to Cambridge for the event.

As mentioned above I’ll shortly make the slides from the event available and we’re hoping to have the videos on Channel8 next week.

Technorati Tags: Imagine Cup,Students,Microsoft Research

X48 Update – Games Now Available for Download

edunhill — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 01:09:13 GMT

A really quick update on X48 – all the games are now online so you can see for yourself what can be achieved with XNA, 36 hours and a crate of Red Bull!

Seavolution – The winning game from X48

Technorati Tags: XNA,X48,Microsoft,Pixel Labs,Channel 4,Games Development

X48 Wrap Up

edunhill — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:26:05 GMT

It’s all over - early Saturday evening 80 exhausted students left Derby University for home after spending 36 hours producing some awesome games using XNA.

The top three prizes went to:

First Prize - Huddersfield Green's Seavolution
Second Prize - Huddersfield Orange's Involved
Third Prize - Team Newport's Bellis Perennis

and there were a bunch of other quirky prizes such as cheesiest game which went to Hull’s Evo.

X48 Awards Ceremony

To all those who took part – congratulations. Not only was I amazed by the quality of the games produced but also your unquenchable thirst for Red Bull!

For those that weren’t there you missed a treat, keep an eye on the official X48 site as all of the games will be posted there shortly.

Technorati Tags: XNA,X48,Microsoft,Pixel Labs,Channel 4,Games Development

Student Technology Day Videos Now Online

edunhill — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:42:54 GMT

On 1st of October at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank, London we hosted an awesome event with Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) keynoting and a host of other top speakers flanking him.

We've now got all the sessions online so if you couldn't make the event you can find out what you missed and best of all the videos are delivered using Silverlight.

All of the other sessions can be found here.

Technorati Tags: Steve Ballmer,Microsoft,Surface,MSR,Students,Live Search,Huddle

Inspiration Tour back on the Road

edunhill — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:12:00 GMT

Yesterday saw the first of this academic years Inspiration Tour events at Bradford University.

This year we're running two sessions; one focusing onrich application development using Silverlight/WPF and the other on XNA games development. The content is designed to introduce these technologies and give an insight into their commercial application (with lots of cool demos along the way).

We have a really busy schedule over the next couple of months, with the below dates already booked up. However if your university isn't on the list and you want us to come and see you then drop me a line and we'll try and squeeze you in.

Blackpool and the Fylde - 14/10/2008
Hertfordshire - 15/10/2008
Liverpool Hope University - 16/10/2008
UEL - 21/10/2008
Sunderland - 22/10/2008
De Montfort - 28/10/2008
Reading - 29/10/2008
Glyndŵr University - 04/11/2008
Aberystwyhth - 05/11/2008
Aston - 11/11/2008
Edge Hill - 12/11/2008
Canterbury - 13/11/2008
University of West Scotland - 17/11/2008
Glasgow Caladonian - 18/11/2008
Abertay - 19/11/2008
Edinburgh Napier - 20/11/2008
Robert Gordon University - 21/11/2008
Brighton - 25/11/2008
Staffs - 26/11/2008
Huddersfield - 03/12/2008
Greenwich - 09/12/2008
Teesside - 10/12/2008
Birmingham - 21/01/2009
Westminster - 21/01/2009

Technorati Tags: Inspiration Tour,Microsoft,University,Students,XNA,WPF,Silverlight

Imagine Cup Update

edunhill — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:25:00 GMT

Both our Software Design and Embedded development teams put in a sterling effort but unfortunately neither progressed to the final. At least we can take consolation in the quality of the entries that did progress, the quality of work produced by our international peers is outstanding.

The format of the photography competition is slightly different and we won't know how Jason our competitor from the UK did until this afternoon when all the winners are announced. His photo essay looked fantastic so I think we're in with a real chance.

Tom Randell the mentor of our SD team Resolve Evolve Solve kindly videoed their presentation and it is now up on Soapbox so if you want to see their project look no further!

Video: EnviroMatch Presentation

Technorati Tags: Imagine Cup 2008,Resolve Evolve Solve,Enviromatch,Super Recycling,Paris,Microsoft

Imagine Cup Grand Final, Paris

edunhill — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 11:48:00 GMT

Over the past couple of weeks our UK finalist teams have been spending every waking hour preparing for the Imagine Cup final where they'll be tested to their limits and ultimately have the opportunity to win the worlds largest and most prestigious student technology competition.

This year the Imagine Cup's theme is focused on maintaining a sustainable environment, to find out more about what Microsoft's commitment to the environment take a look at http://www.microsoft.com/environment.

I've been working closely with the teams (hence the lack of activity on my blog - sorry) to ensure they are at the top of their game and can stand up to the judges scrutiny.

We arrived in Paris by Eurostar yesterday morning (5am start for me as I traveled form Bath) and had the pleasure of opening the weeks competition with a welcome reception at Paris Town Hall.

We have teams in Software Design (Ben Nunney and Dominic Green), Embedded Development and Photography. Today is round one of the final which means that from 2pm all the teams will be presenting and ultimately only 12 teams will progress to the next round. I have the pleasure of sitting in one some of the Software Design presentations so will get to see what the rest of the world have to offer.

We should know if our SD/ED teams have progressed to Round Two by tonight so look for an update later on :)

In the meantime check out Joe Wilson's video blog from the competition on C8.

Technorati Tags: Imagine Cup,Paris,Students,Microsoft,Software Design,Embedded,Photography

Inspiration Tour Wrap Up Video

edunhill — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:43:18 GMT

Regular readers of this blog will know that a huge amount of my time this year was dedicated to taking new technologies on the road and showing students how to get started with them.

In the end we travelled over 15,000 miles to speak to 4000 students at 60 UK universities!

We thought it would be cool to put together a video to summarise what the tour was all about and warm everyone up for next academic year.

You can see the video on Channel 8...

Technorati Tags: Inspiration Tour,Channel 8,Students,Microsoft,XNA,Silverlight,Windows Embedded

Inspiration Tour Update

edunhill — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:26:00 GMT

We've been on the road since October, traveled over 15 thousand miles and spoken to nearly four thousand students about Silverlight, XNA and Windows Embedded amongst other technologies. As we've gone to each university we've taken photos which I've been uploading to Flickr with geotags. I've now built a nice little Popfly app which uses virtual earth to show you all the places we've been.

You can take a look at the live application here, if you haven't used Popfly yet, I'd really recommend you visit Popfly.com and have a play.

We've only got another 5 tour sessions to go:

9th April - The University of Plymouth
16th April - The University of Manchester
23rd April - University of Southampton
2nd May - City University
7th May - Nottingham Trent University

And then that's us done until next academic year, it's been great fun but it's nice to cut back on the traveling :)

If you haven't had a chance to see the presentation live we have also recorded all of our sessions and hosted them on Channel 8. Click here to watch them now!

While you're there it's also worth visiting DreamSpark and bagging yourself some free software. If you do have any problems verifying on DreamSpark take a look at my post here.

Technorati Tags: Inspiration Tour,Microsoft,Students,Popfly,Sivlelright,XNA,Windows Embedded,DreamSpark,Channel 8

MIX08 Sessions Now Online

edunhill — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 16:20:44 GMT

If you're interested in Microsoft Web technologies then this is for you, the sessions from Microsoft's annual Web conference held in Las Vegas are now online at http://sessions.visitmix.com/. There's lots of cool content available including presentations on Internet Explorer 8, Silverlight 2 and Surface.

One of the stand out videos for me is the second keynote which is an interview with Steve Ballmer given by Guy Kawasaki. Guy was an original employee of Apple responsible for some of their early marketing campaigns and is often credited for bringing the concept of evangelism to the tech industry, he is now a well known Silicon Valley venture capitalist. As you can imagine Guy does not give Steve an easy run for his money and the interview is both interesting whilst remaining fairly light hearted. You can watch this keynote session here.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Web Technology,MIX08,Silverlight,Surface,Expression,Internet Explorer 8

All Inspiration Tour Sessions Now Online

edunhill — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 13:34:48 GMT

To follow on from my previous post about the Inspiration Tour on Channel8 I just wanted to let everyone know that all of our sessions are now online:


Introduction	Silverlight

Windows Embedded	XNA

Technorati Tags: Inspiration Tour,Channel8,XNA,Silverlight,Windows Embedded

Inspiration Tour Now Online!

edunhill — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:20:00 GMT

As many of you already know this year we have been touring UK universities on the Inspiration Tour talking about Silverlight, XNA, Windows Embedded and how these technologies are relevant to the student audience.

We've had a lot of great feedback about the content and thought it would be cool to bring it online so that those of you who couldn't make it to one of our sessions could still see the presentation. To that end we booked out the studio at our UK office an got the sessions recorded.

We are releasing the sessions on Channel8 our international video blogging site for students.

To check out our first session take a look here and check back soon as the other sessions will be coming online over the next couple of days.

One of the guys over at Channel8 requested the desktop wallpaper we use for the tour so I have attached it to this post below.

Technorati Tags: Channel 8,Inspiration Tour,Microsoft,Students,Silverlight,XNA,Windows Embedded,Popfly,Microsoft Surface