Mark Johnston's Blog : Imagine Cup

Imagine Cup, Competitors at the ready....

markjo — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:56:50 GMT

The Imagine Cup 2009 is in full swing. And there is no better year to compete - there has been so much going on in the world of Microsoft technology recently:

The Imagine Cup is one of the best and most fun ways to play with all the technology from .NET to Robotics to Silverlight to whatever you want really!

The competitions are now all open and it is the time for students who have passion, ambition and skill to step up to the plate and compete in the Imagine Cup.

Step 1 - Register for the Imagine Cup

You can win without even doing anything in the UK. We are giving away webcams every week, Starbucks cards and a monthly draw for a Dell Inspiron laptop. That should make competing a bit easier...

Step 2 - Compete

If you are an individual, go for one of the skills challenges - themes and categories

If you have friends who want to compete then it's going to be Software Design to enter in the UK. It is the competition that the UK are guaranteed a place in the worldwide finals, this year in Cairo. It is also one of the most inspiring as you go from problem->idea->solution.

You have until 31st December to get your idea in, then 2 months of fun coding to be eligible for the UK finals around Easter next year - Software Design details

Step 3 - If you need support then ask

Paolo Barone and Ed Dunhill are the guys to speak to - we have a team email which you can use to ask us a question or tell us about your idea/entry - ukacinfo@microsoft.com

And my Inbox is always open for IC related questions - Contact Me

And to see the kinds of things previous competitors do, check out our previous winners page

Imagine Cup UK - The winners story

markjo — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:28:18 GMT

It seems like a lifetime ago that we held the Imagine Cup UK finals in London and over 150 students, partners and press came together to see what the competition was all about and how students were helping to fight climate change.

Ben and Dominic won the Software Design competition, and after competing at the worldwide finals in Paris, and their prize was to travel to Redmond (Microsoft HQ) in Seattle to shadow the Popfly team and work on a project. They took a video camera with them to document their experiences and what an experience it was!

Game and Embedded winners also are working at Rare Game Studios and MPC Data locally in the UK for their prize. Hopefully they will blog their experiences as well.

Imagine Cup Short Films online

markjo — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 12:49:45 GMT

One of the most exciting parts of the Imagine Cup worldwide finals each year (I've done 3 now) is the showing of the Short Film category. The teams have a simple brief, make a kick arse short film during the WW finals using the surrounding city as your set. The results are astonishing and remind of the type of stuff done on a BBC documentary earlier this year.

Watch them all on Channel 8

Solving BIG problems with software? Get ready for Imagine Cup 2009

markjo — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:15:14 GMT

It will not be long before I start talking all about Imagine Cup 2009 and the plans we have locally in the UK and at the global competition level. And it's looking better than ever!

I did attend the Imagine Cup Paris finals, but failed miserably at blogging while I was there for a variety of reasons - 1. I was working like crazy over the 4 days I was there; 2. I was twittering at twitter.com/markjo

So what is Imagine Cup 2009 all about? Three things really:

1. Solving all the worlds problems. This is great news, no longer just one theme to tackle but all the big issues facing society today. See Ed's post for more info

2. More Microsoft technologies to play with. 2008/9 is going to be a BIG year for Microsoft in terms of technology. Stuff like Software + Services, Silverlight, Robotics, XNA, Windows Embedded, Windows Mobile,...this list could go on for ages.

3. Great worldwide finals. Cairo, Egypt, Pyramids, bustling city, Sphinx, 'nuff said.

I would encourage students to register early and start thinking about ideas for Software Design, Game, Embedded, Short Films, etc. Want some inspiration check out this post on what venture capitalists think the big potential software solutions are - YCombinator Ideas

Heading to Paris for Imagine Cup...

markjo — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:50:37 GMT

Joe Wilson's Pre-Kick Off: Imagine Cup 2008 Paris

I'll be there from 3 - 6 July with the 3 teams from the UK. According to Joe "Tom Cruise" Wilson it will be the only place to be this summer!

Can't wait. And I'm travelling from the uber-cool St Pancras station:

I'll try to blog a lot when I'm there to brief on the UK students and their progress...fingers crossed.

Achieve what you can imagine

markjo — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:21:07 GMT

We had this really slick video created to explain the Imagine Cup. It is now up on Channel 8 and I would encourage you to take 60 seconds to watch it. MarkT, my big UK boss, recently said in a presentation "beware the teenager in their bedroom" - well, marketing/ad/agency people - this is what one student did in their bedroom :-)

Imagine Cup UK - Achieve what you can imagine

Game Development Imagine Cup in the UK

markjo — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 13:34:42 GMT

This stuff is just too cool! Can't wait to see what the UK finalists come up with and how many get through to Paris!

Hat tip to Mr Ed who is working with the teams in the run up to the finals to make sure they have all the right MS resources.

Video: Drizzle

Great advice for Imagine Cup competitors

markjo — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 23:23:17 GMT

Pitching Your Idea

Some great advice from Philip (MS) and Perry, a marketing professor in the US, for Software Design competitors. This is great advice for UK competitors as they pull together their submissions for sending in on the 15th May.

The UK finalists are in a different situation in that they have already done their in-person pitch but there is a great opportunity to use these nuggets of advice on the screencast demo and A0 poster. Here are some tips from the video:

Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse
Focus on the customer - "give value"
Tell a good story
Summarising

Imagine Cup competitors - where are they now? Channel 8 videos online

markjo — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:17:09 GMT

My first two videos on Channel 8 are now online. Yes, I do sound that weird (that's Northern Irish people for you) and talk a lot. But these guys all have done incredibly well out of the Imagine Cup and our student programs and their stories are worth listening to!

Imagine Cup UK - where are they now? Tom and James

Imagine Cup UK - where are they now? Tom Marianczak

Imagine Cup Day on 5th June 2008 - Celebrating the best in UK student talent

markjo — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:49:42 GMT

It's been a busy couple of months for the Imagine Cup and we have a good 200-odd students fighting it out for great prizes and the opportunity to travel to Paris (in style) to compete at the worldwide finals.

And to celebrate the best year for the Imagine Cup in the UK we are going to run an event tentatively called Imagine Cup Day (I'll update with a better name shortly!). It will be an event exclusively for Imagine Cup finalists in various categories to come to London to hear from Microsoft, leading industry speakers on the future of Software and to network with future employers looking for talented students. That's right, you could get a job at this event....

Credit to PSD

We will have several VIPs, employers and our sponsor Windows Live Search there on the day to talk to the students.

Outline agenda looks like:

Keynote presentation on the future of software innovation
Technology sessions
Showcase of Imagine Cup entries
Career networking session
Award ceremony (think the Oscars without the crying luvvies)

And then we throw a party! Got some fun stuff lined up - Guitar Hero III, Universally Challenged (a NxtGen production) and music/food/beer/drinks :-)

I bet you are wondering how to attend this extremely cool event - Well, if you are a talented student competing in the Imagine Cup then expect an invite very shortly. Same goes for our sponors, mentors and the student academics. If you are a London blogger - and want to attend, then we want you there - email me at markjo@microsoft.com and we'll get you a press pass (although these are very limited).

Bill Gates at Stanford on Channel 8

markjo — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:14:26 GMT

The Bill Gates Stanford Speech

Covers DreamSpark, Imagine Cup, Innovation, power of software and students

Dell Regeneration/Graffiti Contest winners announced.

markjo — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 02:43:23 GMT

This is a great contest, very similar to this year's theme in the Imagine Cup and the Interface Design contest (we have a couple of entries in from the UK this year!). Very inspiring!

"As I blogged earlier this week, the 150 entries with the most votes in the Facebook/ReGeneration Graffiti Contest moved on to Graffiti's panel of judges (which are independent from Dell Inc. or ReGeneration.org) to decide upon the winners in each category. The top 150 entries showcased were displayed in the order of number of votes they received from the Facebook community. We heard back from the judges today, and the winners have been announced on ReGeneration.org. These winners were chosen solely on their own merits, and as it turned out, they were all among the top vote-getters in the final 150. With over 1,000,000 votes entered, you tend to get some pretty fantastic results! In fact, the Overall Winner also happened to be the entry with the most thumbs up votes.

Here are the winners in each category:

Best Overall

Sarwar Z. Khan (Montreal, QC Canada)

Most Creative

Mysha Mys Yoosuf (Maldives)

Winners Announced in the ReGeneration/Facebook Graffiti Contest by Todd Dwyer

Where are they now? Imagine Cup 2004 and 2005 Competitor - Luke Smith

markjo — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 21:24:27 GMT

Luke Smith was a competitor back in 2004 and also a Microsoft Student Partner. I caught up with him recently to hear his thoughts on life since the Imagine Cup. He's gone on to do lots of interesting things including working at a cool mobile sports service called SportsDo and I recently spotted that he is working on Windows Live stuff in his spare time (maybe a useful tool for building this year's Imagine Cup entries ;-)).

Mark: When did you enter the Imagine Cup?

I first entered the IC in 2004, and reentered the following year.

Mark: What was your idea?

My original idea was to use mobile devices and location based technology to help the ambulance service better coordinate and track their personnel, in both day to day operations as well as during major incidents. It also allowed paramedics and the casualty department to share information about a patient before arriving at the hospital, paramedics could upload details including photo imagery to a Doctor who could then be annotate it using a Tablet PC and push it back to the ambulance crew. During my teams second entry in 2005 we expanded on the idea, incorporating both the Fire and Police services and focusing on major incident management.

Mark: Anything fun happen at the UK competition?

At the final in 2005 Microsoft had rented the Namco Station in London, so after the final at the top of the BT Tower, there was pool, bowling and unlimited gaming fun.

Mark: What did you do after the IC? (job wise)

My first job straight out of uni was working at a company writing software to be used internally using ASP.NET. I later moved onto SportsDo (http://www.sportsdo.net), which provides GPS software for mobile devices targeted at sports. Working primarily on the web portal I work with ASP.NET 2.0, Virtual Earth, Google Maps, and the Microsoft Ajax javascript library.

Mark: Shipped any products?

We’ve recently released a beta of TrackMe (http://www.trackme.com), which is a social tracking portal aimed at sharing location based data and aggregating geodata from multiple sources. TrackMe was demoed during the keynote at the Microsoft Mix:UK 07 conference.

Mark: How do you think the Imagine Cup helped kick start your career?

The IC gave me an opportunity to dig into certain technologies that i would otherwise not have had a reason to use whilst at university, which I believe helped me to stand out from fellow students as well as giving something different and interesting to talk about in interviews.

Mark: What’s it like working at a start up type company?

It’s great fun, taking the ideas and building something from the ground up with much less bureaucracy than you get in a larger company. Also being at a small start up company it’s all about getting ourselves and products known about, which has meant exhibiting at shows (which isn’t your typical developers job).

Mark: Any advice to current competitors?

Have fun and network with people from the other teams.

innerworkings - Train your developers to code (properly)

markjo — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 14:12:43 GMT

I spent some time talking to Bob and the guys at innerworkings about their product and service - it is a developer training interface which integrates directly with Visual Studio and gives developers (ones that write code for a living rather than students) practice based learning opportunities to hone and improve their skills on building .NET applications.

They are based in Dublin and gave me a demo over LiveMeeting a week or so ago to show what their service does. The product is pretty cool and the fact it embeds itself directly within Visual Studio makes it a natural learning tool that doesn't interrupt a developer's production environment. Here is some blurb from their site on their offering:

Take .NET training that's 100% practice-based

Gain skills by solving problems using key .NET techniques

Work at your own pace in a realistic learning environment

Get feedback as you learn from our code-checking engine

Enjoy smart, engaging, and effective .NET learning

NOW THE GOOD NEWS IF YOU ARE A STUDENT: innerworkings have very kindly offered us 60 FREE test accounts on their training environment to distribute as part of the Imagine Cup Software Design challenge. That means that teams will be able to spend time getting very practical development skills on .NET. This will increase their chances of doing well in the competition but more importantly will help them shine when they come to interview for jobs after university. And I'm hoping that innerworkings will become an industry mentor for a team in this year's competition and pass on their wisdom to a lucky team ;-)

Go check out www.innerworkings.com

Where are they now? Imagine Cup 2004 Winner - Andy Grieves

markjo — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 17:01:43 GMT

This is the first in a series of videos and email interviews with former competitors in the Imagine Cup here in the UK. A very common question we receive is "What happens to former winners and competitors?" and whether the Imagine Cup has had a positive effect on their lives since. I'm not going to focus just on the winners of the Software Design challenge from the UK but look at competitors generally to see where they are now and whether they had any positive memories from the competition and how it has helped them in their careers.

First up, is Andy Grieves. Andy won the Imagine Cup in 2004 and went onto Brazil to compete against the rest of the world. Here are his own words on the Imagine Cup:

Mark: When did you enter the Imagine Cup?

Andy: I entered the Imagine Cup in 2004.

Mark: What was your idea?

Andy: Our idea was to build a smart, location-aware application that would assist students in their everyday life. The concept came from Mat's second round entry and was initially called ULL(University Lesiure and Lifestyle Manager). We built on this, adding more features and rebranding it into "the juice". This was primarily so that we could use cheesy puns for marketing - "the juice - squeezing the most out of student life" and include features called love juice and love pips. Features included:

- "Juice alerts" - invite friends to social events, including maps/directions and reviews

- "Juice pips" - loyalty points gained by attending such social events which could be used in promotions offered by restaurants/bars (e.g. beer and burger for £2 with 50 juice pips)

- "Love juice" - location-aware dating service to find good personality matches for other juice users nearby

- "Out of juice" - 1 click "take me drunk i'm home [sic]" to request a taxi to come and pick you up from your current location

Mark: Anything fun happen at the worldwide finals?

Andy: Plenty! The competition itself was fun and getting through to the last round and presenting our ideas to a panel of rather important people was rewarding. When we weren't up all night developing our application we enjoyed the occasional Caprioska or Capriahana (both plentiful in alcohol and thirst-quenching and refreshing to boot). There was the odd practical joke here and there (some of which i believe were filmed). Then of course there were the days after the competition actually finished where we got a chance to assume rather touristy personas.

Mark: What did you do after the IC? (job wise)

Andy: After winning the UK finals I was put in touch with a HR body at Rare, which is part of Microsoft Game Studios. I actually did the interviews whilst working on our IC project at TVP and got a job offer the next day! I worked in the Shared Technology Team, developing in a mostly managed-world and working on a number of interesting new projects.

Mark: What is your role?

Andy: My current role is as a Credit Derivatives Developer at an investment bank in London. I've only been here a week but that's the great thing about .NET - it's ubiquitous! I've jumped from video games to investment banking and there is a large overlap in terms of technology being used. .NET is the building blocks for many and varied applications.

Mark: Shipped any products? (Any examples of games you've contributed to)

Andy: Working in Shared Technology we were never working in the front line, being directly responsible for games going to market. However the products I developed are used in a games engine which is currently being used to develop a couple of, as yet, unannounced titles by Rare.

Mark: How do you think the Imagine Cup helped kick start your career?

Andy: Above everything else it gave me exposure. There was media interest and interviews to do which led to a number of approaches from some big companies and ultimately a job offer before I'd really had the chance to sit down and decide what I wanted to do for a career. Also it was my first introduction to the world of .NET which has been the (somewhat solid) foundation of my career path.

Mark: Any advice for current competitors?

Andy: Just to have fun if nothing else!