Microsoft's Imagine Cup winners announced

After a week of intense competition among finalists picked from over 200,000 entries, the winners of the 2008 Imagine Cup have been selected. Australia’s Team SOAK won the worldwide Software Design invitational, Singapore’s Team Trail Blazer won the Embedded Development invitational, and Brazil’s Mother Gaia Studio won the Game Development challenge.

The finals took place in Paris. A total of 370 students from 124 teams representing 61 countries and regions competed in the worldwide Imagine Cup finals in nine categories: Software Design, Embedded Development, Game Development, “Project Hoshimi” (Programming Battle), IT Challenge, Algorithm, Photography, Short Film and Interface Design. The student teams were asked to undertake a series of challenges relating to digital media or technology depending on the invitational.

SOAK is an integrated software/hardware platform that helps farmers convert to more sustainability practices. It combines environmental sensing, rich visual front ends to display the information to the farmer, and a subsystem which controls farm equipment such as sprinkler systems.

Trail Blazer is an environmental monitoring system that helps monitor clean air in real time with a goal of helping to enforce pollution laws or make quick course corrections to prevent further pollution.

Mother Gaia Studio invented a video game, City Rain, which teaches players lessons about ecology in the city and a sustainable environment.

Read about more winning projects here.

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