Day 1 of the Imagine Cup 2011 Competition!!!
We officially kicked off the Imagine Cup 2011 competition here in New York today with the Opening Ceremony keynote by Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer himself presiding over the ceremonies!
Earlier today, Steve was on CNN and interviewed about the Imagine Cup competition: https://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/bestoftv/2011/07/08/exp.am.imagine.cup.microsoft.cnn
Overall, today was a day of final preparations for the competition. For the IT Challenge competition, we were given all new external IP addresses to support a new (hopefully more reliable) network connection to the Internet, so Chris spent time re-addressing gateways, firewalls, and recreating firewall rules to get everything ready to go (again) for the competition that starts at 9:30am EDT tomorrow. Although the great thing is that this new internet connection is MUCH better and a lot more reliable than the previous connection, so a little extra work for a more reliable connection is definitely well worth it!
We had several prep meetings today which included a competition Captains meeting where the Captains of the 7 competitions all got together one last time before the kick off. There was also a Judges meeting where the 90+ competition judges got together and were updated what to expect, what their jobs are, and to answer questions.
And inbetween the various meetings, I ran out to Times Square and bought a jacket… The guy at the gift store said “you know it’s going to be 80-90 degrees today”, and I had to tell him that I’ll be spending the next 3 days locked into conference rooms and convention halls with full blown air conditioning blowing down on me, and as such, I needed the jacket to keep warm indoors than enjoy the nice weather outdoors…
Few facts that Microsoft released today for the competition:
- 358,000 students registered for this years competition
- 183 countries represented by student competitors
- 7 competitions
- 424 finalists here in New York City representing 73 home countries
The key things the lead from Microsoft wanted all of us Captains and Judges to remember, that the students are here to:
- Learn New Skills
- Make New Friends
- Change the World!
We will start the competition tomorrow morning, I will get my next blog post out tomorrow mid-day to report on how the start of the IT Competition is going!
