Poland Briefing and Press Conference
Day 1 of the Imagine Cup final competition kicked off with an 8am briefing with all of the competitors. Here, the 400 finalists gathered to understand the agenda for the next 5-days that include brackets that will whittle the teams down to ultimately the final 3 in each category.
There are 11 competition awards that’ll be handed out on Thursday evening of this week with 4 of the competitions actually having face to face competitions right now. The Software Design competition has 68 teams from every continent in the world (except Antarctica) that have created unique software programs that address global challenges like climate change, literacy, hunger, diversity, informaiton access, and others. By the end of today, only 12 of those teams will advance as semi-finalists, so an entire day of presentations by the teams to 9 panels of judges that’ll qualify the technology behind their program, the viability of their solution, their marketing and “go to market” strategies, and the applicability of their solution to solve problems and challenges facing the global community.
A quick look at the “Imagine Cup’ that’ll be awarded to the #1 team later this week…
Other competitions include Digital Media (where competitors were given a video camera this morning and have 30 hours to go film sights throughout Warsaw and put together a short film). Embedded Design has teams that have created unique applications that run on mobile phones, cameras, ATM machines, and other “devices” that solve key business and social challenges. And Gaming Technology is a competition where the competitors have developed creative game solutions that’ll be presented this week and judged based on the creativity and applicability of the solution to the theme of this weeks competition.
In my competition, the IT Challenge that performed its final competition back in April, we took over 18,000 students from 134 countries through a round of multiple choice quizzes, a 10-page essay, and ultimately the final 6 through a 24-hour head to head competition where they built an entire computer network using Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization technologies. The competitors had to build Microsoft Exchange 2010 email servers, SharePoint 2007 / 2010 document libraries, SQL 2008 data warehouses, Windows 7 client systems, and System Center management systems fully secured, encrypted, and managed as an organization would anticipate their IT department develop a fully functional network environment. To see my blow by blow blog during the 24-hour IT challenge competition this April, visit: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/60439
At the Press Conference this morning, dozens of members of the media from around the world joined to meet us Captains, the leaders of each of these competitions where we explained our competition, what the media will be able to expect to see this week, and how the Imagine Cup, as the premier international technology competition, has some of the brightest minds from around the world working to create solutions that solve global challenges…
I’ll post more as the week rolls on… For those back in the US, hope you have a GREAT 4th of July holiday!!!
