Imagine Cup 2009 in review 14/8/09
If you’ve been following this blog, you probably know that the past 6 months have been very busy. Now, this year’s Imagine Cup is over and it’s definitely a success!
This year, we were participating in 2 categories – Software Design and Mashup. Besides the additional difficulty of developing and managing two unrelated projects, we had an additional challenge: distance! Let me explain: while Bruno and I are studying in France, Eduardo is in Brazil. Conclusion: the first time Eduardo met Bruno was in Egypt! (Note how we had to craft our team picture…)
In spite of that, we managed to build two great projects. Let’s start by the Software Design project, HealthTag.
HealthTag is a healthcare support system specially tailored for isolated locations. It allows the doctor to access the patient’s data from his/her mobile device, being able to analyse and modify the patient’s records even without cell phone signal or an internet connection. The data is stored in the cloud (HealthVault and Windows Azure) and can be synchronized when a connection is available. There’s also a desktop module for management and registration. The system also provides an analysis module that aggregates all the patient information and allows researchers and decision takers to make conclusions and create strategies for their regions of interest, using a collaborative touchless or multi-touch interface. For a more thorough explanation, check out the video below:
Note: This video is also available in Portuguese at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hd3-H_oRMHw
This project was built with constant feedback from NGOs, doctors, healthcare companies and researchers to create a better experience and adapt to their needs. They showed enthusiasm and interest in the project, and we really hope it will become reality soon.
Our Mashup project has been more widely announced in this blog; it’s KnoWorld.
KnoWorld is a data analysis platform built using Popfly. It aims to enable everyone to access world indicators and create analysis for curiosity, research and learning. It’s tailored for easy consumption and creation of visualizations (“mashups”) that use more than 200 indicators from the Gapminder NGO and cross them with other indicators, maps, and events. Besides, thanks to Popfly, users are able to “tweak” visualizations (modify settings and create related conclusions), and “rip” them (discover how they were made and modify the building blocks). This project was the subject of a large series of posts, articles and videos that can be found at the KnoWorld blog.
This project had an overwhelming success. We’ve seen the community grow in front of our (virtual) eyes, the project was used in an actual classroom, and we’ve received great feedback from all the users that tried it.
Unfortunately, we’ve come to know that Popfly is closing in August 24th. That means that (at least for now) KnoWorld is closing. We hope to be able to rebuild it using other platforms, but we know already that a lot will be lost without the Popfly community and its “mashability”. Even though, we’re happy for being able to create this amazing experience and hope you’ve enjoyed it while it lasted!
Results
Our projects have been extremely successful in the world finals!
- HealthTag was
- 3rd place in Software Design and
- 1st place in the Windows Mobile Award
- KnoWorld was
- 4th in the Mashup competition
Also, the Brazilian delegation has attained the top spot in the Imagine Cup as whole! Special congratulations to all of our teams:
- Levv IT – 1st place in Game Development
- Willburn – 1st place in Design
- ProAtiva – 1st place in the Interoperability Award
- IC – UNICAMP – 2nd place in the Tablet Accessibility Award
- Thiago Valverde – 4th place in the IT Challenge
- A Casa Amarela – 4th place in Short Film
- OpenLab – 7th place in Embedded Development
Special thanks
Of course none of this could ever be possible without the help of a lot of people. I’d like to thank the Microsoft (Brazil/LatAm/Corp) teams, the Imagine Cup team, the Bradesco support team, the Brazilian press team (Rede Record) that supported us in the finals. Very special thanks to all the friends and family that supported us, and to the new friends from Brazil and from all over the world. And most of all, thank you team Virtual Dreams – Bruno, Eduardo and Bruno!
I really hope to see you in Warsaw next summer!
Thank you!
Roberto
7 commentsCategories: Imagine Cup, KnoWorld, Novidades