Thomas Edison said about Innovation "There's a way to do it better—find it." Well, at the Imagine Cup Irish finals on April 13th and 14th we got the opportunity to experience it in practice. Here the top 11 teams in the country came together at the Microsoft Ireland European Development Centre for two days of competition to earn the ultimate prize of representing Ireland at the Imagine Cup Worldwide finals, in New York City.  On Wednesday we started off with 11 teams in private presentations, where the students presented their projects to our panel of Judges; after a long day of competing we held our student party in the Aviva stadium  where we got to unwind and have some fun. The next day we held the student showcase, students were invited to showcase their projects to the staff at Microsoft. By mid-morning we announced the top 5 teams who presented their projects in our auditorium in true Imagine Cup style. After a brief deliberation we came back to announce our winners. We were fortunate to be joined by John Walsh, advisor to the Minister for education, who spoke about the importance of supporting students in developing skills in innovation and entrepreneurship. Pat Meegan reminded those present about the value that Microsoft puts on our engagements with academia, the success that Ireland has had in the past with this competition and why students need to know how to learn new skills quickly as technology creates new challenges and new opportunities.

Our winners on the day hailed from Sligo Institute of Technology with team Hermes. It has a key goal of initially targeting “the most at risk” drivers to increase road safety and thereby tackle what the World Health Organisation predict will be the 5th leading cause of death by 2030. With this goal in mind the team came up with a unique idea that will change the way in which road and human factors are associated with fatal/serious vehicle road traffic collisions. Using a mix of embedded technology, mobiles devices along with cloud power, it has the ability to change driving habits to reduce road deaths around the world. It is a hugely innovative program, which is hugely applicable in today’s world. This team has the right mix of innovation and drive to do well at the finals.

Second place went to Griffith College with team Sumbody. Using Kinect, Windows Phone 7, Azure, Silverlight, and  pretty much all MS technologies. Sumbody’s application aims to provide a platform for health professionals to distribute and monitor carefully-designed exercises for a number of purposes.  It has high commercial value.

Third place went to the seasoned Imagine Cup finalists NUI Maynooth for Project SAV. The aim of project SAV is to empower visually impaired people worldwide by creating a 3D virtual sound scape which can be used for the location of objects or collision detection. This project utilises Kinect, we have certainly not heard the last of this team.

We also had awards for both Azure and Windows phone 7. This year ¾ of all of our projects in the Irish competition utilised both these technologies in their design, along with four projects using the open driver for Kinect.

I wish to thank all our Judges who did and amazing job.

• John Leech - eCommerce Director, EMEA at Lenovo and Sponsor.
• Martin Huges – NUI Galway Head of School for Business Information Systems
• Jacqueline Russell - Microsoft, Academic Lead for Western Europe
• Edwin O'Sullivan – Lead SDET on the MAC Office team
• Flavien Charlon- Software Development Engineer, on Azure and two time Imagine Cup representative for France.

You can follow their journey on Facebook.

Big thank you to our sponsor Lenovo for supporting this year’s competition with some great Lenovo devices for the winners and also for putting together great discounts for anyone following this year’s Imagine cup; click here to find out more.

Well done to all the top 12 teams:

IADT Agritext	University College Dublin BFPD	Queens University Belfast	University of Ulster Coleraine Co-op	IADT Explorawalk	Dundalk Institute of Technology Graffiti
Institute of Technology Sligo HERMES	IADT Music that Matters	NUI Galway RowMates	NUI Maynooth Savy	Griffith College SumPeople	Dublin Institute of Technology Teletherapy

Congratulations to everyone!

Michael Meagher Academic Engagement Manager - Wordpress Blog