XAPfest 2011 Finalists and Awards

Summer interns squared off in a Windows Phone application contest, and they had their own set of tough judges to deal with—some of the company’s top executives. Given only 2 months to complete this, and it could only be worked on in their spare time, and it could not have anything to do with projects they were already a part of, they had their work cut out for them.

The contestants were Gary Roumanis (8 Tracks), Shreyas Thiagarajasubramanian (Breadcrumbs), Roberto Sonnino (Hands Free Cook), Julia Schwartz (Headshot), Marvin Cheng (Optical Search), Tara Balakrishnan (Pictionary), Matt Asplund (Ringyfy), Andrei Borodin (Music in the Clouds) and Chris Heuser (Nightlife).

The finalists were judged on:

• Novelty (25%)
• Design/Visual Appeal (25%)
• Innovative use of Mango Features (20%)
• Innovative use of Hawaii Services (20%)
• Quality of the Presentation/Pitch (10%)

The grand prize winner won trip for two to Hawaii, while the runner-ups won an Xbox+Kinect bundle.

The top 3 runners-up were:

• Marvin Cheng, a senior at the University of Washington and intern working in the Windows Phone division. Marvin presented the “Optical Search” app, which uses Hawaii’s OCR service to recognize words in documents and enables users to search for those words on the Internet. The app also has built-in definition look up functionality.
• Gary Roumanis, a student at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. Gary showed “8 Track,” a handcrafted Internet radio service app that offers a simple way for people to share and discover music.
• Ian Christopher, a first-year graduate student at Stanford, and Roberto Sonnino, an undergraduate at the University of Sao Paulo. The duo, who are both interns in the VS Graphics team, collaborated to create an app that uses speech recognition and synthesis to provide cooking tips while keeping the phone a safe distance away from the stove and sink.

The Grand Prize went to Julia Schwartz, a second year graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. Her app “Headshot” uses facial detection and audio feedback to make it easier to get the perfect shot from your phone every time.