All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
The ninth annual Imagine Cup by Microsoft kicked off yesterday in New York City. Students and their teams from all of the world are here in a competition that is affectionately called the "Nerd Olympics." As I found out last year covering the event in Poland, that term of endearment is true to form. The Imagine Cup has an Olympic feel to it, but with competitions in software design, game design, interoperability and digital media instead of track and field events. Some of the brightest minds are here tackling some of the toughest challenges facing the world, and using technology as a platform for change.
At the opening event, Microsoft General Manager of Academic Programs Jon Perera warmly welcomed all of the teams and acted as master of ceremonies for the hour long kick off. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer bounded on to stage with an outpouring of enthusiasm for the teams, remarking that this was his first Imagine Cup attendance.
In talking about the future of information technology and Microsoft's position in the industry, Ballmer talked about the synergy Microsoft is building among all of their platforms -- desktop and mobile operating systems, XBox, Bing -- how their cloud services are tying all of that together with developers.
"The cloud is a big deal," said Ballmer. "It is redesigning how applications get written and deployed. In the world of the cloud, the barriers of writing and distributing your applications go down."
This is something participants in the Imagine Cup are no doubt seeing. Last year, Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud platform, served as a cornerstone for many teams' projects. Yet Azure was still relatively new then, so it will be interesting to see what a year makes both for Microsoft's platform as well as how developers attempt to leverage it.
Also sharing the stage were Arthur VanderVeen, the CEO of the Office of Innovation within the New York City Department of Education who talked about providing education for 1.1 million students within NYC and some standout tech schools such as the Brooklyn Technical High School.
Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute and former Director of the United Nations Millennium Project spoke about the importance of solving touch challenges throughout the world -- a topic with which he is quite familiar: While working at the UN he helped create the UN's Millennium Development Goals, which each of the Imagine Cup team's projects must help to achieve.
Lastly, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley rounded out the presentations with a speech about what it's like to run a startup -- important because each Imagine Cup contestant is doing nearly that. The competition is structured to be somewhat of a pitch to potential venture capitalists. They've taken their ideas, developed prototypes and are demonstrating these projects to an audience. While in this case that audience is a panel of judges, it might just as well be a VC board. Teams need to sell their idea not only on its merits of the good it can be for the world, but also in the ingenuity of their design and their product's marketability. Last year, Microsoft gave all of the finalists access to BizSpark as a testament to their desire to see these teams bring their ideas to market.
Overall, there's genuine excitement here. From the teams, eager to show off their ideas and win big, to Microsoft eager to show the world how technology can help solve tough challenges, everyone has a stake in being part of something big. And I have no doubt that it's going to be a great week!
