Imagine Cup – Global Student technology competition

For the second year I was a judge in the Imagine Cup, sponsored by Microsoft – an international student technology competition.

The purpose of the Imagine Cup is to invite all eligible students to user their imagination and passion to create a technology solution.

The Innovation Competition is looking for the next big thing. It is global contest for the most original student applications where the winning team will take home $5,000. The objective was to create a Create a desktop or tablet application using Windows, or a mobile app using Windows Phone, or a browser app using Windows Azure

This year I reviewed the submissions from 8 teams from across the world. All of them were mobile applications. In particular I found two of the very intriguing. I can’t share any of the ideas with you today but hopefully in one of them wins the competition and I can blog about it later.

As a judge I was responsible for grading the concept submissions in four major categories:

• Hero Scenario – User Flow
• Information Architecture
• Wireframes
• Visual Target

The Imagine Cup Innovation Competition while simple on the surface – create an application – it is never the less a very challenging contest. There are however, other challenges that a student team can participate in along the Innovation path. Each of these other challenges are designed to allow participants to hone their concept, polish the final product and guide the student with the steps to follow to bring the next great idea to market.