It was an interesting day at NIMHANS Convention Center watching the teams giving presentations on their work. The subject was “sustainability”; of course, most of the teams had used “computing” as a tool (probably influenced by the sponsor being Microsoft).
Three teams wee selected from India; after training at IIMA for a while one team is to be selected to represent India in Imagine Cup 2008 Final in France.
Novices@Work that uses Sensor Network to monitor agriculture from Vivekananda Educational Society, Mumbai won the First Prize RS 40K)
SKAN that deals with power management tools to switch off PCs across corporate network from Bharti Vidyapeeth, Mumbai won the Second Prize Rs 20K)
Green Waves from Delhi University Computer Science won the Third Prize Rs 10K)
Microsoft Chairman Ravi Venkatesan gave away the prizes.
Lead India winner RK Mishra gave an inspiring speech; his key message “solving India’s problem using whatever tools is cool; Internet alone is not cool, though most students are from IT”
Kiran Karnik former NASSCOM President in his keynote address talked of the “envious” opportunities enjoyed by Indian students today; he talked of three differences in the environment (compared to his days) that makes Innovation accelerate in India today;
ability to innovate without the need for expensive equipment (thanks to widely available computers);
power of software to abstract complex problems;
power of Internet that allows any one to fine collaborators everywhere
There was an interesting panel discussion moderated by Rajdeep of NASSCOM with IIMA Director Barua, myself, Gopi from GE and Paul from Microsoft.
All in all it was a nice learning experience
Tags: Imagine Cup, Microsoft
May 10, 2008 at 1:48 am
Very nice!
I would add another difference to Kiran Karnik’s keynote speech: the power of Indians connected to the global industry, with international expertise and network, coming back (and fourth) to India for entrepreneurship.
Regards,
Ricardo
May 10, 2008 at 7:15 am
Hello Sir,
To the best of my knowledge, Third Prize was won by the Team Green Waves from Department of Computer Science, University of Delhi and not by the Team EcoPals. Please confirm it and update your post as soon as possible.
Thanks.
May 10, 2008 at 11:27 am
Prof. Sadagopan,
Welcome back – its good to see you on line again blogging. We need more such competitions/events, even if inside companies and more importantly in high schools and colleges, so that there is culture of innovation built from early in schools. At Impulsesoft, when we held a (purely internal) HackFest, some incredible demos were created in the course of one Saturday. As you state, software makes things a lot easier to get done – however we even saw guys innovate with hardware (such as how do you drain (or charge a battery) to desired setting (for testing purposes) in a single day. Wasn’t always pretty but was very functional. Hope to hear more from you.
regards
srikrishna
http://designofbusiness.blogspot.com/
May 11, 2008 at 9:17 am
I was part of Team SKAN (the team that came second) and I must say it was a good experience. I especially loved the panel discussion. Students like us get to learn a lot whenever we get to attend discussions among such reputed people. It was a pleasure, I must admit and for that I thank you for being there
Hope you enjoyed our work too
May 12, 2008 at 12:45 am
This was really a great event, see my blog i have put some videos/pics of the event http://lakshmansrikanth.blogspot.com
thnx
May 12, 2008 at 5:11 am
Sir, I am designing an application for a startup that is building a management tool to interface any electromechanical device over the web. The idea is to be able to use a website as a remote switch for places where manual monitoring isnt possible or is too painful. Its already implemented to control lighting of the outer ring roads in Bangalore. The concept of the second prize winner looks alarmingly close.