Well, it’s all over. So now it starts…
OK – so the heat is getting to me. The UK Final of the Imagine Cup was held on Tuesday 21st June in the BT Tower, 8 teams of students representing the best of the best.
Monday 20th June 2005:
My excursion to the final (as a judge) started on Monday with a hot and sticky train journey from Birmingham to London, the air-conditioning had failed. Then, my faith in human nature was restored – got into a cab to take me to the hotel, only to find that he was taking me to the wrong St. Giles Hotel, so he reset the meter and headed off to the correct hotel, and then refused to accept the amount on the meter as it was ‘too much’. Wow!
Anyway, a brief trip through the hotel room for a shower and off to Planet Hollywood to meet up with the students and the Microsoft team. That was a nice move, remove the students from their laptops long enough to force food down them, not that it took much forcing.
22:30 back to the Hotel. At which point the St. Giles Hotel turned into something resembling a high tech car boot sale with students spread to the 4 corners of the hotel, unloading laptops, PDAs, Tablet PCs, Wireless Routers and goodness knows what else. I’m not sure what the other residents made of this, remember that this was the start of Wimbledon and all the hotels were full. Oh, did I mention the crates of Red Bull…
Tuesday 21st June 2005:
Next morning dawned bright and sunny with stories of who went to bed last, stories of 3 a.m., 4 a.m. and “Bed? What bed?”
The judges had a lazy lie in – we didn’t have to be there until just after 8:00…. This is my third year of involvement with the Imagine Cup, as a judge at the previous two world finals and as a team mentor in the UK final in 2004, so I’m getting used to the pattern for these events, early mornings and late nights.
08:05 Arrived at the BT Tower to find it a hive of activity – the car boot sale had transferred itself here – but with a lot more organisation I have to say. We were searched, scanned and allowed through to be escorted to our ‘deliberation room’. Otherwise known as a fridge – the air-conditioning was obviously working here! It was at this point that I was glad I had my suit on. The judges trickled in over the next 30 minutes or so, introductions all round. Mark Johnstone was to be the judge’s guide and mentor through the day – Nice suit Mark – and just in case some don’t believe it…
OK – on to the competition. The judges had already been impressed with the datasheet outlines that we had been sent covering the team’s entries so we knew we had a hard task ahead of us.
9:30 and Team DeLorean are first up. We were seeing two teams present back to back followed by a short break and then the next two. All the teams did a fantastic job in an extremely pressurised environment; this was going to be a tough one…
15:15 and the presentations are over, now comes the even harder part – reviewing your scoring to ensure you’ve been consistent and taking into account that some teams had obviously not prayed hard enough to the Demo Gods… Discussions were held about presentations, technology, business cases – and then… we had the results, we had a team to go to Yokohama to represent the UK in the World Final!
The presentations were made in typical fashion, the 5 runners up announced in alphabetical order followed by the top 3 in reverse order.
In 3rd place - Team mSpace from Southampton University
In 2nd place – Team Genesys Innovations from Sheffield University
And the team going to the world final was … The Bit Shifters! Believe me you have to be careful how you say that… Adrian Collier from Bournemouth University, Andrew Webber from City University in London and Joseph Wardell from Aberystwyth University.
Another fantastic competition, my congratulations go to all teams involved, you did a fantastic job, seeing the dedication, enthusiasm and passion made it all worth while. It was good to see that the sponsors, Microsoft, BT, CapGemini and 3i were all making the most of the recruitment opportunity too.
Well done to the Bit Shifters – today the UK – next month, the world!
19:00 – Off to the South Bank for the Imagine Cup party. For the life of me I can’t remember what it was called (Edit:Namco Station), but it’s on the Thames on the right just before you get to the London Eye(mainly because if it was on the left we would have gotten slightly damp…) An Aladdin’s Cave of multi-player video games, pool tables, 10 pin bowling… and a bar. Well, what can I say; Andy Sithers and I were beaten 2-1 at pool by Emily and Kevin. Emily then proceeded to thrash me on the Dance machine, the motor racing, the horse racing, that game is soooo undignified it’s not true – ok I won’t go on. Except to say that in round two of the Dance Mat Challenge I managed a surprising come-back!
And finally; many, many thanks to Caroline Phillips and to the whole Microsoft team for organising this event. Also thanks to the sponsors, BT, CapGemini and 3i for their support and helping to make it happen. It was great to see that people understood the reason for doing this, for encouraging talent, for pushing students onwards, to help them realise their dreams and potential.
Now, I’m afraid that my camera work was a little shoddy this year and most of the pics are blurred so I’m only posting a few.
Oh - and the air-conditioning was broken on my return train too...
View from the 34th floor of the BT Tower
The 34th Floor demo area
Happy Bunnies - 2/3rds of The Bit Shifters
On the way to Namco Station - would you buy a car off this man? Sorry Chris :)
Andy really should have picked a different partner.
Like Emily - pro stance there...
Dan and Paul grooving to.... (snigger) Steps...
Caroline and Nikki