Welcome to  the third (bumper) installment of theSpoke chat! This time, I have the pleasure of interviewing Stan, a member of the Imagine Cup 2005 WW Software Design Invitational champion - Team Russia: omniMusic). The other members of Team Russia are Alexander Popov (Alex), Nikolay Surin and Ruslan Glifanov. I would like to acknowledge Alex's generous contribution in the background material for this interview.

The chat transcript is also available in HTML (with a better colours scheme and white background).

Background: Stan is (Stanislav) Vonog, is a last year student at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and also a Microsoft Student Partner. He lives in a university hostel in a small town of Dolgoprudnyi, a suburb of Moscow.

BT and Microsoft invited some best teams from the last year’s Imagine Cup to Microsoft Innovation Centre in Reading to work for 2 weeks in order to extend our applications into innovative and commercially viable solutions. We had an excellent working environment, a world-class technology facility and an experienced team of technology and business experts from Microsoft, BT and Ubiquity ready to help us.

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We had 2 weeks jam packed with intensive development and brainstorming. We didn’t sleep nights, the atmosphere was just crazy. We were given developer workstations with duo AMD64 and Xeon processors and 2GB of RAM with the complete suite of Microsoft software. A special area was at our disposal 24x7 with development room, chill out room (with XBOX 360s there and comfy sofas), presentation room, ubiquitous fridges with cool free drinks and coffee machines making all kinds of tea and coffee. Each team could order any hardware they wished (e.g. each team had a Qtek 9000 3G communicator running Windows Mobile 5.0 with a fully paid unlimited BT SIM card).

We had deep discussions with technology experts from Microsoft, BT and Ubiquity. Each team also had a business mentor from BT. The business guys helped teams develop business model, do market research, identify revenue streams etc, etc. Teams were making report presentations every other day and each day the top team would receive some serious cash prizes in Amazon vouchers.

We had some fun too – Go Carting event, XBOX tournament, London trip, a number of dinners at various restaurants and an entertainment night at Namco Station game club at the heart of London.

At the very end there was final event with press, VCs, people from Microsoft where each team delivered the final presentation. I think Microsoft/BT Innovation Accelerator was awesome and I expect our collaboration with Microsoft and BT continues after the event.

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Nick (Nikolay Surin) and I have participated in the Imagine Cup since its inception and every time the motivation was different. In 2003 Imagine Cup had just started and we were curious to see what it’s all about. We took a “Why Not Try It” approach and in two months developed our project. We came 2nd in the Russian Finals but judges told us we had a good team and an interesting project and basically encouraged us to enter the next year.

In 2004 we wanted to prove ourselves – and judges – that we are worth representing Russia in the World Finals and we were more than happy when finally we were awarded the 2nd prize in Brazil.

After the 2nd place finish in Imagine Cup 2004 we felt very happy and exhausted, we put so much energy and ideas and work into our brainchild – Inspirational Classroom Environment - that we could hardly imagine ourselves entering the Imagine Cup 2005 with a new project. In autumn 2004 half of our team (Taras and Kostya) had to return to Ukraine from Moscow to continue their studies. We got some good programming jobs and were thinking seriously that we had had enough student competitions and that it was the time to concentrate on our careers.

However, everything turned out very differently… On September 29, 2004 our IC 2004 team was featured at Microsoft Student Day in Moscow. This event gathered about 1500 students and the speakers included two Microsoft Senior VPs Eric Rudder and Craig Mundie. Andrey (our Academic Programs Manager from Microsoft) told us that we have to inspire all the students, to tell the audience how great Imagine Cup is, etc. As Nikolay and I play guitars, we asked Andrey if we could play on stage to make it like a rock concert. Andrey did not want to risk the success of the event and refused the idea.

Yet, after that we thought it would be very cool to create a project that would require guitars on stage. Then naturally we came up with the idea of musicians performing from disparate locations being able to see and hear each other. Then we thought it could be based on the collaboration platform we developed in our previous Imagine Cup projects.

Around the same time Alex from Moscow State University wanted to ask my opinion in MSN Messenger about his idea for Imagine Cup 2005. Basically the idea was a web site called ‘Band .NET’ which would effectively be an online community to connect musicians with each other. Given the fact that Alex was a musician (he was sharing musical pieces he composed on theSpoke) and that he came up with a very similar idea we decided to grab him. Then Alex found Ruslan at Moscow State University (or Ruslan found him?) and we had a planning session on December 25, 2004. After the New Year we firmly decided to plunge into Imagine Cup regardless of our current jobs and career plans.

Our motivations were: the cool project and the way it could be interwoven with our love for music. We really wanted to bring the idea to life, we wanted to rock on stage and also we wanted to go to Japan because after Brazil we knew that World Finals experience is something fantastic, something you can never forget.

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Imagine Cup World Festival – it was the final day of the Imagine Cup merged with the Awards ceremony. It was in a very big hall with a huge lot of spectators, laser shows, excellent music, MCs . There were some brilliant speakers including Nolan Bushnell, regarded as “The father of the video game industry” speaking about innovations and Japanese first astronaut speaking about how you achieve dreams.

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1. Don’t be afraid to dream big. Imagine Cup is all about no less than changing the world with your imagination. If you are thinking about writing an email client or a blogging engine – you probably won’t have good chances in the Imagine Cup.

2. Don’t be afraid to start. Find some soul mates – it will be hard to do anything by your own. Print out posters and hang them around your university, come to local user groups and seek the right people there.

3. Discuss your idea with others. All the time do it. Don’t forget to talk with regular people, not only geeks like yourself. Make sure you are able to communicate what you are doing in 5 minutes to your parents or even grandparents. Try to arrange for a real try of your software with your potential users. In 2005 we invited a band of musicians to give omniMusic a try and also had great feedback and fresh waves of ideas. Don’t forget to film everything if you arrange tryouts like this. You might want to consider making a 2-minute movie to be put into your presentation.

4. Start planning from the very end – i.e. your presentation. Remember that you have only 15-20 minutes to tell the judges about your dream. Tell a story, invent the scenario and implement this usage scenario. You are not expected to bring the fully tested commercial level application to the Imagine Cup. You are expected, however, to show a demo that will work brilliantly and make a wow.

5. Start development from UI Design. UI brings you the wow factor. Remember again that at the very end you have 20 minutes for your presentation and a maximum of 10 minutes for your demos. You absolutely have no time to show them the nice code you write. The judges will instinctively judge your development expertise by the quality of your UI. Your UI must absolutely be very sexy, top notch. Don’t worry about the fact that only 3 buttons out of 10 actually work. Deliver the full concept of your application in a sleeky and nicely designed user interface that anyone will fall in love with at the very moment they see it. So grab that guy from the Interface Designer challenge and convince them to join your Software Design team. Find Photoshop gurus and employ them full-time on your team. Consider using Avalon which gives you fabulous graphic effects out of the box with little development effort.

6. Use cool gadgets and hardware. While hardware guys think that software makes magic, software developers stand in awe of hardware. Mobile phones ringing during your presentations, video streaming from 3G phones, web cameras, pocket PCs, tablets, media centre PCs, guitars, armbands, GPS devices, photo cameras, sensors that measure blood pressure or temperature – the more creative you’ll be thinking about gadgets the more innovative your project will look. I know they are hard to find but …

7. Don’t be stopped by the obstacles. You should be absolutely obsessed with your Imagine Cup project in order to win. I don’t know which obstacles you might encounter on your way to the Imagine Cup but I’ll tell you about some facts regarding our teams that will show you that you have to be prepared for more than pure coding with the Imagine Cup.

Anyway, struggle and never lose faith! Good Luck!

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Thanks Bernard, I am through with my exam.