The entire trip was amazing. The greatest experience ever. We flew to Paris, enjoyed the city and brought back 1st place in the interop award I’d write a huge detailed account but I’m too bored. Its been an age since I came back and writing down every single thing that happened during the 6 days at the competition and the 5 days we spent there on our own would be just too much. So here’s a brief overview of what happened

3rd of July: We arrive at the airport exactly 8hrs 34mins after we took off as was told to us. Accurate much? It took us an hour to get our baggage after which we took the bus to Novotel. On our way, we even saw the concord! (the aircraft, not the Paris metro station or Place de la Concorde) Getting a good shot at 60 kmph with street lights in the way is tough but I seem to have a pretty good photo Here’s the picture I took of the Concord. We got our registration kits and dropped off our legal forms. Until 3 we were hanging out at the Lounge and at 3 we were given our room keys. We went up to the 22nd floor and settled down. We had to come down at 5 for a trip to City Hall. The opening ceremony was here. The City hall is the only time my jaw actually dropped on the entire trip and this includes all of the amazing places we’ve been to. You just have to see this one.

4th and 5th of July: SDI and EDI had their first rounds. SDI had to give presentations to two sets of judges (one on each day). The scores would be added and the top 12 (semi finalists) decided. EDI had their presentations on the first day and a demo session on the second one. The scores would again be added but this time, the top 6 (finalists) be decided.
Semi Finalists were announced on the 5th early in the evening. After being announced, they are put up on a white board outside the press room so I got a snap of it Here are the semi finalists in SDI and finalists for EDI. Sadly none of the Indian teams made it We still had Novices@Work in UPRIA and us in Interop though
The SDI semi finalists then had to present some time between 6 and 8 pm the same day and the results came out on the morning of the 6th. You can see the finalists snap here.

6th of July: Its cultural day! We went to the Louvre and of course, did the usual How could we not see the Mona Lisa? The evening included a dinner cruise which was great! There was a DJ there so.. well you know what we did =p

7th of July: Finalists started presenting at the Louvre. Who ever knew they had a conference center too :p We set up our booth’s quickly and attended all the presentations. I liked Team SOAK and Team AcidRain the most and I must say, I fancied both of them to win it The other teams were pretty good but I liked these two not only for their ideas but also for their presentations SOAK did a near perfect job of presenting and Long Zheng in particular was amazing.

8th of July: Time to announce the results and what better place to do it at than the Louvre! The atmosphere was electrifying. We had Microsoft ADEs, Microsoft dignitaries, people from various businesses, judges from all categories and all the competitors. We had the who’s who of the universe, except the yeti of course.

We manned our booths and waited for people to come over so that we could tell people what we were doing. Interop contestants had nothing to do all week. We had met Craig Kitterman once and walked him through the entire system but that’s about it. Believe it or not, lazy little me actually wanted to work! Everyone else got to do something here while we were having a nice vacation. Not that I didn’t have fun but this was our first second chance to present but no one was actually coming to us. I started walking over to people and distributed the brochures that we had made asking people to drop by our booth and see what we’ve been doing. Believe it or not, it worked! People did start coming in. I even walked some people to the booth myself This also gave me a chance to do what I wanted to do for a long time, have a look at the other solutions on display So while I was interacting with the people I had met over the week and also with ones I hadn’t, I got to see quite a few good solutions that didn’t actually make it to the top 6 and thus weren’t showcased on stage. My team mates at this time were busy giving a presentation/demo to the people I was directing towards our booth

Then started the result ceremony! Before we knew it, the interop award was up. Just before it did, I randomly started recording video and so I have the video of us all throughout! Joe Wilson was the one on stage and soon he was about to announce third place. We were tense for obvious reasons. Third place went to Team Together from Poland. Paras, I think it was, told me to pass on the cam to him so that he could take the vid and I simply responded that I was going to take the cam on stage Vineeth wished me good luck and I said “Please god, not second place again…” and then Joe announced the second place team. Second place went to Team Ecologix from Brazil. We wildly errupted. We had done it! India has finally won first place in something at the Imagine Cup albeit an award, not a category. We had just become the first interop awardees in the world \o/ We settled down and waited for Joe to read out our names. First place went to.. “SKAN from India” We went up on stage. We got a cheque for $10,000 (USD) and a trophy. The website said a we’d get a few other things a bit later as well (trip to Redmond ;))

I took my camera on stage so I have the crazy video with me. I’ve brought the 4 min video to 40 mb (yeah, need more compression but the old size was 483 MB :|)  but I need to add subtitles (so you know who said what in the background) I’ll upload it once its done

The only thing that didn’t go as I predicted was the EDI. Ireland came tied second with China and Singapore came first! Congratulations to Team Trail Blazers from Singapore! As predicted though, Team SOAK from Australia won the SDI! The Imagine Cup has travelled the world from the USA (2003) to France (2004) to Russia (2005) to Italy (2006) to Thailand (2007) and now it goes down under! Congratulations to Team SOAK!

You can have a look at the following resources.

• Official Enpower Website (Team SKAN wins the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2008 Interoperability Award)
  
• Imagine Cup News Page with all of this year’s winners.
• My Picasa gallery with the pictures from the past few months. It has pics of the world finals (Paris, France), national finals (Bangalore, India) and IIM-A (Ahmedabad, India). It also has a few pics from Paris, Versailles and Lille. These aren’t anywhere near the 15 GB of pics I have but these are a start. I’ll keep adding to them. Once the video (of us winning and taking the prize) is up, I’ll make a new blog post for it! I also took quite a few 360 degree shots so once I stitch them together, I’ll put them up on dA and put up a link here

We did have a great time in the days we stayed back in France. We went to Versailles, Lille (on the TGV \o/) and to a few places (like the Arc de Triomphe) in Paris where we hadn’t been the week before. The Imagine Cup has been an amazing experience all in all. Great chance to see a bit of France and I would love to return there some day Thanks for Microsoft for this opportunity and a special thanks goes out the entire Academic Team at Microsoft India It was great meeting so many new people and I hope to see a them again in Cairo, Egypt next year!

Click Images to see larger size. For more, have a look at the Imagine Cup 2008 Gallery.

Tags: Imagine Cup