Chris Alexander

On Engineering

Imagine Cup UK Final

4th June, 2008

Wednesday, 6pm: Tomorrow my team and I are off to Microsoft in London for the Imagine Cup UK finals. A whole host of events, presentations and meetings are going on to celebrate the teams reaching the UK final and possibly heading off to France in the summer for the worldwide competition!

I’ll be live blogging (hopefully with pictures) throughout the day at this URL if you want to catch up with how I’m doing.

Thursday, 6.30am: Well here it is, the big day has arrived! I’m really looking forward to it. Haven’t been up quite this early for some time! Today I will be blogging here as often as I can from the event, and uploading pictures if I can.

9.30am: We’ve arrived at Microsoft and eating very nice pastries to make up for the journey! There is a steady stream of people arriving and it looks like a great event. There’s some restrictions on the internet here so I can’t upload pictures yet, but I’m working on it! I’ll update when things kick off :)

10.45am: We’ve just had a fun half an hour working with Capgemini on assessment centre techniques. Assessment centres are used by many companies to assess candidates for jobs before interview, and the techniques used throughout are really important to ensure you appear your best. Next up are the keynote presentation and lunch. Still technical issues with the photos but I’ll upload them when I get a chance :)

2pm: We’re about to start the next series of presentations; I’ve spent the last few hours grabbing a bit of lunch and talking to loads of business guys about the CarShare software and getting loads of realy entheusiastic responses :) Photos will be online later as the system is blocked here.

2.30pm: Two great presentations from the Live Search and huddle.net. live search is talking about moving in loads of new directions for searching new types of media - there’s some really cool stuff like face identification in streaming video. The huddle team are doing a really cool thing, and doing a great job of being a startup. Bonus is they’re looking for summer interns! Next up is a tech presentation from the environment agency.

3.45pm: The environment agency talk on the uses they have for technology has finished, and the winners of the UK competition have been announced. Sadly we weren’t in the top three for software design, but we had a great time and the winner was really good :)

In the evening there was a rather awesome get together at Ha Ha, just across from Microsoft. There was Rock Band, nice food and plenty of drinks!

Well, the Imagine Cup experience this year was really amazing, I enjoyed all of it and I will definitely be entering next year with something even better than was managed this time round. Just getting there was a great achievement I think.

Thanks to everyone at Microsoft who put this all together; Mark Johnston for organising it and particularly Ed Dunhill for his support.