Madd0's Tech Blog

The award ceremony of imagine Cup 2008 took place on Tuesday, July 8th in the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris. SUPINFO teams were competing in two different categories: Game Development and Software Design.

Traditionally, prizes are handed out to the three first places in each of the nine categories of the competition. However, this year many special prizes were also awarded. One of these, an invitation to participate in the “BT Innovation Accelerator” program was won by Régis Hanol and Gauthier Chanliau–SUPINFO Languedoc Roussillon in Montpellier, Sébastien Warin–SUPINFO Nord-Pas de Calais in Lille and  Jean-Noël Gauthier–Ecole des Gobelins, of team Well’k Home.

The winners of this program, growth catalyst for innovative projects, are invited to work directly with the BT teams that will help them take their student project and transform it into a business plan. For them, Imagine Cup is only the beginning of the adventure!
I would also like to congratulate Frédéric Pedro, Anthony Chen Kuang Piao and Nicolas Gryman – SUPINFO Ile de France, and Maximilien Paitel – SUPINFO UK of the ECOThink team, who were able to distinguish themselves among 200 000 competitors and made it to the world finals with a few other privileged teams.

Finally, I’d like to encourage all students to follow these exemplary teams by registering today for the next edition of the competition, the world finals of which will take place in Cairo and Alexandria, in Egypt. The theme will be “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems facing us today.” Students will be asked to create software solutions that are aligned to one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). More information about the MDGs can be found at http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals.

Registration for Imagine Cup 2009 is already open. You’ll find more information at http://www.imaginecup.com.

It has been two days since students from all over the world got to Paris to participate in the Imagine Cup 2008 finals and we just got the first intermediate results:

From 50 teams, the list of competitors in the Software Design category has been brought down to only 12 and our Well’k Home team, of Régis Hanol, Gauthier Chanliau and Sébastien Warin (SUPINFO) and Jean Noël Gauthier (Gobelins) is among them!

There's still plenty of work to do before the final results are revealed on Tuesday, so I wish plenty of luck to the Well’k Home team as well as ECOThink (Game Development) for the rest of the competition. I'll keep you updated on how our teams move forward and will post pictures from the podium as soon as I have them.

It's July 3rd and the Imagine Cup World Finals start today!

I'm not a finalist this year—but only because I didn't participate at all ;) Still, after being at last year's finals in Korea, I just couldn't stay away. I needed a plan.

So here I am in Paris, the competition is taking place in my own back yard and, even though some Microsoft Student Partners are invited to come visit for a couple of hours, I needed to be there all week. Well, it seems that if you want something strong enough (and work hard to get it) the universe helps: I'll be present from July 3rd through 8th at the Imagine Cup 2008 finals!

What am I going to be doing there?

Well, first, there are two teams I've been kind of coaching for the last few months, SmartCooking and ECOThink. I'll be supporting them the best I can. Even though, at this stage, everything is mostly up to them.

Second, I'll be covering the event with Channel 8! That's right, for a whole week you'll be getting exclusive insider information both on the Channel 8 site and, of course, right here. Did I show you my badge?

Come back soon and often for more information about the teams, the competition, the venues, the city, etc. ;)

No, these are not lottery or horse numbers, it's the order in which the teams from SUPINFO that are going to the Imagine Cup finals next week in Paris!

There are two kinds of competitions going on next week:

• Software design, embedded design and game development, in which teams must basically sell a finished product to judges from different countries and backgrounds;
• The rest, in which teams have 24-36 hours to create something new from scratch (that's what I had to do last year).

6 will be the position of ECOThink, our Game Development team.

54 will be the position of Smart Cooking, our Software Design team.

Watch Max, Rogerio and Tim as they draw the teams and they explain what's going to happen.

Imagine Cup 2008 Worldwide Finals Drawing

Oh, by the way, did I already mention I'll be covering the finals? More on that soon ;)

After the French Final which took place last week, where we learnt that our own Well K’Home team qualified for the finals of the Software Development category, we received today in a more discrete but not less important manner the results for all the other categories. I am therefore glad to announce that a second SUPINFO team has qualified for the worldwide finals!

I’m talking about the ECOThink team composed of Frédéric Pedro, Anthony Chen Kuang Piao and Nicolas Gryman – SUPINFO Ile de France, and Maximilien Paitel – SUPINFO UK, who will be representing the colors of SUPINFO and France in the Game Development category.

Only 6 out of the hundred or so teams that participated worldwide have the privilege to attain this final round that will take place from July 3 to 8 in Paris. I therefore congratulate this team for their exceptional work and this well deserved reward.

It is also thanks to these two teams that SUPINFO will be the French school sending the most students to these “Olympic Games” of Computer Science.

I’d like to thank teams Well K’Home and ECOThink once more, but also all the other participants in all the other categories for their efforts.

I hope that those for whom the adventure stops here were able to take advantage of it and will retry the experience next year. To our two finalist teams, I wish them the best of luck for the next stage and would like to remind them that they have our full support until the end.

Last night took place the French finals of the Software Design category of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup. Seven finalists, two of which came from SUPINFO, were competing for the first place that would allow them to represent their school’s and their country’s colors in the worldwide finals that will take place from July 3 to 8 in Paris, France.

It was before notably Eric Boustouller–General Manager of Microsoft France, Jean-Louis Missika–deputy of the Mayor of Paris, in charge of innovation, research and universities, and Chantal Jouanno–President of the French Environment and Energy Management Agency, but also our President, Alick Mouriesse, that this much desired first place was attributed to our own Smart Cooking team, composed of Régis Hanol and Gauthier Chanliau–SUPINFO Montpellier, Sébastien Warin–SUPINFO Lille, and Jean-Noël Gauthier–Gobelins.

Months of hard work have borne fruit, even if the show is far from being over. These four students must still step up to their biggest challenge during the first week of July, when they will have to convince judges from around the world that their project is the most relevant from a technological, economic and environmental (this is the competition’s theme this year) point of view, amongst the fifty other countries participating in the international finals.

I’d like to congratulate personally, but also on behalf of all of SUPINFO, Régis, Gauthier, Sébastien and Jean-Nöel for their victory!

I’d also like to congratulate Team Plastid, made of Sylvain Bruyère, Romain Léveillé and Steven Bailly-Maître–SUPINFO Toulouse, who managed, despite their young age, to qualify for the French finals. I wish them good luck in continuing their project and hope to see them on the podium next year.

Finally, last night only the Software Design category was at stake, however we have great teams still participating, especially in the categories of Embedded Design, Game Development, Project Hoshimi and IT Challenge. Some of these teams were there yesterday evening and were able to showcase their projects and benefit from the opinion and advise of visitors, including Alick and Olivier Comes. These teams have submitted their projects hoping to grab a place in the worldwide finals, however in these categories the competition is already taking place at the international level. We will therefore know the definitive list of SUPINFO finalists by the end of the month.

Once again, on behalf of SUPINFO, I wish luck to all the teams who are still competing and would like to congratulate and thank Régis, Gauthier and Sébastien for all their work.

A few weeks ago I posted the pictures of the Imagine Cup conference that took place in Paris and during which I had the opportunity to interview Bill Gates.

An event like that was of course filmed and now the videos are also available for online viewing and for download from the web site of Microsoft France.

There are six videos:

• French (well, French and Costa Rican :P) finalists from 2007 (French)
• Bernard Charlès, CEO Dassault Systèmes (French)
• Ora Ito, Designer (French)
• Andrew Herbert, Microsoft Research Cambridge (English)
• Bill Gates, Microsoft Chairman (English)
• Q&A with Bill Gates (you can see me here again) (English)

Click on "Voir ..." to view the video online or "Télécharger" to download.

Have fun!

As usual these days, there were all sorts of cameras present at yesterday's activity. This is great because I of course couldn't take my own pictures. Here's a selection of pictures that I have received:

Yep, that's me, to his left first and then to his right.

And here are links I've received/found with pictures of the event. I'll be editing these as I find/get new ones:

• G-IT
• Photos by Séverin Ferrand
• Photos by Stéphane Rangaya
• Photos by Emmanuel de Taillac
• Photos by Maxime Gaillard
• Photos by Stéphane Rangaya
• Photos by Johanna Piou

I'm exhausted!

Today was day of "firsts":

• First time in I can't remember how long that I wake up and it's still dark outside (yes, I know, what you're thinking. I'm not lazy, I just manage my time differently).
• First time I risk missing breakfast in a hotel because it's too early (I guess you're seeing a pattern here. It's just coincidence).
• First time I take a morning train in London to go down to Paris planning to come back up in the evening.
• First time I went to La Sorbonne and visited its main amphitheater.
• First time I'm asked to speak in front of so many people (although I'm not actually 100% of this one).
• And finally, the first time that I meet Bill Gates!

Since he was in the neighborhood, BillG dropped in La Sorbonne to demo Microsoft Surface and talk about Imagine Cup to a hall full of students. After all, this year's Imagine Cup finals will precisely take place in Paris.

I got to Gare du Nord at about 11:50 and had to be in La Sorbonne as close to noon as possible. I got there at about 12:45 because I had to go to my apartment first to change. Why was I changing? Well, because I was going to be onstage.

After a rushed rehearsal and discovering what I had to say and do onstage, I patiently waited with two other MSPs/French Imagine Cup finalists, Manon and Benjamin, for several hundred people to settle into the centuries-old main amphitheater of France's most famous university.

At about 14:30 (or at least I think it was that time, I wasn't really thinking about that by then...) everything started: Marc Jalabert, head of Microsoft France's DPE, gave an introductory speech and invited my friends and I to come onstage. We were asked a couple of questions about Imagine Cup and then sat down next to the other special guests: Bernard Charlès from Dassault Systèmes, Ora Ito and Andrew Herbert from MSR. In that order, the three guests gave their speeches.

After a couple of minutes of improvisation to make up for a slight delay, finally, the star guest arrived: Bill Gates. He gave a short speech and showed the "Bill's last day in Microsoft video". He also demoed Microsoft Surface, but that didn't go as well as expected. We'll blame the lighting.

Finally, it was time for our 15 minutes of glory. Manon, Benjamin and I went back onstage to join Marc and Bill for a Q&A session. We each got to ask two questions. After that, some pre-chosen students among the audience asked a question each and the afternoon was over. Or was it? We were rushed to a short photo shoot will Bill and then to a cocktail. The rest of the evening is much less interesting unless you're me, so I'll stop here.

I am now on a Eurostar heading back to London, actually suffering because there are no power outlets and (and here Windows went into hibernation because I ran out of battery)

There was one thing I loved about Seoul and it's that, wherever you were, if there was a little green near you, there was music to be heard. Gyongbokgung was not an exception. Indeed, I actually got to see the artists behind the music and one of them was glad to perform before the camera:

Well, not exactly. I'm at a friend's, but it feels like home anyway after such an exciting—and thus tiring—week.

If you're not following, what I'm saying is that I left Korea (about 20 hours ago) and I'm now back in Paris.

Except for the fact that the flight got to CDG about an hour late and that the food made me sick, I have to say Korean Air is a very respectable airline. On the 747 we took, we had comfortable seats (at least as comfortable as they get in coach) and we even had Video on demand. Unfortunately, lots of rain and air-conditioning in Korea were a bad combination and I caught cold, so I didn't enjoy the flight as much as I would have liked to.

So, I'll be writing more about Imagine Cup 2007 in the following days, summarizing everything I didn't talk about because I was either to busy (competing), lazy (visiting Seoul) or simply couldn't manage to get hold of an Internet connection because 1000 other people were using it too...

For now, I want to thank my friend Pascal for his hospitality, and like the guy on the picture, I'm going to disconnect 'til tomorrow.

I'm sitting in Mugunghwa Hall 1 in the Sheraton Grande Walkerhill in Seoul right now listening to one of the Embedded Design presentations that are going on.

From literally hundreds of teams, we are down to only 6 by category and each one has to do a presentation in front of the judges in order to determine the winners. The only teams who still need to present are the ones in the Software Design and Embedded Design categories, but their final presentations are happening right now. In about 24 hours we will finally learn the names of the 27 winners of Imagine Cup 2007 during the World Festival that will take place tomorrow.

I'll communicate the results as soon as possible. I also have to upload pictures of yesterday's day of Seoul, but that will take time on this Internet connection, so it will have to wait.

Things moved so fast (or I was too slow) to write about the start of the 24-hour competition that took place from 14h GMT+9 on Monday 6th to 14h GMT+9 on Tuesday 7th.

The competition involved students from practically all categories, including mine: Interface Design.

Here are a couple of pictures I uploaded to Flick before starting:

The cubicles of all 6 Interface Design contestants.

This is our booth, before the competition started.

And the same 24 hours later. As you can see, we managed to keep it quite clean in spite of the tens of bottles of water and cans of soda drinks that came by...

As for the competition, the 24-hour challenge ended about 4h40 ago, which means I haven't slept in about... ...33 hours. We already presented both programs (the one that qualified us and the one we developed during the last 24 hours) in front of the judges:

Now all that's left is waiting for the winners to be announced on Friday (I think) and enjoying Korea in the meanwhile. Tomorrow, a tour of the city of Seoul is planned, I guess it should give me material for photos and writing. For now, priority number one is eating as soon as possible in order to go to bed as early as possible. That shouldn't be hard to accomplish.

Joe Wilson officially welcomed us to the 2007 finals of Imagine Cup about two hours ago.

Unfortunately, everything happened during the "Welcome Reception."

Given all the food and the lack of good lighting, I chose to eat instead of taking pictures.

By the way, I decided to remove the Flickr photos from the FeedBurner feed because it was getting rather spammed. But you can still see the latest pictures on the website or subscribe to the Flickr feed. 

Here we are in Korea!

The Imagine Cup finals are taking place in Seoul's Sheraton Grande Walkerhill, where we arrived a few hours ago. If you are reading this on the website, you can see that plazer can already locate me on this side of the globe.

I started publishing pictures to my Flickr account. I'll see what I can do to better integrate them with the blog as soon as possible. I'll probably put a Flash badge on the site like I had before and I think FeedBurner can do something for the RSS feed.

Since the competitions do not start until tomorrow, we have some free time in our hands today, so I'll go with most of the French delegation downtown in about an hour to check out a huge tech market. Apparently haggling is the rule here, like in China, where I actually got pretty good at it. Unfortunately, I don't know how to say the numbers in Korean yet and, even though "calculator-haggling" is possible, it's not as effective as trying to speak the local language.

Pour ceux qui veulent suivre, en français, la délégation française à Séoul, voici quelques blogs :

• Les Français à la finale mondiale d'Imagine Cup en Corée - Août 2007
• Benjamin Gauthey
• Srooba's blog for Imagine Cup 2007
• Team Arenium

Et j'éditerai le post au fur et à mesure que j'en trouve d'autres...

I'm in a plane heading to Seoul right now to participate in the finals of Imagine Cup 2007 and this will be the first of, hopefully, many posts covering the event. A couple of remarks: since I am a contestant and not a journalist, I will not have a lot of time for writing, so for a while all posts will be only in English (the text will be available on all three feeds, though); and since Internet access will apparently be difficult to come by with, I will probably be posting by batches when I get the chance to go online.

That said, let's get started!

So, why am I quoting Flemming?

It's the best description I could find for the flight.

Shaken, because we probably passed through every single turbulence pouch from Paris to Seoul. Every single one! I know this particular route is bumpy—I get the same treatment when flying to Beijing—but today it was particularly rough. I felt like I was traveling on a Costa Rican road, and for those who have been there (and I encourage you to go in spite of this particular comment) that is no compliment.

The "stirred" part, however, has nothing to do with the flight, what I wanted to allude to was the elegance of the drink concerned. I maybe shouldn't even mention this if I still want people to talk to me when I get back home, but still...

You see, we were asked by Microsoft to get to the airport extremely early. We were actually the first people to check-in (never done that before, by the way. I've already been among the last, but never the first.) and already some of us (including me) were on a waiting list because our flight was extremely overbooked, even though we already had confirmed seats (or at least I did). Anyway, I kindly told the lady that, if there was any problem, I was ready to make the sacrifice of accepting an upgrade to Business class. And, guess what. I got it!

Here's my place in our plane's seating plan when I checked-in:

And here's the place where I actually sat:

That's right, I got to travel the only way people should travel during the longest flight I've done this year (according to FlightMemory at least).

Well, there's not much more to say for now. The pilot's announcing that we are about to start our descent towards cloudy and hot Seoul, so I'll get back to you with more later today.

An interesting idea by the Imagine Cup team: map the locations of all teams on their way to Seoul this weekend for the Imagine Cup finals.

It would have been even better if they had asked us to actually locate ourselves on the map, because I'm sure nowhere near the south of France right now.

So, idea for next time: a mash-up using plazes and Virtual Earth, now that would have been cool...

I left some IE7 tabs open before I took the plane to Costa Rica and, while closing them today, I stumbled upon Channel 8 again, where a new video is already online. This video, that presents Bill Gates and Craig Mundie talking about Imagine Cup, reminded me that I forgot to make a very important announcement because it happened right when my blog died:

I qualified for the Imagine Cup finals in Korea!

Well, when I say I, I mean my team of course, Time Cube. So I leave for Korea with the rest of the French finalists on the 4th of August to participate in the final event of the Interface Design category. We'll see how it goes.

Wish me luck!