The grand finale of Microsoft Imagine Cup Bangladesh 2013 was held last Saturday at the American International University Bangladesh (AIUB) auditorium in the capital.
Buet 101, a team from Buet (Bangladesh University of Engineering Technology) won this year’s Imagine Cup Bangladesh competition with their project Happy Watch, a Windows phone app that instantly helps to monitor heart rate and status of physical well-being far away from the user of the app.
Team Blue from AIUB became the 1st runner-up with a gesture and speech recognition based Windows Phone app that helps a regular person to communicate with a deaf-mute person.
NerdCats from Khulna University of Engineering & Technology stood 2nd runner-up with an amazingly fluent phonetic Bangla keyboard for Windows Phone.
The winning team received Doel laptops and Nokia Lumia 620 handsets. The 1st and 2nd runners-up teams also received Doel laptops
Microsoft Bangladesh called students from all over the country to take part in the Imagine Cup Bangladesh 2013 by March 15.
One hundred and thirty five teams registered for the Imagine Cup competition and 12 teams were chosen for evaluation at the preliminary round. Four teams among them advanced to the local finals.
Buet101 will participate in an online contest to qualify for the worldwide finals of Microsoft Imagine Cup which is going to be held in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Minister Mostafa Faruque Mohammad was present at the finale as the chief guest and Nazrul Islam Khan, secretary, ICT ministry was present as the special guest.
Judge panel consisted of Zakaria Swapan, editor of Priyo.com, Tapan Kanti Sarker, president of CTOForum, Radi Chowdhury, country manager of Nokia Bangladesh, Shah Ali Newaj Topu, chief technology officer of Selise, Tafsir M. Awal, managing director of Multimode, Tareen Hossain, executive editor of Daily Ittefaq, and EPG Leader of Microsoft Bangladesh Mohammed Asif.
Microsoft has been organising this world’s biggest IT Olympics ‘Imagine Cup’ for the last 11 years.
This is the third time Microsoft Bangladesh is hosting such premier student technology competition in Bangladesh.
In the first attempt, in New York worldwide finals, Bangladeshi students surprised the whole world winning the ‘People’s Choice’ award among 189 countries by developing an app for visually impaired population.
Last year, Bangladeshi winning team competed in Sydney worldwide finals as well.
ICT minister has expressed his heartfelt hope that this year, the Imagine Cup Bangladesh 2013 winner, will win the ultimate glory and recognition for the country in the Imagine Cup worldwide finals.
Source: The Daily Star