NZ Imagine Cup winner announced

Microsoft New Zealand has named the national winner of the 2010 Imagine Cup, following presentations from the four finalists on Friday evening.

Team OneBeep (pictured) from the University of Auckland was named the winner following a series of 15-minute presentations and will now go on to represent New Zealand at the worldwide competition in Poland later this year.

Focusing on the One Laptop Per Child program and its 1.4 million deployed laptops, Microsoft said that Team OneBeep came up with an inexpensive and robust method to solve the problem of sending educational content to these laptops, which are sent out to schools in areas of the world where there are no phone lines or internet services.

The solution uses Team OneBeep's software to package a file of educational data as audio to be sent via radio waves. This can be received on any cheap AM/FM radio which passes it on to the laptop. The file is then converted back to its original form once it has been received on the children's laptops, ready to be viewed.

"Throughout the competition we've seen many great ideas, but Team OneBeep's stood out as the best of the best," said Scott Wylie, Director of the Developer and Platform Group for Microsoft New Zealand, sponsor of the Imagine Cup. “Their project was the most well-developed, reasoned and emblematic of our theme, based on the U.N. millennium development goals: to solve the world’s toughest problems with technology.”

The worldwide finals take place from July 3rd to July 8th in Warsaw, Poland.

“After working so hard for so long, winning this competition has been a big payoff, and it feels great,” said Vinny Kumar, Team Leader for OneBeep. “With all the support we’ve had along the way, we’re ready to take our project to the next level. Now we’ve just got to keep the strong momentum going through to the finals in Poland. We’ll do New Zealand proud.”

The New Zealand finalists were announced in February.