About 300 tech-savvy students from 71 countries gathered in St. Petersburg on July 10 and July 11 to contend for global recognition and a total of $1 million in prize money, Microsoft reported. These student finalists pitched innovative projects to a high-profile jury in three main categories.
In the Games category, Austria’s Zeppelin Studio came out on top with Schein, a quest-like game requiring ingenuity to solve a range of problems.
The first prize for social projects went to Portugal’s For a Better World, who presented an express blood group identification system.
Finally, the UK’s Colinked was named the best project in the Innovation category. Their soundSYNK is a mobile-based social network solution that taps into Bluetooth technology and is designed to bring together like-minded music lovers.
There were also three lesser categories, including Windows Phone, Windows 8, and Windows Azure. It was in the latter category that Ukraine’s life won second place just behind an Indian team, making them the only winning representative from the former Soviet Union. Their project is a social platform for users to set off for missions, create their own tasks, and share those with friends.
Home-field advantage was of little help to the Russian finalists, two teams from Moscow and a third from Cherepovets some 490 km northeast of Moscow. None were among the winning finalists.
Dmitry Soshnikov, Microsoft’s academic program coordinator, told CNews.ru that he had seen a lot of “bright ideas” as the competition unfolded but had to admit that some had “questionable commercial applications.”
Russian students were luckier at the ACM ICPC contest, which attracted 120 teams from 36 countries to St. Petersburg last month.
