South Africa and Uganda teams Win Microsoft Imagine Cup 2017 Online Finals to qualify for World Finals in Seattle

South Africa and Uganda teams Win Microsoft Imagine Cup 2017 Online Finals to qualify for World Finals in Seattle

Two teams from Africa qualified for the 2017 Microsoft Imagine Cup World finals by submitting applications through the online finals.

online finals

 

Teams from Uganda and South Africa have qualified to participate in this years Microsoft Imagine Cup world finals. Team LabTECH Innovation from Uganda and BITSplease from South Africa landed 2 out of the 3 possible qualifying spots. With the 3rd spot won by a team from Spain. These teams will join the other qualifiers from the Middle East and Africa competition held in Lebanon.  

There are two ways to qualify for the Microsoft Imagine Cup World Finals held each year. One way is to participate in the national competitions held by the Microsoft or recognized organization in your country. The other is to submit your project online. This option is usually for teams in countries without a Microsoft office or no scheduled competitions.

So this is how the teams from Uganda and South Africa made their qualification. These teams will have to like the others prepare to present their projects at the finals in Seattle July 27th. Any of the participating teams can walk away with over $200,000 in prizes.

About our 2017 Online Finals winners from Africa.

Team LabTECH Innovation from Uganda

online finals

Stephen Kalyesubula, Alvin Leonard and Fred Byakuyamba are team members of labTECH. They developed an integrated hardware and a mobile application for diagnosis and monitoring of maternal health.

LabTECH Innovations project is an integrated solution called UriSAF. It’s for effective diagnosis and monitoring of maternal health in low resource settings with their application and Uri scope device.

Check out Team labTech on Facebook and Twitter and read all about their project here.

Team BITSplease from South Africa 

online finals

BITSplease is a team from the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. The members include Computer Science and Software Engineering students Jihyun Byun and Jacques Oosthuizen. They built a platform that helps users overcome multiple forms of addiction.

Alice is an online environment that helps its users overcome multiple forms of addiction. It allows for portability and easy communication between users and their counselors. So, no matter where in the world our users are, they can always receive the help they require.

Check out Team BITSplease and read all about project Alice here.

We wish all the teams representing Africa the best and hope they make it to the finals of the Imagine Cup 2017 competition and win. Teams  E-Park (Morocco), BITSplease (South Africa) and labTECH Innovation (Uganda) have qualified for the world finals in Seattle to represent Africa.

2017 Imagine Cup Registration Opens with $100,000 Top Prize

2017 Imagine Cup Registration Opens with $100,000 Top Prize

Microsoft has announced the launch of the 2017 Imagine Cup Competition. The global student technology competition also enters it’s 15th year since it’s launch.
 
2017 imagine cup
 
Microsoft’s Global student developer competition, Imagine Cup, open to Microsoft Student Partners (MSP) around the world has been launched. The 2017 edition is special in two ways. First the completion turns 15 years. Secondly to celebrate the milestone the usual award price of $ 50,000 gets doubled to $ 100,000.
 

 
Last year four teams from Africa represented at the finals with team Night’s Watch placing second in the World Citizenship category. I’m really looking forward to seeing more teams from Africa present at the finals in 2017.
 
The have been some changes to categorization in 2017’s competition. The focus will be more apps and solutions oriented, which should allow more innovations to be included.
 
First, as cloud technologies become more and more pervasive, we feel it’s paramount that Imagine Cup help student developers prepare for their futures by building skills using today’s premier cloud platforms. To that end, we highly encourage all Imagine Cup projects to showcase one or more Microsoft Azure services within their solutions.
Also, we’re changing the way we judge projects. For the 2017 Imagine Cup competition, we’re placing greater emphasis on each project’s underlying technology. What that means is that Imagine Cup will be on the lookout for deep technology integration in fully formed apps, services and games with the potential to be viable in the commercial marketplace.
 
Finally, we’ve decided to forego categories in favor of opening the competition up to apps and solutions that might not have neatly fit into one of those categories in past years . . . in other words, all big ideas are welcome in Imagine Cup.
 
Looking forward to the 2017 Imagine Cup Competition? Join a Microsoft Student Partners (MSP) group in your institution and you could be on your way. Currently there are MSP groups in Ghana Telecom University, University of Cape Coast, Ghana Institute of Journalism, University of Ghana, GIMPA.
 
Visit the registration page and get started.
 
Source : Microsoft