Several months ago, I got the chance to make a 15-minute presentation to the Chief Software Architect of Microsoft, the father of Windows, and the richest man on the planet—Bill Gates. Here’s how:
The competition
Our team from the University of California in Berkeley competed in the Imagine Cup Exhibition Round in San Francisco, held at the Microsoft Mobile Developer Conference (MDC). The goal of the Microsoft-sponsored contest is to create an application to solve an everyday problem.
A team from the University of California in Los Angeles created an application to help travelers select nearby restaurants based on their stated preferences and interests. Another team from San Francisco State University came up with a mobile dating system, wherein a user’s mobile device suggests potential dates for them in the area based on their location. The Cornell University team demonstrated a system to pilot model airplanes using a mobile device.
Jeff Chen, Casey Ho, and Lin Xu present to Bill Gates their mobile time management application, Mobile Time-Flex Solutions.
Our idea
We realized that everyone wants to be more productive, but effective time management is sometimes not possible when people are wasting time waiting in lines. We used the Visual Studio .NET development suite to create a mobile time management application. We named our program Mobile Time-Flex Solutions. It assists with the problem of time management at busy locations. Our application can be tailored to fit a variety of uses, from kids who want to go on more rides at theme parks to business professionals who need to talk to a number of vendors at conferences or trade shows.
Fig. 1: Mobile Time-Flex ThemePark Solution lets visitors plan out their day to minimize the need to wait in line.
The contest
Judging for the contest was done in question-and-answer format. Judges (from the software development industry) visited each team’s booth to learn about their product and its benefits. The judges looked at the base idea, the potential market, security design, and many other factors. Every team faced difficult questions on areas like implementation, deployment, and expected consumer satisfaction.
Though answering the questions was challenging, the demo portion of the presentation was even more stressful for us. Our program was newly developed: we didn’t know how it would behave as we ran it through its paces. When the judges asked for our demo, we held our breath and crossed our fingers.
Why were we worried? Well, we were notified of the competition only four days before the judging! In addition, none of us had any previous experience programming in .NET or C#. We stayed up four days straight installing Visual Studio .NET for the first time, and then writing our program using newly-learned tools such as Active Data Objects and Active Server Pages. It nearly drove us insane!
Unexpected triumph
We didn’t expect to win. Programs from the other teams represented long-term research projects; they were much better developed than ours. So our team sat in the back of the auditorium when the award ceremony finally came.
We were shocked when we won first place. I remember myself at the time literally jumping up and down and rolling on the floor with excitement. The judges told us that we won due to the ingenuity our product displayed. They saw in our project an interesting concept and a solution that could work. As the name of the Imagine Cup competition suggests, using our imaginations made us the winners.
The reward of the contest was a chance to give a presentation on our product to Bill Gates. Bill was at MDC to deliver the keynote address, and we’d get to meet him afterwards. Clearly, this presentation was very important and we definitely wanted our application to run perfectly. So, we stayed up all night again debugging things further.
Printer-friendly version