My entry, Tweet For Your Team shows the tweets of the two teams simultaneously. It measures the live intensity of the tweets (how many are written per minute for each team) and also analyzes their mood by matching keywords and using simple rules to decide whether a tweet carries positive or negative emotions for the team.

The entry also allows visitors to get involved and cheer for or against their team with a single click sending a shout visible to other users off the application. See this post on further details on the application functionality.

Winners of the competition were announced just before the World Cup 2010 final and I was happy to see my entry being selected one of the two winners. As the judging panel wrote in their summary:
“Gergely created a really engaging application that you could easily sit and watch and interact with during any live World Cup match.” And “The performance of the application is really impressive considering tweet rates for Spain alone have been seen to hit 3500 tweets per minute.”

You can read more about the application in the following previous posts:

• World Cup 2010 Real Time Twitter Mashup
• Cheer For Your Team With a Click on TweetForYourTeam.com!
• Video on how TweetForYourTeam works

And of course you can see it in action at TweetForYourTeam.com!

Kairos Society is an invite-only foundation aimed to unite the world’s brightest young minds. Each year they hold a global summit where some of the most influential leaders are brought together with a select group of the world’s most innovative and entrepreneurial students. As part of the summit the 100 most innovative student projects are exhibited – I’ll also be one of the exhibitors as participant in the Green Watering Project.

I have been invited to this year’s summit based on the Green Watering project I’ve played marginal role in developing. The project is an integrated hardware and software solution aimed to dramatically reduce the amount of water used for irrigation. The project has received numerous awards so far including worldwide third place on the Microsoft Imagine Cup (the world’s premier student technology competition) in Paris, 2008, and first prize on the Innovation Accelerator in Silicon Valley, 2009.

I’m really excited about the summit – it psyched about exhibiting within the New York Stock Exchange, curious about the other projects and looking forward to networking with all the bright people!

Among the sessions were presentations on startups Liftopia, Ribbit, Zoosk, 3Scale and some others. We visited the Plug & Play Centre – an incubator for about 200 startups – a place that seems like lots of fun to work at! Of course there were some Microsoft sessions as well, we had a networking event and all key phases of starting up a company were covered in a presentation series. It’s incredible how much I’ve heard over the week..!

The Hungarian Team on the Innovation Accelerator

Before the Innovation Accelerator we’ve taken a week long road trip in California and Nevada. If you’re interested, you can read our blog in Hungarian on the trip here.

Every year there are about 200 teams competing in the country, 20 of which can make it to the finals. We’ve taken part one of the qualifiers yesterday where the top 3 teams of the participating 32 were to advance. We came in at 2nd place meaning we’ve qualified ourselves to the national finals! Woo!

In the competiton we’ve managed an telco company for a year, making business decisions every quarter. All teams were in a market of 5 or 6 teams, initially starting out with equal market share on the phone, cable TV and internet markets. In each quarter about 20 smaller decisions had to be made like pricing packages, marketing budgets, employee salaries and investing in architecture. After all teams on the market made the decisions (there was usually an hour to do this) these decisions were fed into the simulation system which then returned the new market shares and financial data.

On our market we were competing with 4 other teams. Unfortunaltely right in the first quarter one of the teams decided to agressively break down prices in all segments to gain market share and other teams followed the 2nd quarter. Now falling prices aren’t really good for profits… luckily however we’ve put together an Excel spreadsheet with which we were able to identify the sub-markets with the highest profit rates and focused our marketing on those while keeping the price high for an extra profit. The other companies on the market either didn’t notice these extra rewarding segments – so while our market share slowly, but constantly shrinked, our profits steadily increased.

Before the final round it was final that we are going to win our market. However only the top 3 market leaders advanced of the 6 groups… luckily we came in as 2nd! Next stop are the national finals!!

Presenting at the finals, in the Louvre

The whole competition started a few months ago when we’ve decided to enter the Imagine Cup competiton. We’ve managed to win the Hungarian national round which made us qualify for the world finals among with 60 other teams across the globe. The world finals took place for 6 days. The firs few days there were qualifiers from where 12 teams advanced to the semi-finals. After another round 6 of the 12 teams were selected for the grand final. The qualifiers and semi-finals were closed to the audience, whereas the grand final was in front of about 2,000 people in the Louvre! I never expected to be presenting in front of this many people!

Our project for the competition, Green Watering, was an intelligent automatic watering system that uses the least water possible by monitoring soil moisture, tracking weather and using custom watering rules. The structure of the system looks like this:

We’ve used numerous technologies to put the system together: fiddled with hardware to put the sensors together, used .NET to communicate with the computer, built a web client using MSSQL, ASP.NET and Silverlight to manage it and built a simulation table using small pipes and sensors and microcontrollers to demonstrate the system in action in really small scale.

The simulation table, the team and our mentor

It was a fantastic week… and what’s more thanks to the Innovation Accelerator prize it doesn’t end all here: early 2009 we’ll be participating in some kind of bootcamp further working on commercial availability of the project!

Innovation Accelerator Winners!

The top 3 teams: Australia, Slovakia, Hungary!

Congratulations to all other participating teams as well – it was a great time!

The main task was to create a website that tracks movements of truck drivers throughout Europe. We were given sample GPS coordinates of about 30 drivers with reports every 5 minutes in a months interval and had to visualize this information, make it searchable and implement the most we could of a list of about 30 requirements.

We decided to use ASP.NET, WCF, Silverlight and Bing maps with the Javascript API to solve the task. The competiton started at 10am on Saturday and the hours seemed to fly by too fast. I was developing route visualization with Bing maps and tried to work around limitiations of the Javascript API (e.g. that only paths of about 25 steps can be plotted on it) as well as building website functionality and a bit of Silverlight.

Unfortunately we only implemented about 60% of the functionality required. Because of this we weren’t hoping of any prize – however to our delight we were awarded IT Secure’s special prize for the most innovative user interface! And after the award ceremony I went home and slept a good 15 hours

The Idea

In theSoftware Design category teams of maxium 4 have to create a project for the theme of the competition utilizing Microsoft technologies. We’ve spent weeks brainstorming with what we could develop for this year’s theme and finally came up with a water saving irrigation system. The motivation driving this idea was that we learned that 80% of all sweet water used goes towards irrigation compared to only 7% of sweet water used by households! So if we could save 5% on irrigation that would be equivalent of saving 50% on household water usage and would have a huge impact.

Looking at the irrigation systems used today the main types of these are:

• Manual, when a human constantly controls irrigation
• Automatic, when some irrigation equipment is installed and it waters according to a pre-defined rule
• Automatic with some sensors: this solution is more expensive but takes into account the current soil moisture before watering

Our idea was to create an automatic watering system that is more efficient than the irrigation systems existing today while being cheap at the same time. To do this we are using cheap soil moisture hardware, freely available weather forecasts and rules specified by the farmer.

Implementation & Demo

So the past two months we’ve been developing an initial prototype of this system. We’ve ordered the soil moisture sensor, managed to get it communicate with the computer, integrated a water pipe that’s controlled by the computer and developed an application using MSSQL, ASP.NET and Silverlight to control the whole thing.

The only question was on how to demo the whole thing. I mean, we can show the interface and diagrams but in a room it’s quite hard to demo anything of this. Originally we’ve planned to show it using plants… but the problem is that plants need watering only every day or so… and after having drowned about 5 of the home plants we gave up on this path.

The idea to this came only two days before the presentation: let’s use sponges to “speed up” time and demo the whole system in a small box! So we’ve created a small mock-up of a sponge, a soil moisture sensor, a plastic plant and a small pipe watering the whole thing. In the demo we haven’t had time to integrate weather forecasts but the whole set up looked quite cute watering a little about every 30 seconds just as the sponge ran out of water.

Presentation & Prizes

The presentation went really good. We were the last ones to present and there was another team who’ve developed a really good project encouraging environmental awareness via a social site where members get reputation based on environmental tasks they do. The judge however announced us (team DigitalMania) as winners! This means we get to go to the world finals in Paris at 3-8 July 2008!! We’ll definitely be polishing our project until then!