Greg Does IT » winner

First place on the Innovation Accelerator in the Silicon Valley!

Gergely Orosz — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:59:23 +0000

It’s been a week since we’ve come home from the Innovation Accelerator in Mountain View. This is the trip that we’ve won on the Microsoft Imagine Cup in Paris, last summer, as special prize. It’s been a great week – we’ve attended numerous priceless sessions and gained a peek into the entrepreneurial life in Silicon Valley. In the end of the week all the teams presented their projects to three venture capitlists – and of the six participant teams (Australia, France, Germany, Slovakia, South Africa and us, Hungary) we were the ones receiving the highest ratings!

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.

Qualified for ITech Challenge National Finals!

Gergely Orosz — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 22:17:41 +0000

With two of my friends at the Budapest University of Technology we’ve entered the ITech Challenge management competiton (our chosen team name is Drunk Puppies ). This competiton is about managing an IT firm and making most profits possible; this year each team had to manage a telecommunications company. I would actually say that the competiton is actually 90% management and 10% IT (some basic knowledge was required on how the phone/cable/internet infrastructure works and depends on each other).

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!!

Special Prize on 24 Hours Coding Competition

Gergely Orosz — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:23:07 +0000

The Win The Web 24 hours coding competition was held last Saturday. The competition was organized by Microsoft Hungary and during the 24 hours teams of 3 had to complete a larger and three smaller web projects using any technology they preferred. I entered with two of my colleagues from work.

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

Imagine Cup Hungary Winners!

Gergely Orosz — Sat, 10 May 2008 11:06:53 +0000

The Imagine Cup Hungary finals were held last week at Microsoft headquarters in Budapest. This year’s topic was Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment and there were multiple categories one could enter (including algorithm, games, short film and some other). We’ve entered the “main” category, Software Design. In this category the winners of the national round qualify for the world finals held in Paris this year. And yes… we’ve won and will be representing Hungary in the world finals!!

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!