Australia And NZ Clean Up At Microsoft’s 2014 Imagine Cup

England might be leading the medal tally at the 2014 Commonwealth Games (a fact I know has most of us quivering in our footwear), but when it comes to innovative technologies, it’s Australia (and New Zealand) all the way. Today, a pair of Monash Uni students took out the grand prize at Microsoft’s Imagine Cup, with NZ also snagging first place in the Innovation competition.

The Imagine Cup has a number of awards and events, but the three big ones are the World Citizenship, Innovation and Games competitions. This year, Australia and NZ took out the first and second of those, respectively, with Australia also taking the grand prize. Students Jennifer Tang and Jarrel Seah claimed the victory with their Eyenaemia tool, which allows anyone to check themselves for anaemia by looking into a webcam.

For the Kiwis, it was a team of four from the University of Auckland with an app called Estimeet. The application tells you how far away your contacts are and how long they’ll take to get to you, but doesn’t show your precisely where they are. According to the app’s description on the Imagine Cup site, it’s designed to eliminate the need for “stressful texts and calls to your friends”.

The Eyenaemia and Estimeet teams will both bank a cool $US50,000, while the former can also look forward to meeting up with Bill Gates for some one-on-one (one-on-two?) mentoring.

[Imagine Cup]

Photo: Microsoft


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