The Imagine Cup provides each competitor access to many different resources and technologies to use while creating a solution to solve some of the world's toughest problems. Below you will find a short description of some of those technologies.
Software Design Technologies
Microsoft MultiPoint helps developers create educational applications that affordably increase the reach of existing classroom computers. With MultiPoint, a single computer can have multiple mice connected, making it possible for groups of students to work on one computer—at the same time. Through uniquely-designed on-screen cursors, Microsoft Multipoint allows three to 30 students to collaboratively use and learn from educational software on one computer, thereby creating an active, collaborative learning experience that engages each and every student. To incorporate MultiPoint SDK in your Imagine Cup solution: click here.
Mesh Services and Live Framework are building blocks that bring software and internet services together and put you in control of your digital world. They allow you to interact with applications, files, people, and devices that matter the most and make sure you are in sync with them wherever you are and whenever you need them. Mesh Services provide exciting new opportunities for developers that bring traditional client and web applications to life and introduce new classes of applications to the developer toolkit. Experience Mesh and learn about developing on Mesh Services. Live Framework provides one place to program against Mesh Services and other exciting Live Services like Live Contacts, Live Profile and much more. These are the same things that power the Windows Live and Mesh experiences. Now you have their power at your disposal! No matter what languages, platforms or developer tools you use, you’ll find that with the Live Framework you will be able to create exciting new applications across the web, desktop and devices and enhance your existing applications with new capabilities. To incorporate Mesh Services & Live Framework in your Imagine Cup solution: click here.
Parallel Computing applications are helping turn ideas that were once nothing more than farfetched dreams in to reality. Dynamic 3D environments, complex investment analysis, and product development tools are just a few examples of what parallel computing makes possible. The computing industry is at an inflection point. Over the last 30 years, software developers have relied on exponential growth in processor power in order to increase the performance, feature functionality, and user experience richness of their applications. However, this clock speed driven free lunch is over. While the average PC clock speed increased more than 10x between 1993 and 1999, this average hasn’t doubled in the last four years. Instead, the hardware industry is shifting to multi-core and manycore processors where multiple cores are placed on a single die to increase the overall processor computational horsepower. The average PC on the market today is a dual-core, soon to be quad-core. In two years, expect the average to be eight-core! Unfortunately, most software today does not effectively take advantage of multiple cores. The key to high-performance applications of the future is through parallelism. To incorporate Parallel Computing in your Imagine Cup solution: click here.
SMS Server Toolkit enables anyone with a Windows smartphone and a PC to create an SMS server, thereby bridging computer networks with that of SMS. Short Message Service" (SMS)-capable phones are the most common digital-access devices in the world, with more than 2.5 billion devices sold to date. Unfortunately, much of the great data and functionality based in PC networks has been unavailable to SMS-based phones to date. In particular, we are excited about this technology because it enables small organizations such as schools, microfinance organizations, and even a lone IT staff worker to experiment and deploy SMS based applications cheaply. They can build these applications using Visual Studio or Excel. Additionally, this technology does not require that a developer gain permission from the local telephone company. The developer just plugs in a phone and pays for any SMS messages their program generates or receives. Sample applications we expect people to create: Schools can SMS hundreds of parents simply by filling out an Excel spreadsheet. Organizations can make their corporate directories easily available to any employer with an SMS cell phone. Sales representatives can SMS a customer name or number to their company’s SMS server and receive that customer’s ERP information. This is mostly an enabling technology that will help many developers create SMS applications easily and cheaply. We believe that this platform providing SMS “server sessions” is the first of its kind and will make it easy for developers to create dialogue-based interactions via SMS, essentially enabling people to create interfaces as robust as an iPod UI. To incorporate SMS Server Toolkit in your Imagine Cup solution: click here.
Windows Mobile lets you reuse your existing Visual Studio and .NET development skills and server infrastructure to extend your applications to mobile devices and give users new experiences and solve new business problems. Students! Use your genius to create innovative, dynamic, and powerful software applications by using Microsoft tools and technology- namely the Windows Mobile SDK. Unleash your ideas, curiosities, and talents towards creating usable software applications that run on Windows Mobile Phones.To incorporate Windows Mobile in your Imagine Cup solution: click here.
Embedded Development Technologies
Windows Embedded CE 6.0, along with Platform Builder, a Visual Studio 2005 plug in, provides an integrated development environment (IDE) that enables you to build both application and Windows Embedded CE 6.0 operating system software in a familiar environment. Windows Embedded CE 6.0 helps streamline the development process by providing, Code flexibility, Source Code Accessibility, ability to configure and test easily, fast editing, enhanced compilers, production quality drives and native windows applications. To incorporate Windows Embedded CE in your Imagine Cup solution: click here.
Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2 provides the latest breakthrough technologies that enable CE 6.0 device makers to efficiently build small footprint devices that connect to Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. These new features include additions and upgrades to: Device Drivers, Remote Desktop, Internet Explorer, VoIP, Web Services on Devices (WSDAPI), WMP Updates and File System Updates.
MashUp Technologies
PopFly Block is the fun and easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, and Web pages. It’s made up of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups and a social network where you can host, share, rate, comment and even remix creations from other Popfly users. So you’ve created an account on Popfly and want to create a mashup but you’re not sure what a mashup is or how you create one? Then this is the document for you! Popfly Mashups are all about letting you take data and media from different sources and combining them to make web sites the way you want. These mashups can then be embedded in other places such as your blog or Facebook profile and even downloaded as a Windows Vista Sidebar gadget. To incorporate PopFly Block in your Imagine Cup solution: click here.
Photography Technologies
Photosynth is a potent mixture of two independent breakthroughs: the ability to reconstruct the scene or object from a bunch of flat photographs, and the technology to bring that experience to virtually anyone over the Internet. Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point each photo was taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos. Photosynth was inspired by the breakthrough research on Photo Tourism from the University of Washington and Microsoft Research. This work pioneered the use of photogrammetry to power a cinematic and immersive experience. Providing that experience requires viewing a LOT of data though—much more than you generally get at any one time by surfing someone’s photo album on the web. That’s where our Seadragon™ technology comes in: delivering just the pixels you need, exactly when you need them. It allows you to browse through dozens of 5, 10, or 100(!) megapixel photos effortlessly, without fiddling with a bunch of thumbnails and waiting around for everything to load. nt to know even more We’ve have bunch of information about our community on the blog. You can get advice on making that one synth turn out perfectly on the community site. To incorporate Photosynth in your Imagine Cup solution: click here.
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