Regional Imagine Cup final 2009 - Serbia

On Thursday, May 21st, we held the sixth Imagine Cup Software Design national finals in association with the Serbian Ministry of Youth and Sport, in Belgrade, Serbia. Similar to the previous year, the event was organized in Palace Serbia, a government building situated in New Belgrade. This time we had more than 50% more registrations in comparison to last year, with lots of contestants entering the new on-line categories (short film, game development, IT challenge etc).

At a glance:

• So far in Serbia, exactly 663 participants registered across all nine IC categories this year (last year it was 392, the year before 237...)
• Over 130 people were present in the Palace Serbia at the finals
• Four SD teams advanced to the national semi-finals and presented their solutions to six judges from the Microsoft Development Centre in Belgrade, experts from the sponsor company and partner companies
• The Minister of Youth and Sport in the Serbian government, Mrs. Snežana Samardžić-Marković, and GM Microsoft Serbia, Mr. Vladan Živanović, were present at the finals. They talked about the importance of this competition – for the youth in Serbia, and also for the future of the country in general
• For the first time in Serbia, we managed to find a general sponsor for this event and for the trip to the worldwide finals – the largest telco company in our country, Telekom Srbija (thanks to Mr. Zoran Janković, Enterprise account manager in EPG, and excellent DPE-EPG cooperation).
• This sponsor has also funded one additional local SD category – Telekom Srbija Mobile Award, which was given to the team with the most advanced solution in the field of GSM and Windows Mobile technologies (nTek Team, project One Click Taxi).
• We had a strong media presence from national TV stations and newspapers, including very popular Serbian web magazines.

Winners:

1st place:
Team: BrainWave Team, Project: People 2 People Economy
P2PE (People to People Economy) offers a solution to global economic crisis. BrainWave team created a non-profit exchange network, in which goods and services can be traded without the need for printed currency, by using interest-free local credit. The application is developed as a Cloud Service in Visual Studio 2008 and it’s uploaded on Azure.

2nd place:
Team: iVar, Project: StudyDesk

3rd place:
Team Eagles, Project: Nisaba