Innovation is alive and well among technology students in New Zealand, with the 2012 Microsoft Imagine Cup providing plenty of surprises for the judging panel on April 29.
The final cut of 17 teams, from more than 400 entries, was further reduced to 16 because of the late withdrawal of a South Island team due to illness.
The 20 preliminary judges survived their briefing from Microsoft guru Ryan Tarak and the day began, with the Owen Glenn Building at the University of Auckland providing an ideal venue.
Each of the 16 remaining teams first gave a 90-second presentation to the total judging panel, allowing us to get a flavour of the teams we were not judging.
The 20 judges were allocated to four panels to judge four teams.
However, it was helpful to understand what the the other teams were providing.
The other members of my team were Microsoft finance director Vanessa Cope, Weta Workshop concept designer Greg Broadmore, University of Canterbury pro vice chancellor Jan Evans-Freeman and Rob Maher Consulting principal Rob Maher.
The teams we judged were:Dawn Phenomena, which had designed a game on a smartphone to teach children about diabetes.
Team Aura, which had designed a simple solution for the diagnosis of sleep apnoea.
Team United, which wanted to use its solution to help people to find jobs that matched their skills, set up their own businesses and help employers find the skilled workers.
Team Radar, which provided a smartphone solution to help parents keep track of children while they were outside.
The judging panel was chosen with our backgrounds in mind, but the teams had to show they understood the "global problem" they were trying to solve and that they had made some progress in the commercialisation of their idea.
Microsoft had provided mentors. Most teams had both a Microsoft and an industry mentor to help with the development of their projects.
First up for us was Dawn Phenomena, and its game to teach children about diabetes.
The team believed a game was ideal to gain the attention of young people.
However, it seemed too complicated at such an early stage.
The team had talked to Starship Hospital and was planning to trial it with staff there.
The panel was not sure whether the game was to teach children about diabetes and its causes, or to teach diabetic children how to use the needles for blood testing and insulin injections.
Team United struggled with the problem definition, which counted for 10% of the marks.
The first team member to speak identified what she believed to be the problem, but once the other members of the team got involved, the definition widened to impossible proportions.
The judges could not see how the software linking job seekers with employers was any different from commercial sites already online.
Also, the data analysis to find how many others ran similar businesses in a region was not sufficiently narrow.
Team Radar provided good problem definition, and tugged at the heartstrings of parents by talking about the number of children going missing each year.
The solution was easy to follow: clip a transmitter on to a child, the signal bounces to a cell tower then back to the parents' mobile phones.
Business viability was also likely, but there was a nagging feeling somebody was either already doing this or could look at Team Radar's plan and copy it.
Coincidentally, this week, an announcement was made in the United States about someone using the same technology to find missing children.
Team Aura was the group that stood out for my panel of judges.
Sleep apnoea is known as the silent killer, not only causing mainly middle-aged overweight men to die in their sleep but also many traffic and work-related accidents.
Long delays for people to get into sleep clinics was seen as an ongoing problem the team thought could be solved.
Its solution was for a suspected sufferer to wear a belt around their chest at night, in their own bed rather than in hospital, which measured how many times they stopped breathing, the length of those stops, the amount of oxygen in the blood and other data.
The data could be downloaded by their general practitioner to a smartphone for immediate diagnosis.
Each of the judging teams had one overwhelming favourite from the presentations, and those final four - Team Aura, Team Thought-Wired, Team Connect and the eventual winner, Team Mobile Eye - went through to the final at the Auckland Town Hall the next night.
Microsoft director of the platform group, Scott Wylie, told the Otago Daily Times the more than 400 entries were the most for the competition in New Zealand to date.
"Team Mobile Eye stood out for their imagination, passion, creativity and a well thought out solution to address the issues faced by people who are blind."
The team was now aiming for the worldwide finals being held in Sydney later this year.
Microsoft New Zealand expected the international judges to be impressed with the work of Team Mobile Eye, Mr Wylie said.
Mobile Eye planned to take crowd-sourcing technology to the next level by combining richer information from spoken questions and phone sensors.
The team demonstrated its technology to the 20 judges.
A member took a photograph of a table of judges, the software analysed the photograph and an automated voice told the room there were three people at the table, and a bottle (of water) was on the table.
Mobile Eye was working with the Blind Foundation of New Zealand on its project.
