Publication on The Star - "Our teams doing well at Imagine Cup 2010"

WARSAW: Malaysia’s Team HDC is keeping the Jalur Gemilang flying high at the Imagine Cup 2010 here. It beat 62 other teams from around the world to make it to the finals of the Software Design category early this morning.

Another Malaysian team — Team Hypo from Tunku Abdul Rahman College (TARC) — had already made waves at the event this year, coming in third in the Windows Phone 7 “Rockstar” Award, a pre-event category.

However, this is the first time that a Malaysian team — Team HDC — has come so far in the Software Design category, the winner of which will be rewarded with US$25,000 (RM85,000) and the Imagine Cup.

The team, comprising Keith Khoo, Lee Chong Yang and Choong Yen Yen who are all students from The Asia Pacific University College of Technology and Innovation Malaysia (UCTI), wowed judges over the past couple of days with their software, Project Apple.

Project Apple is a solution which aims to improve health and well-being by promoting good eating habits. It allows individuals or families to plan their meals, providing recipes based on each individual’s taste, nutritional needs and health condition.

“(Team HDC) created an exceptionally impressive user interface and the presentation was very smooth, very sleek. I think there is a great potential for this solution to be used by real people,” said Sergei Golubev from Very Software in Britain, one of the judges of the software design category.

Team member Khoo said he is feeling relieved and tired, after having only “two to three hours sleep” the night before in preparation for the second round.

Team HDC was the first to present in Round Two of the software design category, and had to make some minor changes to its presentation based on feedback from the judges in the first round.

“All of the ideas from the judges were very practical and we could incorporate them into our presentation. We used them to tackle the question-and-answer segment; we added a few more slides in our Round Two presentation to make it more comprehensive,” Khoo said.

The team was obviously thrilled with their achievement so far. “We definitely tried our best,” said Khoo.

Project Apple also aims to play a larger role in the community, by helping to prevent food wastage, an environmental sustainability concern in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG).

The Imagine Cup is in its eighth year and brings together students from around the world to create technology solutions and innovations to tackle MDGs. It is hosted by software giant Microsoft Corp. This year’s theme is, Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems.

Three teams from Malaysia have made it to the final round of the competition. Besides Team HDC, Universiti Sains Malaysia’s Team TEC4Life is also here and yesterday took on five other teams in the final round for the Envision 2020 Award category. The results will be announced on Thursday evening.

(Editor’s note: The Star R.AGE team is in Poland for the Imagine Cup 2010. To follow the progress of the Malaysian teams, you can log on to its blog at http://blog.rage.com.my/category/whatthetweet, or its Twitter account at www.twitter.com/thestar_rage.

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The entire article and photo above was published on The Star on Tuesday, 6 July 2010.

Source: http://www.thestar.com.my/Tech/Tech-News/2010/07/06/Our-teams-doing-well-at-Imagine-Cup-2010/