• First Place: $8,000 USD
• Second Place: $4,000 USD
• Third Place: $3,000 USD  

Digital Media Step By Step Guidelines

1. Create a video. Use this easy "how-to" to help create and upload your team's video.
   
   
   
2. Your video must be at least 2 minutes in length and under 3 minutes and 30 seconds in length.
   
   
3. Your video must address the 2010 Theme.
   
   
4. Your entry must be your team’s original work. It cannot contain any copyrighted material. If you include any music, video footage or images that are not created by members of your team, you must have secured proper permission from the copyright/trademark owner for the use. Any submissions that do not follow this guideline, will be disqualified. For more information, please visit the Imagine Cup 2010 Rules and Regulations.
   
   
5. Your video must begin with the Imagine Cup 2010 intro and end with the Imagine Cup 2010 outro. These files can be downloaded from the links below. Right click and save a Video: Intro for the beginning of your video and a Video: Outro for the end of your video before you upload it to the video sharing site.
   
   Video: Intro
   QuickTime: NTSC 30fps, PAL 25fps, 16:9 25fps
   Windows Media: NTSC 30fps, PAL 25fps, 16:9 25fps
   
   Video: Outro
   QuickTime: NTSC 30fps, PAL 25fps, 16:9 25fps
   Windows Media: NTSC 30fps, PAL 25fps, 16:9 25fps
   
   
6. Upload your video to a video sharing site (example: YouTube). Copy and save the embed code for that video. You will need to use this embed code later in the Imagine Cup upload process.  Use this "how-to" to help you create your video submission.
   
   ** Important **: Embed code is a snippet of HTML code containing an embed tag, typically provided by video sharing sites after you upload a video. It is not the URL to your video on their site.
   
   
7. Round 1 of the competition is separated into 6 sub-rounds.  You can enter the competition at any time but you must submit a Round 1 entry during at least one of the sub-rounds below.
   
   

   Sub-round	Start Date (all times 12:01 A.M. GMT)	End Date (all times 11:59 P.M. GMT)
   #1	October 5, 2009	October 31, 2009
   #2	November 5, 2009	November 30, 2009
   #3	December 5, 2009	December 31, 2009
   #4	January 5, 2010	January 31, 2010
   #5	February 5, 2010	February 28, 2010
   #6	March 5, 2010	March 31, 2010

   
   
8. When you are ready to submit your video for voting, click on Submit Entry in the top right panel on this page. You will be taken to a page where you will add the following:
   
   
   • Title of video
   • Thumbnail
   • Description
   • Keywords
   • Embed code for video (this is the code you received from the video sharing site)
   
   If you do not see Submit Entry, you have not completed all pre-requisites for submitting an entry. Please see for the Frequently Asked Questions for further information. If you see Update Entry, you have already submitted a video entry and can use this feature to edit or update your entry.
   
   Note: The title of your video, description and keywords will be used on your voting page for search engine indexing as well as search purposes. It is very important that your team carefully chooses their words.
   
   
9. You will now be able to view your team's video page and see the voting controls.

STEP 4: VOTING

1. Remember this is not a popularity contest or a people's choice award. The point of this competition is to make your team's video as interesting and as enticing as possible, so that people want to pass it on, and get the entire world to vote for it. The videos that become the most viral - win!
   
   
2. Sub-round Voting: The vote counter for a sub-round starts on the 5th of the month and continues until the end of the month. (A separate counter is used to determine the 20 Wild Card spots - as discussed in #6 below.) You can submit your video at any time during a Round 1 Sub-round.
   
   
3. During a sub-round, you are free to edit, adapt or change your video content. However, note that the voting platform is set up so that the Digital Media captain can (and will) review every video that is or was visible during a sub-round. If a video isn’t available for reviewing then it cannot be checked and that team will not advance. All of the videos that a team has live during a sub-round must comply.  If not, then that team will not advance. If all videos that were displayed during the round comply and they are in the top 20, then they can advance to Round 2.
   
   
4. Imagine Cup has implemented two different voting mechanisms to ensure that the voting system is just and fair:
   
   
   1. The voting controls appear two minutes after the page loads. In order to vote, two minutes of the video needs to play.
      
      
   2. In each sub-round, only one vote will be allowed for each team from any publically accessible IP address. It is important to know that many computers from a common location may all share a single gateway to the Internet, and will likely all share a single publicly accessible IP address, the IP address of that gateway. For example, if your team has received a vote from one computer in an Internet café, users on other machines in that same café will not be allowed to vote for the same team during the same sub-round. This is why it is so important to have your team’s video reach the world and not just your friends and family.
      
      
5. Within five days after the last day of the month for that sub-round, Imagine Cup will advance up to 20 teams with the top scores on to Round 2 of the competition. For each of the six sub-rounds, up to 20 teams (a total of up to 120 teams) will move on to Round 2.
   
   
6. Up to 20 Wild Card spots will allow up to an additional 20 teams to be moved to Round 2. These will be up to the top 20 teams in Round 1 (a total of all of the six sub-rounds) that had the overall highest scores but were not part of the 120 that were already advanced. This is a terrific incentive to get your team started early with a video.
   
   
7. A total of up to 140 teams (120 from each of the sub-rounds and 20 Wild Card winners) are moved on to Round 2 of the Digital Media competition.