Question: Team Members Full Names:
Answer: Kong Wen Bin Yeo Ken Long James Kang Siew Hwa

Question: Mentor:
Answer: Kang Siew Hwa

Question: Title of Project:
Answer: Virtual Earth News (VENews)

Question: Project Overview:
Answer: We hope to help everyone of us to understand the environmental problems that we are facing on the earth. Many people think that pollutions and disasters only happen in certain countries, but in fact, they could happen everywhere. We hope to raise the awareness of earthlings on environmental issues happening in our surroundings.

Question: Technology/Software Used:
Answer: Microsoft Popfly & Microsoft Visual Studio 2008

Question: Inspiration: What inspired your team to enter the Microsoft Imagine Cup and why did you choose the MashUp competition?
Answer: The theme for Imagine Cup 2009, “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems facing us today.", caught our attention. We want to make a difference, we want to make use of our knowledge to do something for our world. We believe that if everyone is willing to play a part, we could solve the world's toughest problem. If somebody have to start the ball rolling, we would take the lead!

Question: Team History: How did your team meet?
Answer: Kong Wen Bin and James Yeo were classmates where Mdm Kang was their lecturer.

Question: Team Experience: What experience did your team have with MashUp before competing in the Imagine Cup?
Answer: When PlanetKY compete in the Imagine Cup, we (including our mentor) have no experience in MashUp at all. However, we are skilled in other Microsoft applications such as Visual Studio & etc, thus we picked up the skills quickly. We learn the MashUp as we work on our VENews MashUp application.

Question: Highlights: What has been the best part of the Imagine Cup competition to date?
Answer: When we are creating our own unique MashUp block, LocationIdentifier. It started out with lots of loopholes in the program, when we are not able to get accurate location as we expected. However, after weeks of researches and testings, we have successfully enhanced it to reach the level of accuracy that we desired. It is great!

Question: Inspiration: How did your team come up with your submission? Include which Millennium Development Goal inspired your solution.
Answer: There is a lot of environmental issues happening in the world, but the exact location and magnitude of the issues are not readily available. Thus we want to raise the awareness in a worldwide sense, by breaking through the piecemeal reporting of news in a traditional manner and instead, make use of Microsoft Popfly application to create a unified & clear overview of specific environmental issues across the world. In raising the awareness, we aim to create general & widespread knowledge in environmental sustainability. This is done through the very user-friendly and easy depiction of real-time events that are happening around the world.

Question: Challenges: What personal or technological challenges did your team face while developing your submission?
Answer: First of all, we do not know what is the best manner to utilize the Microsoft Popfly technology. Another challenge is to improve the performance of our MashUp application, VENews - we uses real-time retrieval of RSS feeds, thus we have to think of ways to cut down the loading time to make it user-friendly. As not many people are exposed to the area of Microsoft Popfly MashUp application, when we are publicizing our MashUp application, VENews, we not only have to explain to them on our idea, we also need to build their interest in adopting Microsoft Popfly MashUp technology and teach them how to use our MashUp application.

Question: Future Plans: What does your team plan on doing after the Worldwide Finals in Cairo, Egypt? Do you plan to use your project to launch a new business?
Answer: We plan to further enhance VENews to make it country specific, so that it can filter not only according to environmental issues categories, it can also be filtered according to countries/continents categories. We have planned to further tie-up with environmental groups, such as National Environment Agency (NEA) in Singapore. We also have plans in setting up a Microsoft Popfly MashUp application creation company, because through working on VENews, we found out that Microsoft Popfly technology is actually very powerful yet very simple and easy to use. It is very user friendly and we believe that it would become popular quickly and become the trend of the internet world.

Question: Links to more information (i.e. website, blog):
Answer: http://www.mit-nyp.net/planetky/