Hi it’s Andrey Terekhov again representing Central & Eastern Europe’s participation in Imagine Cup. This week, I would like to introduce one of the judges at this year’s event and a former Imagine Cup competitor, Nick Surin. I first met Nick at the 2004 Russian semi-final in Moscow. Once his team won the Software Design competition in Russia, I became their informal mentor, reviewing their presentation and ensuring they kept focused on the elements that would make their idea standout.

Nick and his team came in second at the 2004 finals in Brazil then and then won at the 2005 finals in Japan, impressing the judges with their Internet-based distributed music concept. Nick’s team has since gone on to co-found a Silicon Valley based startup, of which Nick is the CTO, and works with venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and innovators to develop futuristic computing applications.

I’ve asked Nick to provide a few blog entries over the next week that give an overview of his path to the Imagine Cup, the doors it opened for him and his team and why he is joining us this year from the other side of the panel as a judge.

Thanks for the introduction, Andrey! It is a pleasure to be back at the Imagine Cup once again and I am so excited to be a judge this time around! My road to the Imagine Cup was long … several times we were only an inch from victory but it was not close enough.

The Imagine Cup has a truly unique atmosphere and spirit and these are the key elements which help all the competitors create such amazing projects. The competition is not about fighting against each other for first place; it's all about creativity, passion and technology. That's exciting!

Every failure only made us more determined and drove us to start again. In hindsight, we would never have created all of our cool projects if we had simply won on our first attempt. This would be my first piece of advice to all competitors – do not give up! Being part of the Imagine Cup itself is one of the most exciting things I have ever experienced, let alone all the amazing and innovative projects which are presented by the competitors.

The first glimmer of success was in 2003 when we took second place in the Russian regional finals. Then in 2004, we also achieved second place but this time in the Worldwide finals, which was a step closer – at the time, we thought this was the best result we could achieve.

However, we then suddenly came up with the idea of distributed music performances via the internet, something which had not been possible before. We were so inspired by the idea that we decided to participate in the Imagine Cup one final time in 2005, putting all our energy, passion, creativity into this project. This became the project which took first place and changed everything for me.

- Andrey Terekhov and Nick Surin