If there were a special prize for overcoming the biggest obstacles on the way to presenting at Imagine Cup final, this year's Armenian Software Design team would be a strong candidate.

The team TechSquad, which represents American University of Armenia, won the Armenian semi-finals and was preparing for the trip to Cairo, when their plans were derailed by an unexpected problem. Unfortunately, three out of four members of the team,  Lina Hovanesianmasihi, Sahar Mojtahedi and Narbeh Mirzaei, did not receive Egyptian visas in time and thus could not make the trip to the Worldwide Finals in person. So the team had to be represented in Cairo by only one person, Hovhannes Zardaryan, and even he found that getting to Egypt was not an easy feat. Hohvannes started from Yerevan in the morning and after a 7-hour layover in Moscow, he finally arrived to Cairo just past midnight. The next morning, he had to wake up very early to test the LiveMeeting infrastructure, so that his team members that stayed in Yerevan could participate in their presentation to the judges.

In spite of all these difficulties, today in the afternoon the full Armenian team delivered a presentation to the judges and it went well. It was clearly a team effort!

I would like to congratulate the Armenian team for not giving up, even in the most difficult situations. I think that they have already set a great example on how technology could can help us to overcome the problems and transcend the boundaries!

- Andrey Terekhov