At this year’s Imagine Cup, we saw more than 1,000 students from over 400 teams across the globe apply to compete in the Embedded Development competition. In China alone, 80 teams from 14 universities competed in China’s local Imagine Cup preliminaries. The innovation, the inspiration and the emotional investments that formed the basis of all this year’s projects was just mind-blowing. The challenge: solve some of the toughest problems facing the world today and without exception all the teams broke new ground with their projects and their approach.

To do justice to the work – sometimes 12 months of hard work – of the students, we wanted to get to know them and their projects in-depth. Speaking as the Embedded Development captain, in previous competitions we’ve been so focused on the judging that we never really got to properly know the students. This year, the extended Imagine Cup family was able to follow the progress of the Embedded students at every twist and turn thanks to our dedicated and extremely hard-working camera crew. You can see the results of our hard work and get a sense of what it was like to be part of the Imagine Cup, by visiting the following links:

· Windows Embedded @ Imagine Cup 09 - Day One

· Windows Embedded @ Imagine Cup 2009 - Day Two

· Windows Embedded @ Imagine Cup 2009 - Day Three

· Windows Embedded @ Imagine Cup 2009 - Day Four

· Windows Embedded @ Imagine Cup 09 - Day Five and Closing Ceremony

From arrival to the moment when the winners were announced, we lived their Imagine Cup journeys. And we got to know them quite well too. We learned that Yoonji Shin, a 21 year old from South Korea, was leading her team, Wafree, in a passionate and some might say, idealistic, attempt to bring an end to starvation by building an embedded solution for breeding beetles in a controlled environment.

We also talked with Xiudong Tang and Xuan Zhang from Chinese team iSee, who developed a solution that brings the power of the internet to the blind: people who are some of the most information poor in our society. Their motivation came from a moving visit to a school for the blind. They learned how isolated and alone the kids felt and they believed in the power of technology to help transform lives.

Other teams like AST from Turkey identified a problem at the heart of world food production; and created a dream team of specialists to solve it. With one IT guy surrounded by agricultural engineers, it was inevitable that they would address a really difficult but important problem: developing a fully-automated, self managed, low-cost seeding machine which makes precision farming affordable for the masses.

Other teams wanted to solve major world health problems. Juan Pablo from Mexico told us how he wanted to build a health system that could provide better remote healthcare to those rural areas, after his grandmother died of complications relating to her inability to receive treatment for her arthritis. His team created Project Hygea, a telemedicine device that makes it possible for a greater number of patients to access electrotherapy.

These projects were brought to life by embedded technology. Students were given the X86-based DM&P/ICOP eBox-4300, running Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2 and Visual Studio, a suite of software development tools. This combination of hardware and software means that the students are actually enabled to build a fully operational working prototype of a device that could even be ready to take to market when the competition finishes. Often the students are so inspired by the Imagine Cup experience, whether they win or lose, that they go on to commercialize the technology and make their projects a reality. This year’s first place Embedded Development winners, Wafree, have already won seed funding from a humanitarian group and are determined to take their solution to Africa.

The road to Cairo was different for everyone. But one thing that was true and clear to us all was that each journey was moving, personal and life changing. The students would never be the same again. From the Egyptian team that had never been to the Pyramids (because they’d just never found the time), to the UK team who wanted to change the way we all engage with technology in our homes, it gave the Microsoft team pause for reflection on just how relevant technology – and particularly embedded technology with its blend of hardware and software – has the power to change lives around the world.

The competition might be over for another year, but the students’ work and dreams carry on. I hope they never lose the passion that they demonstrated during those few short days in Egypt that we all shared.

Here are some final thoughts, from the awesome closing ceremony at the pyramids in Egypt… Here’s to Poland 2010!

-- Scott Davis, Windows Embedded, Microsoft