Microsoft Imagine Blog

Want to change the world? Make it smarter with the Internet of Things!

Student Developer Evangelism Team — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 14:21:43 GMT

On a clear, sunny afternoon in mid-April, two student developer teams—Campus Innovators and SmartGrid—blew the minds of university staff, their professors and industry professionals. In just four months, these teams were able to demonstrate two ways that the Internet of Things (IoT)—that is, the billions of devices that connect, collect, and exchange data using the internet—could make people’s lives easier on a massive scale. Rewind to November 2015: 44 students submitted proposals to the University of Washington Bothell (UW Bothell) IoT Challenge, co-sponsored by Microsoft. But only two teams would be awarded a $10,000 grant, a monthly stipend, and a network of mentors. The competition’s creator, co-judge and Microsoft coordinator Colin Kwong said, “These teams stood out because they wanted to tackle core issues that affect people’s daily lives—and they’re doing so with the intelligence of cloud technology.”

Life on-campus

For Campus Innovators—Kyle Burney, Armin Haghi, Skyler Kidd and Laura Valiente—that issue was making on-campus life easier. They proposed an open standard “smart campus.”

Campus Innovators from left to right: Laura Valiente, Skyler Kidd, Kyle Burney and Armin Haghi

Skyler said, “We wanted to empower students to solve on-campus problems, and to establish a platform or application program interface (API) that was simple and compelling enough to make any student—regardless of their technical background—wonder, ‘How will this work for me?’” Fueled by their passion to support their classmates, Campus Innovators met as often as possible. Armin said they were in constant contact through every communication method available. He confessed that he was so excited about what his team was doing that he talked way too much during his parts of the presentation. The Campus Innovators plan to cover the campus in sensors that automatically collect and store information in a platform built on mini computers, Microsoft Azure services and Windows 10 IoT Core (an operating system). UW Bothell students and faculty could connect to the smart campus platform wirelessly or via Bluetooth. From there, they could use web APIs to access and analyze stored campus data, build new apps, and generate reports. Imagine if you wanted to study for an exam while on campus, but all your usual study spots were crowded and noisy. With Campus Innovators’ system, you could open an app on your phone to find the nearest, quietest and brightest place to crack open your books. Or maybe you’re running late and don’t have time to circle the parking lot a hundred times. This IoT system could tell you where to park before you even reach the lot

Armin looks at the real-time sensor data while Laura gives her hand a rest

There’s still a lot to do to make UW Bothell a smart campus, but this team is well on its way to making its mark. The team has already designed a way to monitor light exposure. Even industry veterans in the room gasped when the on-screen bar graph dipped and crested as Laura covered and uncovered a sensor tag with her hand. What’s next for this team? Campus Innovators plans to continue meeting as often as possible, add advanced data processing and machine learning features, cover the campus in sensors, and work with the university and other students to develop the smart campus platform. They already have students interested in contributing to the smart campus platform!

Life on the grid

Kiran Gurajala heard about the UW Bothell IoT Challenge through a professor and immediately knew he wanted to submit a proposal. The open-endedness of the challenge let him hand-pick his team and decide what solution to develop. He just didn’t know what he wanted to work on. He reached out to Ivan Owen, UW Bothell’s MakerSpace Lab Manager, who would later become the team’s mentor. Ivan challenged Kiran to investigate issues around accessible energy for people in developing countries, rural areas and densely populated regions with substandard power grids. Ivan’s suggestion really resonated with Kiran, who grew up in a rural coal-mining town in India. He knew all too well what kind of impact a lack of electricity could have on a community. The UW Bothell IoT Challenge suddenly became a personal quest. Kiran knew Alex Lee from another research project, and he recruited Justin Diekhans for his hands-on electrical engineering experience. Molly Herbert jumped on board because of her own time spent in India and for an opportunity to apply all that she was learning through her double major—Global Studies and Law, Economics and Public Policy.

SmartGrid from left to right: Molly Herbert, Kiran Gurajala, Justin Diekhans and Alex Lee

The four formed SmartGrid, and they were determined to find a way to reduce power consumption without cutting power to entire neighborhoods (called “load shedding”). Originally, they explored ways to randomly select which houses lost power, but the idea quickly ballooned into a much larger concept: Instead of cutting 10 percent of a neighborhood’s power, what if you could trim 10 percent of energy consumption across every electricity-using device in the neighborhood? For their load shedding idea to work, they would need to build something that was simple, cheap and could easily integrate into the home and existing power grid infrastructure. As Kiran put it, “If you can’t build this at home on a table, then it’s too complicated.” So Justin set out to design a “smart outlet”—something that could adjust how much electricity flowed to a device—made of cheap, common parts. By the April deadline, Justin had constructed four wooden boxes, each outfitted with a standard U.S. electrical outlet, an Ethernet port, and a Raspberry Pi. (He was especially thrilled to use a laser cutter for the first time.) Alex coded the system, and Kiran devised the mathematical algorithms that adjusted load shedding. At the presentation, the team connected the SmartGrid box to the internet with an Ethernet cable. (In production scenarios, the SmartGrid box would connect via Wi-Fi or cellular networks.) To represent the electrical load in the home, they plugged a lightbulb into the box’s electrical outlet. When Alex hit the proper key on his laptop, instructions moved though the cloud, into the SmartGrid box, and turned off the lightbulb. Alex tapped the key again, and the lightbulb turned back on.

Justin sets up SmartGrid boxes for the live demo

In the real world, this IoT system could allow the power company to send a power reduction command to an Azure IoT Hub instance. The IoT Hub would relay that signal to the nearest SmartGrid box, the box would pass the power reduction signal to the next nearest smart outlet, and so on until every device in a neighborhood had 10 percent of its electricity taken off the top. Consistent, reliable access to electricity can impact a person’s ability to work, to learn, and to live a productive, happy life—so it’s not a big surprise that SmartGrid has already been approached about the possibility of sharing their project during a campus-wide presentation. The competition may be over, but the teams aren’t done yet, and they won’t be forgetting their experience any time soon. Both teams plan to continue their research and prototype development. Interested in what you can do with IoT and Microsoft Azure? You’re in luck because Azure is free for students. Sign up for Azure today, and start building your own apps! ___________ Microsoft Imagine, anywhere, anytime:

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Meet your 2016 Online Finals Winners!

ictest — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Imagine Cup is all about games you cannot turn off, innovations that change the way you live, and applications that save lives. Imagine Cup helps young people see how the technology they create can not only shape their own futures, but can directly improve the lives of users.

Introducing the 2016 Imagine Cup Online Finals champions! Online finalists come from countries that do not host an Imagine Cup National Finals round. These six talented teams will proceed to compete head-to-head against the Imagine Cup National Finals winners at the World Semifinals, which are held online.

But the road doesn’t end there. The next round of winners will show off their hard work in Seattle at the Imagine Cup World Finals in July. One team each from the Games, Innovation and World Citizenship categories will be crowned Imagine Cup winners while the one team chosen as World Champion will meet face-to-face with Satya Nadella! Good luck to all and congratulations to our Online Finals champions!

Meet the winners!

Games Competition

The Void by Shooting Star Studios, Spain

When you feel yourself hollow, when all your hard work changes nothing, when you feel alone in darkness, trapped within your own mind, will you still seek happiness? Will you dare keep fighting to escape the Void?

Shooting Star Studios, Silvia Barbero

POINTS by WorkD, Côte d'Ivoire

POINTS is a turn based strategic game that allows you to play the game called "point-point" with rules adapted to digital format.

POINTS is comprised of Abraham Doumbia, Christian Wakablet, Desire Ouonouan, and Diakité Amadou Kaba.

Innovation Competition

FuelE.co by FuelE.co, Canada

FuelE.co is a universal Windows app that leverages cars' onboard sensors to display real-time and historical fuel efficiency data to drivers with compelling visualizations.

FuelE.co is comprised of Scott Killeen and Will Thompson.

moderateIT by TrollBusters, Slovakia

moderateIT's goal is to get rid of offensive, poisonous and impolite comments in online discussions.

TrollBusters is comprised of Andrej Švec, Filip Vozar, Jakub Adam, and Monika Filipcikova.

World Citizenship Competition

Safe Driving by Safe Driving, Bolivia

This application is intended to lower the rates of accidents caused by intoxicated drivers. It would be very useful globally to prevent loss of life as well as property damage.

Team Safe Driving is comprised of Alison Parisaca Quispe, Katherine Ramos, Monica Hiliri Quelali and Rodrigo Diego Quispe Laura.

Dabo by Team Dabo, Canada

Dabo, Latin for “to give”, is an online platform that connects the world together through philanthropy. Dabo aims to leverage the power of crowd-sourcing and advanced geo-mapping technology to amplify the positive work that is being accomplished around the world.

Team Dabo is comprised of Ali Khokhar, Alex Adusei, Enoch Tam, Steve Emmanuel.

We look forward to watching these apps and teams develop and compete again in the World Semifinals, concluding at the end of May. The winners advancing to the World Finals in Seattle will be announced the first week of June. Follow all the exciting action on ImagineCup.com and on Twitter at @MSFTImagine.

Updated 5/3/16:

Team TechnoFunGames from Kuwait is a winner of the 2016 Kuwait Games National Final and will be representing Kuwait at the 2016 Imagine Cup Games World Semifinals.

Want to win a trip to Imagine Cup World Finals? Enter our Hello Cloud machine learning contest now!

Student Developer Evangelism Team — Fri, 22 Apr 2016 11:09:49 GMT

Congratulations to the latest winners of the Hello Cloud competition:

February winner: Prabhath Mannapperuma of Sri Lanka
March winner: Attila Geiszt of Romania

Attila and Prabhath each won $1,000 just by learning to build and deploy apps with Microsoft Azure! Want to be a Hello Cloud winner? Register for the Hello Cloud contest, and start completing Hello Cloud activities. You’ll learn how to deploy a web app, how to create and publish a website, and how to build your résumé. Every activity you finish is just another chance to win! Better yet, you only need to complete each activity once. Your name stays in our drawing pool month after month, and we’ll continue drawing winners through June. The Hello Cloud sweepstakes is so much more than the prize money—it's a free opportunity to learn about cloud computing and its effect on the tech industry. And if you’re hoping to land a job in the tech field, hands-on experience with cloud computing will look great to your future boss. Interested in taking your cloud computing learning to the next level? Check out our Hello Cloud Azure Machine Learning activities. Through these two activities, you pair machine learning with a basic online game. Then you can submit to win the Azure Machine Learning Award! Simply build upon all that you’ve learned through the Hello Cloud activities, and either modify your app or create something totally new with the churn analytics AML API. The Azure Machine Learning team will choose the two students with the most creative or innovative web or mobile game. What’s the prize? An all-expenses paid trip to attend the Imagine World Cup Finals near Seattle in July! You have until April 27 to submit your web app or mobile game, so act fast!

One language to rule them all: How Azure and Xamarin dominate app development

Student Developer Evangelism Team — Wed, 13 Apr 2016 11:52:29 GMT

Malte Götz (L), Rafael Regh and Kai Brummund develop apps together and have been friends, Microsoft Student Partners and Xamarin Student Partners for six years.

If you want to learn how to create beautiful and compelling cross-platform apps and deploy them to the cloud, then look no further than Malte Götz (21), Rafael Regh (21) and Kai Brummund (29) to find out how to do it. Over the last six years, this trio of German students has bonded over the power of code and creating cool stuff using Microsoft Azure and Xamarin. Azure is a cloud development platform that supports a broad selection of operating systems, programming languages, frameworks, tools, databases and devices. Xamarin is a cross-platform framework for mobile app development. Users simply code an app in C# and deploy to iOS, Android and Windows devices. In that regard, Xamarin is a massive time saver. Alone, Azure and Xamarin are powerful developer tools. Together, they rapidly accelerate app development. Malte, Rafael and Kai know this kind of rapid deployment well. The list of apps created both separately and together goes on and on. Among them: a meal plan app called Mensa Deutschland for German university students (made by Rafael and Malte), which uses Azure Mobile Services on the backend. Next, there’s a recipe app called 10 Minute Rezipes (made by Malte), which was built using Xamarin and is deployed on Windows and Android. 10 Minute Rezipes also uses Azure Mobile Services on the backend. The three MSPs also created apps with which to compete at Imagine Cup Germany. One of those apps is Tutus, which won first place in Global Citizenship at Imagine Cup Germany 2014. The app reminds seniors when they’re supposed to take their prescription medications and was built using Xamarin. It has been deployed on Windows and Android and utilizes a bevy of Microsoft cloud services, including Azure Websites and WebAPI and Azure Notification Hubs on the backend. Rafael explained, “It would be impossible to pay for a physical server (especially as a student) to do all the things Azure and Azure Mobile Apps can do. Azure makes it very easy to try out new things. No install or operation, you don't have to download anything.”

The three Xamarin Student Partners presented Xamarin to the Microsoft Technical Summit 2015 in Germany. The MSTS is the biggest Microsoft event in Germany. Listen to it here, if you happen to speak German.

Kai cleared up a common misconception about Xamarin. “Many students think of Xamarin as this cross-platform magic button, but that is not the case. You are still doing completely native Android and iOS development, just with a different programming language. It saves tons of time learning new languages.” Malte agreed. “If you are just starting in the mobile and cloud world, Xamarin is kind of like one language to rule them all. You can code everything in C#.” The trio is embarking on a new, exciting endeavor – again applying the power of Azure and Xamarin. Rafael recently co-founded a communication startup called Gabr. Kai and Malte jumped on board to help their friend speed up the development process in order to launch the beta. Rafael described Gabr. “Texting has replaced face-to-face conversation and most calling [services] can be unreliable and awkward to use. We want to make talking on the phone cool again.” They have secured venture capital for the project from a U.S.-based company and are working toward a release in the next few weeks.

The soon-to-be launched conference call app, Gabr.

Azure powers Gabr’s entire backend. Kai gave us the rundown of the Azure features they use: “We use web services with document data base, SQL server, Redis Cache, block storage, traffic manager, table storage, and push notifications. It’s really cool to see how many services you can integrate together fast and easily!”

Malte Götz (L), Mark Kreuzer (teammate for Imagine Cup 2013 and 2014), Rafael Regh and Kai Brummund took home the first place award in Global Citizenship at Imagine Cup Germany in 2014. They created a wristband medication reminder app called Tutus (pictured above).

You don’t have to be an MSP or Xamarin expert to get started bringing your app or game to life. Ready to dive into Azure Mobile Web services and spin up new apps fast, just like Kai, Rafael and Malte? Activate your Azure student offer and play around with it. Xamarin is also free for students, plus Microsoft Imagine has a plethora of resources to help you learn how to use these tools fast, including these courses on Microsoft Virtual Academy:

Microsoft Imagine, anywhere, anytime:

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Microsoft Azure Tutorial: Build your first movie inventory web app with just a few lines of code

Student Developer Evangelism Team — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 09:18:39 GMT

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post from Mustafa Mahmutović, a Microsoft Student Partner who attends the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the University of Sarajevo where he is a Computer Science Major. In this tutorial, you will learn how the built-in features of Visual Studio Community 2015 and the .NET framework do a lot of the work for you in when creating a web app. Using very little code, you’ll build a database of a movie collection. So, even if you are new to programming, you can use these tools and services to make something cool. ASP.NET MVC is a web app framework that gives you a powerful way to build dynamic web apps. You’ll use ASP.NET MVC 5 and Entity Framework 6, which gets deployed on Azure App Service – Web App and Azure SQL Database. You will need Microsoft Azure, Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition and Microsoft Azure SDK for .NET (VS 2015) - 2.8.2. In addition, you will need to register and verify yourself as a student if you haven't already, which you can do here. Let's get started! Using your Microsoft Account, sign into Microsoft Azure. As you can see, there are many options on the Azure portal. Leave Azure open in your browser, we'll use it later.

Step One: Develop an MVC Web App

Now it's time to develop our MVC Web App on Azure, using EntityFramework with CRUD (create, read, update and delete). 1. Open Visual Studio Community 2015 and log in to your Azure account. 2. Open cloud explorer to see all the projects or apps you have on your Azure account: View->Other windows->Cloud Explorer or View->Cloud Explorer (the second option in my version). 3. If you can’t find ‘Cloud Explorer’ in ‘Other Windows’, check ‘View’ in the list menu. When you have clicked ‘Cloud Explorer’, this is what you’ll see in Visual Studio.

Step Two: Create a New ASP.NET Web Application Project

Now let's create a new ASP.NET web application project. 1. To name a project, go to File->New Project->Web->ASP.NET Web Application. (For the purposes of this tutorial, I have kept the default option). 2. When you click ‘OK’, a new window will pop up. First, choose MVC, then make sure that you are using Azure and that ‘Host in the cloud’ is selected. Then click OK.

Step Three: Create an App Service

The next step will help you create a new app service on Azure. When the 'Configure Microsoft Azure Web App Settings' dialog appears, make sure that you are signed in to Azure. 1. First you will have to give a unique Web App Name (I named mine AppName WebApplicationOOAD). If you want to specify a name for your web app, change the value in the'Web App Name' The URL of the web app will be {name}.azurewebsites.net, so the name has to be unique in the azurewebsites.net domain. The configuration wizard suggests a unique name by adding a number to the project name "WebApplicationOOAD,“ which is fine for the purposes of this tutorial. 2. In the 'Subscription' box, you'll use your DreamSpark subscription. 3. For 'Resource Group', type the name of your new resource group. You can use one resource group for multiple projects or you can create a new resource group for each project that will be on Azure. I have named mine mvcAppGroup. 4. For 'App Service Plan', double-click on 'new', then choose the nearest region and click 'OK'. 5. When you are done, you should see something like this (except that you will have a DreamSpark subscription): 6. Click ‘create’. Once your project is created, your first view will be the one shown below. 7. Now let’s test the default generated view on MVC Web App. Click on the start icon and select Microsoft Edge. Before that, you can see that ASP.NET already created Models, Views and Controllers for us. The browser will open your app and you will see this:

Step Four: Add a New Class

Now let’s go back to Visual Studio and add a new class to the project (this class represents a table and the properties represents the colums of that table). 1. Open the folder named ‘Models’, right-click and Add->New Item->Class. 2. Give a name to that class (I called it 'Movie'). 3. On the class, create (or copy/paste) the following code: 4. You will get an error message on DbContext. Simply right-click on the error to resolve and add a library to the class: Entity or shortcut CTRL + . (dot) enter, enter. You will end up with something like this:

Step Five: Add a Controller using Scaffold

The next thing we’ll create is a Scaffold Item. 1. Right click on Controllers->Add->New Scaffolded Item 2. Now choose, ‘MVC 5 Controller with views, using Entity Framework’ and click ‘Add’. 3. Enter your model name in the empty fields. 4. If an error pops up like the screenshot below, just rebuild a solution and try to add a Scaffolded item again. After the code generation process is complete, you will see a new controller and views in your project. The Controller was automatically created with CRUD operations. The Views were automatically created (open 'Views' and you will see a subfolder, 'Movies', and then 'Create,' 'Delete,' 'Details,' 'Edit.')

Step Six: Add Movies to Web App Display

Now we want to add a link to our main page to add or delete a movie. 1. Select Views->Shared->_Layout.cshtml 2. Find the code for the navgation bar under

. After that line, simply add the following code: @Html.ActionLink( displayed,view Name,folder name) 3. Now that you have displayed movies, you will be taken to the Movies index page.

Step Seven: Create a Server on Azure

Now we are ready to create a server on Azure. 1. Go to Azure. If you have closed that tab or browser, log in again. Important: Do not close Visual Studio! 2. Go to New->Data+Storage->SQL Database. Fill in the empty fields. 3. Name your database and click on Server->Create a new server. Add server name, admin, password and your location (just like for App Service location). 4. Click ‘OK’. 5. Remember your server name, admin login and password. In my example, it is ooadexample.database.windows.net. Select ‘Create’. You will see that Azure is creating the database. Wait for it to finish.

Step Eight: Create Connection Strings

1. Select your database. Under the label ‘Connection Strings’, click on ‘Show database connection strings.’ Select the link in the ADO.NET box and copy it. 2. Go back to Visual Studio. Right click on ‘Project’ and click ‘Publish.’ 3. This action launches the ‘Publish Web’ window. Paste the previously copied connection string into the ApplicationDbContext and MoviesDbContext fields. Then click on the three dots (…).] 4. The fields should automatically populate the correct information in the Destination Connection String window shown below. If not, enter your server name (in my example: ooadexample.database.windows.net) and password. Check ‘Save my password.’ Important: if password is not filled, enter your password and check “Save my password”. 5. Select ‘OK’.

Step Nine: Test the Published App

Your app will now open in your browser. 1. Click on ‘Movies.’ 2. Test it by adding a title, release date, genre and price. Enter mm/dd/yyyy (American date time settings). 3. Creating a title here will also add it to your database on Azure. Close the tab and reopen it again to verify.

Step Ten: Verify Data in Azure

1. To verify that the movie data you entered in Step Nine appears in your Azure database, go to Visual Studio. Under ‘Cloud Explorer’, right-click on your database and click ‘Open in SQL Server Object Explorer’. 2. Now enter your server name, admin and password. Click ‘Connect’. 3. Once connected, you will see that the migration has indeed occurred. Now you know how to upload an MVC web app to Azure using Entity framework and CRUD. I hope you've found it useful! Microsoft Imagine, anywhere, anytime:

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First an app, now a booming business – Azure powers Imagine Cup alumni to new heights

Student Developer Evangelism Team — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 14:45:22 GMT

Team Smile, from Microsoft Imagine Cup 2008, is now a thriving company. From left, Chris King, Devin de Vries and Dave New, founders of WhereIsMyTransport.

Back in 2007, Chris King sat anxiously waiting for an overdue university shuttle. The shuttle arrived so late that he missed an exam. Transportation frustrations like this led Chris, along with University of Cape Town friends Devin de Vries and Dave New, to establish one of South Africa's most successful transportation startups, WhereIsMyTransport. What started in a Cape Town garage with a few members is now a booming business with 32 employees and a second office in London. Using Microsoft Azure, WhereIsMyTransport has launched two different transportation apps, for which it has won five awards. WhereIsMyTransport has long utilized an assortment of Microsoft Azure services. Nick Cuthbert, Software Architect, described this partnership. “It has been quite a journey with both Azure and WhereIsMyTransport evolving together. As our needs have grown more sophisticated in areas like managing cloud services, we’ve been fortunate enough in that a lot of the pain points have been eased by Azure.” The company started using Azure features like virtual machines and SQL and moved to cloud services and improved automation with Visual Studio Team Services. They also use NoSQL products like table storage and document DB. In addition to being early adopters of Azure, WhereIsMyTransport was an early member of the Microsoft BizSpark program. Through BizSpark, the company not only gained access to free software and Azure cloud credits but also support from advisors who taught the team how to facilitate growing a startup with introductions to Microsoft’s vast network of contacts. Additionally, Devin recalled that BizSpark was key to reducing the burden of software-license expenses during the company’s formative years. How did WhereIsMyTransport get where it is today? Eight years of success all started at Imagine Cup 2008.

From left, Devin de Vries and Chris King present WhereIsMyShuttle at Imagine Cup South Africa in 2007. They won first place and a trip to the 2008 Imagine Cup World Finals held in Paris.

Well before they became WhereIsMyTransport, Devin and Chris formed Team Smile and got to work developing their transport app for Imagine Cup. But they ran into challenges right from the start. Devin told us that the necessary transport data required to power the app didn’t even exist at the time. "We discovered that not only was there no source for such data available, the transport providers didn’t have digital systems to capture and provide their data," he said. The team ended up creating an entire Public Transport Management System specifically tailored to the needs of transport providers in cities like Cape Town. Devin described the beginning phase of the project. "To create our project, I rented our team a house, where we slept on mattresses on the floor under our desks, and basically worked continuously for months. It's so much time thinking and breathing your project." After eight months, the team emerged from their development cave with an impressive Imagine Cup entry, an app called WhereIsMyShuttle. WhereIsMyShuttle allowed transportation providers to track their vehicles and manage their operations, while also providing a data feed that could power apps for commuters. WhereIsMyShuttle was a big hit. The team won first place in the Imagine Cup South Africa in 2007 and a trip to the Imagine Cup World Finals in Paris in early 2008. At the World Finals, the team took second place in the Rural Innovation Category as well as an innovation-accelerator award. Devin credits Imagine Cup with teaching him the "soft skills" necessary to own and operate a business: skills like being able to articulate an idea or business pitch on paper and in person. After Imagine Cup, the team put its newly found soft skills to work and began a startup company—funded entirely on in-kind support from friends and family as well as the team's own money. The resulting app was almost immediately profitable. "Imagine Cup, like entrepreneurship, is a blend of crazy dreaming and pragmatic planning and execution," he said.

Findmyway is a transportation app for Windows Phone (pictured), iOS and Android. Based on live data from city transport operators, the app suggests various routes and modes of transportation for commuters.

For the next four years, the team got back to work developing a new app. And in 2012, the startup, established with the new name WhereIsMyTransport, launched Findmyway, an app that helps commuters plan a journey between two destinations using any kind of transportation system. Azure has been an integral part of WhereIsMyTransport all along the company’s journey. Nick described how he sees Azure and WhereIsMyTransport aligning in the future. “We’ve been focusing on live data processing, big data problems and machine learning. Looking at Azure’s trajectory, it seems that our paths will continue to cross. Azure Data Lake, HDInsights and the other analytics tools will likely make an appearance shortly, and Service fabric is definitely in some of our plans.”

The Transport for Cape Town (TCT) app was Africa’s first official multi-modal app for the city of Cape Town. It was developed by WhereIsMyTransport in 2015, and is available for Windows Phone, iOS, Android and Blackberry devices.

WhereIsMyTransport had a busy year in 2015. It launched the next release of Findmyway and an app for the city of Cape Town’s Transit Authority called the Transport for Cape Town (TCT) app. That same year, the company also received a £600,000 (almost $1 million) investment from a range of both local and international institutions. Nick described how Azure has helped the company make the most of that money. “We haven’t had to stretch our budget further by employing IT professionals. We are leveraging Azure to ensure that our developers can focus on building the stuff that really matters. Configuring, deploying and scaling are not chilling words anymore!” Devin agreed. “It is an extremely well integrated platform, making it easy to iterate and experiment, which is a huge advantage in such a research and development driven company.” Microsoft wants to help future entrepreneurs like Devin, Chris and Dave to succeed in achieving their dreams. Are you deep into developing your Imagine Cup idea? If so, be sure to check out how Azure can support your project both now and in the future. Are you thinking about how to turn an idea into a growing startup company like WhereIsMyTransport? Check out the Microsoft BizSpark program, which gives startups three years of free stuff – including software, services, tech support and access to the Microsoft Azure cloud. ___________ Microsoft Imagine, anywhere, anytime:

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Student Highlights from Build 2016 Day 2

Student Developer Evangelism Team — Thu, 31 Mar 2016 21:20:53 GMT

More student highlights from the second day of Build 2016! Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanslman, Steve Guggenheimer, and others walked through some awesome announcements and demos. In this video, I discuss Build 2016 day 2 highlights with two students: Ming Yang (former Microsoft intern), and Keegan Farley (also a former Microsoft intern).

Please stay tuned for more Build 2016 student news, and check out my previous posts from Build 2016: Students: Get the most out of Build 2016 and Student Highlights from Build 2016 Day 1

Student Highlights from Build 2016 Day 1

Student Developer Evangelism Team — Wed, 30 Mar 2016 20:40:14 GMT

There was a LOT of exciting news and announcements during the first day of Build 2016. Satya Nadella, Terry Myerson, Kevin Gallo, Alex Kipman and others had awesome announcements and updates spanning Windows, Universal Windows Platform (UWP), Xbox, Hololens, Cortana, and other technologies. In this video, I discuss Build 2016 day 1 highlights with two students: Megan Fu (former Microsoft intern), and Aniket Prabhu (Microsoft Student Partner). Please stay tuned for more Build 2016 student news, and check out my previous post: Students: Get the most out of Build 2016

Students: Get the most out of Build 2016

Student Developer Evangelism Team — Tue, 29 Mar 2016 14:51:15 GMT

It's finally time for Microsoft's biggest developer event of the year: Build. Build 2016 is taking place in San Francisco once again, and it's sure to be full of exciting news, announcements, and tech stories. If you can't be at Build in person, don't worry - there are many different ways you can be involved. I'll be here for the entire event, and will be highlighting news, announcements, and action that's relevant to student developers.

So how can you stay up-to-date and get involved? Here are some ideas and resources: Follow the news on blogs

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Guess who thinks hackathons are important? Your future boss, that’s who!

Student Developer Evangelism Team — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 09:00:15 GMT

Collaborative problem solving. Laser-sharp focus. Stressful deadlines. These are just a few of the skills required to hack it in the IT world. The students who attended TreeHacks, Stanford University’s annual hackathon competition, know that competing in hackathons is a surefire way to get a crash course in these hirable habits. To kick off TreeHacks 2016, Matt Thompson, General Manager of Developer Evangelism at Microsoft and himself a Stanford graduate, inspired the student hackers to look beyond the weekend’s activities. He challenged them with a question: “Why hack?” Here’s why: Future employers will look at a prospective hire’s devpost history, and it may carry more weight than a perfectly-curated résumé. The student hackers took Matt’s advice to heart. In a formidable display of creative and technical skills, students created projects with names such as HearVR, The Kinect Awakens, Pic-y Eats and Appception. These projects caught the attention of Microsoft sponsors and judges. HearVR: Microsoft Hack Award winners HearVR (pictured left) imagined a way to give music lovers a more immersive listening experience. Instead of simply hearing music, the three sophomore dorm mates thought it would be cool to actually see a song in motion. Thus was born HearVR – a program that combines machine learning with virtual reality to create an environment where SoundCloud music files can be visualized on the Oculus Rift virtual reality device. Through the use of a frequency spectrum and data associated with SoundCloud’s user comments, HearVR helps users “see” music. The team consists of Max Spero, Christopher Vo and Jason Liu. A great idea, but its genesis wasn’t without some panic-filled moments. Like the point where Max spent 10 hours trying to get SoundCloud files to work with the Unreal game engine only to discover that Unreal doesn’t support the SoundCloud audio files. He had to learn and use the Unity game engine instead. Hackathons present students with the challenging opportunity to learn new technology on the fly. Despite the team’s unfamiliarity with Azure, they found it easy to learn on the go during the hackathon. The final iteration of HearVR used Azure Machine Learning Studio to perform data analysis and publish the app as a web service. For their use of Azure, the team won the Microsoft Hack Award and each took home a Surface Pro 3 as well as a Microsoft IoT Kit for Raspberry Pi 2.

The HearVR app provides a visual representation of digital music to listeners through the use of a frequency spectrum and data associated with user comments. The more comments a specific music file receives, the more prominently that file registers on the spectrum.

The big payoff for the team came when the project was complete. Max was the first to try it. “It was just the coolest thing to see the song visually. It was so immersive,” he said.

The Kinect Awakens

TreeHacks participant Angie Palm supervises while James Lu plots user data into the Microsoft Surface 3 using the Kinect.

“The Kinect Awakens” is a Unity-built video game by students James Lu, Angie Palm and Kate Tolstaya. James told us that he’d always wanted to play with lightsabers, so the team created a virtual reality way to do it. Users put on the Google Cardboard virtual reality headset device and pick up a PlayStation Move controller. Suddenly a lightsaber appears in their hands and along with an ogre-like monster as their opponent. The system works like this: A Microsoft Kinect collects the coordinates of the player’s head and hands in 3D space. The PlayStation Move controller and the intertidal measurement unit (IMU) of the phone provide the orientations of the camera and weapon, which are then visually rendered on Google Cardboard using the Unity game engine. Google Cardboard has similar functionality to the Oculus Rift, but looks like a cardboard box. Once the team got the data to visualize in Unity, they were overjoyed. The app worked perfectly. Though it was their biggest challenge, James said “getting so many individual components working together was really cool.”

Pic-y Eats

Pic-y Eats aims to tap into the food-obsession present in social media.

Raya Kuo, Vivian Fang and Michael Meng created Pic-y Eats, a social media app that generates a food-related theme of the day and then gives users a randomly-selected two-hour time window to upload food photos of that theme. Raya Kuo explained the app’s inception. “Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook are dominated by pictures of food. We thought it'd be fun to generate a daily goal where users post photos only of that specific food for the day.” Like the HearVR team, the Pic-y Eats were Azure neophytes. However, with the help of Microsoft Technical Evangelist Tim Reilly, they were able to get their app up and running on Azure. By then, it was nearly 3 a.m. on Sunday, so they all took a short snooze. Raya described the dramatic push to finish. “We woke up Sunday only to find that the Azure server times had changed overnight, exposing a bug in our code. Expo was in three hours, so we rushed to fix the bug, finish our DevPost descriptions and prepare our presentation pitch all at once.” Despite the stress, the Pic-y Eats team had a finished product to show. “We made a video demo and also interactively walked audiences and judges through the user experience, which made it easier for them to understand the idea behind Pic-y Eats. They were very intrigued.”

Appception

If you’re a developer, you’ve probably been in this scenario – someone comes up with an awesome idea for an app – and asks you to make it. Or, they shrug it off because they aren’t a developer or don’t know one. Avery Lamp, Antonio Marino, Beth Yue Shi and Sam Kortchmar wanted to make app development easier for less experienced developers. Antonio described the team’s idea. “We wanted to build the simplest possible developer experience, something our non-technical friends can use when they come to us saying, ‘I’ve got an idea for an app that's going to be the next big thing!’” Appception (screenshot left) allows anyone to build native iPhone apps using a drag-and-drop interface. Appception actually hosts an app inside itself (hence the name, a riff off of the movie “Inception”), the one the user is building through the interface. And in fact, this was the biggest challenge. “Ensuring the separation of the apps was the main difficulty,” said Antonio. Antonio knew it was an ambitious project for a thirty-six-hour hackathon. The team struggled to find teammates for this very reason, but right when they considered changing their idea, Sam arrived. His flight had been delayed, so he wasn’t around when the team was recruiting hackers. He loved the idea though, and the team began hacking. The team used the magic of Azure Virtual Machines. Antonio said, “We needed to run a program on a remote server that would take the information about the new app and generate the source code for it. We chose to host this program on a virtual server in Microsoft Azure. The process of setting up this server was easy and straightforward, even though it was our first time using Azure. We just grabbed an off-the-shelf configuration from the Azure Marketplace.” Once everything finally came together and worked as intended, Antonio felt proud of the team for not giving into their own fears associated with tackling such a challenging idea. He explained, “One thing I’ve learned by attending hackathons is that the best hackers are not afraid to aim for building a complex project. We all were very excited that we could finally use what we had spent the past two days building.” Want to learn more about how competing in hackathons builds the skills and habits that hiring managers find invaluable? Head on over to the Microsoft Imagine Hackathon page. Don’t have the time to participate in a hackathon, but still want to build something cool leveraging cloud technology? No problem. Check out our free Microsoft Azure offer for students. ___________ Microsoft Imagine, anywhere, anytime:

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