During the Imagine Cup Innovation Accelerator Program I meet Nigel Pepper and Robbie Clutton, two awesome developers on the British Telecom's .NET Mobile SDK team. I've previously blogged about their SDK, which makes it dead simple to create applications and services taking advantages of services in the telecom network.

I just want to give a shout out to Nigel and Robbie, and the rest of the SDK team, and congratulate them on a really good video up on Channel9. So be sure to check out the video, and learn more about the SDK and see some sample code on just how easy you can set up a conference call!

Charles just uploaded a bunch of videos from the Imagine Cup accelerator event in London. You can now watch the final presentation from each of the teams on Channel9. If you're just interested in our demo, jump ahead to 04:15 in the video.

Imagine Cup Innovation Accelerator: Team Norway - MediWatch
All Channel9 videos tagged with Imagine Cup

We did an interview with Aftenposten, on of the top three largest newspapers in Norway, after the presentation in BT Tower. The article was printed in the Sunday issue of the paper in the job/education section! The article is available online, so check it out!

We're also featured in the latest version of the Norwegian Microsoft Magazine. The magazine is available as a PDF download from Microsoft Norway (we're on page 38 and 39 in the printed version and page 20 in the PDF version).

Day 11
A good day of solid coding. Messed with Microsoft Blend and the tool is looking really promising!

Day 12
On Wednesday we went to Cambridge and visited Microsoft Research. We got an introduction to what Microsoft is doing research on, and got a chance to learn more about projects like the True Skill system in Xbox Live, some new imaging technology, the Vista network map and more.

We also got a chance to hear the stories behind three successful businesses from the Cambridge area, among them the ARM processor, which you probably have running inside your MP3 player or cell phone.

In the afternoon Microsoft had arranged an student event for Cambridge students to come to the Microsoft research facility to learn more about Imagine Cup. The goal of the event was to encourage more students to take part in the Imagine Cup.

After the student event we visited one of the old collages that are part of Cambridge university. We had the dinner in the dining hall which looked exactly like what you'd expect from an old traditional English university.

Day 13
On Thursday we got the final bits and  pieces to fit together. The new demo turned out really nice! We also got some time with a professional presenter, who work with different companies to learn them how to get the message across. She was really got at what she did, and we got several useful tips on presenting!

Day 14
The big final day! We all got up early and traveled in to London for the final presentations at the BT Tower. I think there where about 90 people or so in conference room, consisting of people from Microsoft, BT and the press. Each team had 10 minutes to present what they had been working on during the two weeks. Even tough this wasn't a competition there where two awards being handed out. Best use of technology and most compelling business case. We where  aiming for the technology award with our cool demo using the latest and greatest of Microsoft technology such as WPF, WCF, Vista Media Center, Sidebar gadgets, Office 2007 and Windows Mobile 2005. So the fact that we won the "most compelling business case" award was quite a surprise! The price was a Philips digital photo frame with a 1GB memory card with pictures from the event. Really cool!

After the presentation we went up to the 34th floor for drinks, press interviews and some snacks. The tower is almost 160m high, so the view was just amazing!

Day 15
Traveled back to Norway. Because of snowy weather all over Norway we where really delayed, and it actually took 16 hours from we left the hotel to I was back home in my apartment!

Day 5
Wednesday was a solid day of coding. We got lots of stuff done, and the application is really starting to take shape. I'll promise we'll do a full web cast demo of the application before we leave Reading! On the evening we visited a really large GoKarting facility. The course was quite big, and they even had this bridge you had to drive under and under. We where randomly put together into 8 teams of 4 drivers and competed in a endurance championship. Two and a half hour of solid GoKarting, with pit-stops, driver changes and everything. It was AMAZING fun, probably one of the funniest things I've done in a LONG time. I was lucky to get on a team with three guys who where as competitive as me, so we won the competition, and I had the fastest lap of all! Just plain fun!

Day 6
Another day of just cranking out code. Tons of fun! Did the Office 2007 integration, which turns out to work really well. With Visual Studio Tools for Office 2nd edition you get support for ribbons and application level add-ins in all Office 2007 applications. We've implemented an application for healthcare professionals to connect to the MediWatch server and download data.

Day 7
Friday was the day of the Windows Vista release for developers in the UK. We got a chance to see an really amazing proof of concept application for the London underground, written by Microsoft and the London underground IT department. They built the application over three weeks at the Microsoft Technology Centre, and the end result was just amazing. The application let you view trains move in real time in a sweet WPF application. You could do all kinds of things like turning on and off tracks, looking at heat maps, breakdowns, crime ratings etc. for the different stations. They also had a 3D map of the underground giving you an impression on how the different stations are layered on different depths.

Sanjay Parthasarathy, Corporate Vice President, Developer & Platform Evangelism Group, was in Reading for the Vista launch, so he also took time to drop by the teams to see how they were doing.

Day 8
Saturday was quite laidback, and we hade a late breakfast and only stayed at the Microsoft Campus to five in the afternoon. We then went into Reading for an amazing meal at the Chilli resturant. We then went out on town, and Woo from the Microsoft Technology Centre where doing a good job making sure everyone had enough beer. We finished the night at the Walkabout disco, a large two floor disco. It turns out Reading have quite good nightlife, and people from smaller city around Reading come in to Reading in the weekends to party.

Day 9
Sunday was a day off, and Wendy had arranged with train tickets for everyone so that we could get a chance to see London. Gøran, Hans Olav and I first visited the Madam Tussouds, which was lots of fun. It was way larger than I expected, and some of the wax figures where just amazingly real. Lots of picture to come! We then did some shopping in Oxford street, and spent some time at the London Apple store. It's probably the coolest store I've ever seen, so definitely going back there next week with Hege!

We finished the day with a round in the London eye, catching a great view over London, before having dinner at a stake house.

Day  10
Today we've spent most of the day working on our application. I finally figured out how to do background add-ins inside Vista Media Center, and how to load up a WPF browser application, so now everything is pretty much set. Things are coming together, and it looks like we'll have a brand new demo ready for BT tower Friday.

Today was also the meeting day for Microsoft Architect Council, and Team Norway was invited to give a presentation about our project and our Imagine Cup experience. The Architect Council consists of the most experienced software architects from all of Brittan, so that was lots of fun.

In the evening we had a gaming night, with 360 network gaming, pizza and beer. I did some video filming, but I left the cables at the campus, so I'll have to youtube the video later. We had 6 Xbox 360's available, and played some Gears Of War, Fifa, PES6 and Ghost Recon.
 

Day 2
Time fly's and we're already at the fourth day of the event. Sunday was the first day out at the Microsoft Campus and their Technology Centre/Innovation Centre. We spent most of the day in a conference room going trough the agenda for the two weeks. Tim Stevens from British Telecom did an awesome presentation of their Web21C SDK, which basically let's you use their infrastructure with a bunch of .NET one liners.

Making two phones ring is a simple as:
btCall.StartCall(caller, calle);

To send an SMS you just do:
btMessage.SendMessage(message, recipient);

You get the idea. Now if only more telecom companies where as agile as BT and made their services this approachable!  If you want to learn more about the SDK it's publically available in beta, so check out their site at http://sdk.bt.com. I'm really looking forwarding using their SDK in our project for SMS and positioning!

We also got some information about the infrastructure we have available over the two weeks. We basically get's two really powerful developers stations, with what ever operating system we want. Since we're doing some Media Center stuff we went with three Vista Ultimate machines and one 2003 server. Microsoft had pre-configured a Team Foundation Server, so each team got their own project portal to work on. Super sweet!

After the introductions and presentations at the campus we went for dinner at a local Indian restaurant, but I got a really bad headache and went to bed early.

Day 3
We started out Monday with a few presentations, first one was an opening talk by Kevin Nickles who talked about entrepreneurship and doing a startup. Dr Allyson Reed gave shared some of her experience from running start ups and had some really interesting stories to tell.  After the business related talks Carrie and Paul from Microsoft Consulting in Reading did an excellent talk on Windows Presentation Foundation and user experiences. Carrie is talking at Desingertopia, so I'm looking forward that. Carrie and Paul is going to be with us over the two weeks to help us out with anything related to user experience. Microsoft is really investing lots of time and effort into this event, and we have all the resources and people we need available to get the most out of these to weeks, and take our projects forwards. I don't know the exact number of people involved, but we have tech support, user interface experts, MBA's to help us with business stuff, developers from BT to help us with the SDK etc.

Day 4
Today have been the most productive day so far. We've spent the entire day (from 09.00 to 22:00) working on our application. We basically decided to work on the design and architecture from India, but re-write most of the code and use the latest and greatest in technology. By the end of the day we had most of the database, data logic and infrastructure up and running. We're using C# 3.0 and LINQ for all the data access stuff, so that saved us a ton of time. I spent most of the day in Photoshop and did both the new web UI, the smart phone UI and the Vista Sidebar gadgets. Gøran focused on the smart phone application, and the plug-in framework for health monitoring devices is coming together really nicely. We also have some really cool UI stuff for the smart phone up our sleeves, so watch out!

I've uploaded a few screenshots of what we're working on, and I've allso uploaded some pictures on my Flickr site.

Smart phone UI


Gadget docked to the sidebar


Gadget floating on the desktop

We've arrived in Reading, and have settled in at the fancy new "elements" hotel in the centre of Reading. We've spent the night catching up with old friends from the other teams over a nice dinner. The other teams attending the Imagine Cup Accelerator programs are Italy, Brazil, Germany, Croatia and China. So the teams are spread out all over the globe.

The agenda for tomorrow is information and briefings, and a tour at the Microsoft Innovation Centre here in Reading.

Now I'm going to hit the bathtub with a cold coke and a audio books on my iPod!