The Imagine Cup is a fantastic starting point for developing a business, especially for those interested in gaming. The winners and finalists of these competitions get unique opportunities, exposure and mentoring to bring their ideas to life. Two success stories from the Imagine Cup are last year's finalists, Radication games and 2013 Innovation winners, Colinked.
If you are over 16 this is your chance enter the Imagine Cup and come up with and compete with students from across the world to win as part of Microsoft's global student technology competition, and be in with the chance to win $50,000!
You can enter one of three categories in this year's competition and all competition entries must use Windows; you can develop a desktop/tablet project using Windows, a mobile project using Windows phone or a browser game using Azure.
You can enter the games category by developing a new and exciting game.
In our innovation category, we're looking for you to develop the next big thing! Whether that be a social network, gadget or music service, we want you to come up with something new and different!
The World Citizenship category is all about developing a new technology project that solves a social issue; this can be in areas such as education, health and the environment.
Key Dates
- 1st March - Online National Preliminaries Round
- 15th March - Online National Semi-final Round
- 15th April - UK Final at Microsoft HQ
The winners of the UK final will be entered into the World Finals in Seattle, USA and the winners of the World Final will win the Imagine Cup trophy and a huge $50,000!
Enter Now!
- Get your team together and learn more about the competition here
The Imagine Cup is a fantastic starting point for developing a business, especially for those interested in gaming. The winners and finalists of these competitions get unique opportunities, exposure and mentoring to bring your ideas to life. Two success stories from the Imagine Cup are last year's finalists, Radication games and 2013 Innovation winners, Colinked.
Last Year's Finalists
Radication Games developed the game Sanitarium in which the player is a doctor who is trying to diagnose and treat Tuberculosis patients. A unique aspect of the game is that the player may have to use real money to pay for treatments within the game and Radication plan to donate this money to charity. This is an example of a game in the new gaming movement 'Games for Good'.
What's more the team use Microsoft Azure to host the leader boards, so that they can store as much user data as possible and won't have to turn away users.
Previous winners
A huge success story is 2013's winners of the UK innovations category, Team Colinked. They won the grand prize of $50,000 with their winning mobile app soundSYNK. Their app has the capability to stream music from one device to another through Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, directly into a room. They built a version specially for Windows Phones for the Imagine Cup and used Microsoft Azure to store the app's data.
What made this stand out as the winning app was the new approach to mesh networking which can be used for sharing photos, documents and data, and as a result, team Colinked won the Imagine Cup Innovations UK final. Following this, the team were invited to join the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator programme, which took their company to the next level.
If you have been inspired by these stories and are keen to find out more, read more about their story below.