Imagine Cup US Finals - Morning Recap

Day one is flying by - we started out with intro presentations by
Nicole, Daryll, and I, then had Chris To from the MS Mobile Developer
Experience team present. Chris was part of the competition last year
down in San Diego, and along with his UCLA teammates finished in 1st
place, grabbing a trip to Sao Paolo Brazil for the World Finals (France
won...).

Always a good way to rev up an crowd of competitors - talk up how cool the ulimate prize is.

Next up - Ford Davidson and Eric Engineer of the Mobile Device team,
presenting some amazing demos that showcased Windows Mobile 2005.
Fitting, given its recent launch. I'm going to seriously have to
upgrade my phone to Magneto now, this stuff was on the far side of
"woah..." We wrapped up with gifting of much SWAG (logo'd bag, which
turned out nicely), then Scoble captured a few quick interviews with
student competitors, and a couple of our Student Ambassadors.
Should be up on Channel 9 shortly (we think).

Perhaps the  funniest moment of the morning came when Daryll
pointed out Brian Desmond from Walter Payton College Prep. Turns out he
was just announced as having WON the worldwide IT-High School
Invitational, which comes with a nice tidy cash prize. Brian knew he
won, but not about the cash. A little Christmastime this morning!

On the video front, we've also got some professional quality stuff
being shot (in case any of the local broadcast folks want to talk about
students), and Pat from Mainfunction doing
snippet interviews - she'll be running her own "audience choice" award
where HS teachers vote for the best student team based on the video
interviews. We'll post links to that here when it goes live.

After a short rampage through the company story and visitor center
(which, BTW, is far more interesting that I expected. I've been here 5
years and never stepped foot in it or the old Museum, but they've done
a sweet job), we migrated to Main Campus and the Project Fair. More on
that to come...

For pictures - we'll be sticking them up on Flickr with tag "imaginecup" shortly.