Johannesburg, 03 Aug 2007
A team of four South African university students will board a plane to South Korea this afternoon to compete in Microsoft's annual Imagine Cup worldwide finals.
A Microsoft initiative, the Imagine Cup is an international student technology competition. The global software vendor says its aim is to provide opportunities for the next generation of technology and business leaders to compare ideas, gain practical experience and stretch the limits of their imagination in creating solutions that apply to the real world.
The theme of this year's competition is to "Imagine a world where technology enables a better education for all".
Made up of three students from the University of Pretoria - Davide de Caires, Claudie Watson Ferreira and Grant Lindner - and Nicholas Goossens, from the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, in Port Elizabeth, Team SA is already looking at making its solution commercially viable.
"We are investigating a few opportunities and need to assess certain factors, but our definitive goal is to make this a real system and make it into a business," says Team SA.
The solution the team is taking to the cup finals is a management system that aims to provide comprehensive control of the day-to-day administration of schools and academic institutions.
One element of the system is a completely automated roll-call system that scans pupils' fingerprints, and promptly sends SMS notifications to respective parents when pupils are late, absent or bunking.
The team members qualified for the Imagine Cup by winning Microsoft's local Project Firefly student technology competition in December 2006. Over 3 500 entries from 41 educational institutions were entered in the competition.
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