Looking for the next Bill Gates

Yolande Knell
Reporter, BBC Cairo

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Microsoft looks to the next generation of developers

The founder of the next Microsoft or Google could be among the students gathering in Cairo, Egypt for the finals of a competition looking for innovative uses of technology.

The Imagine Cup, now in its seventh year, is run by Microsoft to find novel uses for its technology.

Entrants are asked to develop software - which can make use of mobile technology, new web applications and their own embedded devices.

More than 300,000 students registered for the competition. In the final rounds, 444 students from more than 70 countries competed to see who had the best ideas.

This year the coveted top prize for software went to a Romanian team who designed UpCity, a program that connects citizens and government agencies to help build communities.

Microsoft's Ray Ozzie meets the Taiwanese team

"Most of the toughest challenges we face today can be met starting with local community issues," Adrian Buzgar, a student at Romania's University of Iasi, told judges.

"We don't believe software itself can be a magical solution to the problems of humanity but we believe by using software people can solve these issues."

The software platform is to be introduced in the students' home city this month and they intend to set up their own company.

Mr Buzgar said the prize had given the whole team a boost. "There are absolutely no words to describe what we're feeling right now."

In line with the ethical stance set by Bill Gates, Microsoft encouraged teams to tackle development issues.

A South Koreans team won the top prize for a novel embedded system to help people farm insects food in areas struck by famine.

They said that when their system was used to bake cookies with stag beetles in Gabon, Africa "the first batch was gone before they set the basket on the table."

Several teams offered technological solutions to health problems.

ViVa spots diseases and gives medical advice

Four Russian students came second in the software category with their invention, ViVa, a system to identify diseases and give medical advice.

It also tracks outbreaks and aims to issue early alerts about epidemics using PCs and portable devices.

"We worked for eight months on this project," said Sergey Sederov from Nizhny Novgorod State University.

"It meant a lot of nights without sleep and working a lot of weekends."

More than $288,000 (£180,000) was awarded in prize money but there are greater rewards if students can develop and market their ideas.

Many took the chance to ask Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, for advice and he said he took younger code writers very seriously.

"Within our industry many of the companies that have had the greatest impact, were started by students: Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook."