Microsoft aims to promote student entrepreneurs

Microsoft, which announced the winners of the India leg of the competition here, said, the teams would also be sent to the Centre for Innovation and Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), managed by IIM-Ahmedabad for learning the basics of entrepreneurship.

"We are promoting the Imagine Cup participants at the global level by showing them ways on how to turn their innovations productive for quite some time. Now, we are working on helping the Indian student innovators to foster their innovation by making these available commercially," said Tarun Gulati, General Manager (Marketing & Operations), Microsoft India.

Microsoft also announced the winner of the Imagine Cup, 2008 competition from India. The winners will represent India in the global competition set to take place in Paris in July this year.

Team Novice@work, a team of four students from the Mumbai-based Vivekananda Education Society's Institute of Technology were adjudged as the winner for their project work on self-configurable wireless sensors for agricultural requirements.

The wireless sensor can monitor and analyse agricultural soil parameters like moisture content, nutrient composition, temperature, pressure and light, and help agriculturists in taking instant crop-related decisions.

Imagine Cup, 2008, which is in its sixth year now, saw the participation of more than 18,000 students from major colleges across India.

Of the final 90 teams that were considered after careful scrutiny, eight teams were short-listed for the final. The theme of Imagine Cup this year was environment.