The People's Choice Award website for this year's Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals in Cairo is up and running!

To make it easy for you to vote, we have published videos from all of our software design finalists online.  Every single student who entered the competition focused on how they could use technology to solve some of the world’s toughest problems - eradicating hunger and poverty, halting the spread of HIV/AIDs, and improving education and environmental sustainability. 

Take a look at the videos that explain their projects and cast your vote!

They might not be updating their Facebook pages or Twittering about local restaurants with the best vegan menu, but thanks to a new software application from Kenyan mobile solutions company Virtual City, you can now find livestock in East Africa grazing by SMS.

Dubbed the Livestock Identification Tracking System, our partners & innovators at Virtual City developed a unique radio-frequency identification (RFID) solution based on Microsoft technology that Kenya’s cattle farmers and traders can use to better track livestock – a key to unlocking new markets for Kenyan beef exports.

Speaking to Virtual City CEO John Waibochi in Nairobi last winter, he says that, “For the export market you needed to have good traceability for cattle. A lot of the cattle here are held by pastoralists and no real fixed abode, and we needed to find a way of how we are going to track a product that is constantly on the move.”

The RFID tag is placed in the cow’s stomach where it stores information on the cow’s origin, previous owners and medical history.  This information – which is transmitted via mobile phones - helps reduce administrative costs and time, prevent fraud, improve quality control and ensure fair pricing for farmers. 

Agriculture and related activities such as cattle farming account for more than 50 per cent of Kenya’s GDP, generating employment for about 70 per cent of the population, 80 per cent of export earnings, 70 per cent of materials for agro-industrial production and a major share of government revenue, according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development.  But implementing advanced technology solutions in rural parts of Africa does not come without its challenges.  “You have to provide the technology in a way and form that doesn’t scare them, as relative to their day to day as possible so they don’t feel that they are changing the way they work,” said Waibochi.

-- Claudia Toth

Microsoft Global Strategic Accounts

Only two weeks to go until the Imagine Cup 2009 Worldwide Finals in Cairo, Egypt! Our judges have narrowed the field of entrants for the Microsoft Unlimited Potential Design for Development Award and selected five finalist teams.

Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Unlimited Potential Group

Last week, students participating in the Imagine Cup traveled to Microsoft’s Redmond campus to meet with various Microsoft teams as they prepare for the 2009 Worldwide Finals in Cairo, Egypt. Team SKAN from India and Team MultiPoint WEB from the U.S. used the opportunity to network with developers and programmers at the company.

·         Team SKAN participated in the 2008 Worldwide Imagine Cup Finals in Paris, France, winning the Interoperability Achievement Award for their solution, Enpower.  Team members Karun AB, Amith P George, Noel Sequeira, and Sameet Singh Khajuria also went on to win India’s prestigious Eureka 2009 Award and have used their solution to start a company. In addition, two of the members are competing in the Software Design category at the 2009 Worldwide Finals as Team Pearl, with a solution that focuses on rural healthcare.

·         Team MultiPoint WEB, three brothers from Oregon (Jimmy, Mark and Luke Dickinson), recently won the U.S. Imagine Cup Finals and are now preparing to go to Cairo to compete in the 2009 Worldwide Finals for Software Design. Their solution uses the MultiPoint Software Development Kit to create educational games for students. In addition to competing for Software Design, the team has also entered the MultiPoint Education Award sponsored by Microsoft Unlimited Potential.

While on campus, Team MultiPoint Web sat down with famed tech guru Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome for a video interview about their project.  You can watch the video here.

This article from IDG’s PC World site about some of the challenges to teaching in Thailand, and technologies to help overcome them, was interesting and had a humorous ending. A reporter came to visit one of the schools where we are trialling Microsoft Multipoint, and the children and teachers really took the time out to show him how it helped them in their maths school work. Not only does MultiPoint help address the challenge of lack of PCs in the classroom by enabling multiple mice to be connected, it also helps make classes more interactive by enabling all the kids to participate at the same time. It also helps the teachers monitor responses so that they can track who has understood and who is still behind. But one student, when asked what he’d like to be doing if he had the choice on a sunny day, said he’d rather be playing football with his friends. I guess even the power of technology can’t stop kids being kids.

But what it can do is enable kids, if they are stuck in the classroom on a sunny day (we’ve all been there, right?), learn in a more collaborative way – perhaps accelerated learning might even free up some time for them to develop their football skills. And if they don’t get the opportunity to become the next Cristiano Ronaldo, then having some Maths and computer skills might be handy for maximising their opportunities when they leave school.

A whitepaper from a Thai teacher called Parichat Pasatcha from Uthaiwittayakhom School makes for interesting reading in this regard. The paper looks at how teachers can use Microsoft Multipoint and other Computer-Assisted Learning Technologies to enhance learning capabilities. The paper outlines a way of empowering students though CALT by tasking them with selecting their own favourite subject, and then helping them develop at least one lesson, based on the Basic Education Curriculum. Not only does this develop their own project skills, it also enables them to develop tools and lessons from which other students might benefit.

So how does MultiPoint fit in? Well, according to the whitepaper: Nowadays, computers are widely used in the educational institutions. Most of them use computers to develop Computer Assisted Instruction software, or CAI, to make a student-centric learning method. This is because it enables student to learn in a way that fits to their skills and intelligence without having to wait for other students in the same class. It also minimizes teacher’s burdens on monitoring all students in the class, while students can learn or repeat the lesson on their own without much help and support from the teacher. This also helps reducing several problems in case that one class comes with several levels of student’s proficiencies because students who are more intelligent will understand the lesson far quicker than others. Thus, the CAI will help ease the problem caused by this difference in individual’s learning capability. CAI can help fill the gap in dealing with different student’s learning skill levels. It opens more chances for students to learn and improve how they will learn better. The most important benefit of the CAI is that it has its own evaluation process. This can make students see their own success and progress through each step and each lesson. Also, CAI is useful when there are not enough teachers to teach all subjects in a school, since it can be used to support teaching many students interactively and simultaneously. (Boorana Somchai, 2000)

If the students develop their lessons using the MultiPoint platform, they can then collaboratively demonstrate and learn with other students, helping each other along, and they can do this with minimal active participation from the teacher, who will be observing and can jump in if needed. And according to Parichat Pasatcha, “The school held an exhibition to demonstrate the use of Microsoft MultiPoint software and computer lesson as a new learning media to the teachers and staff in the Uthaithani Province. The students and teachers are very excited with the result.” Not as excited by football, I bet, but that’s one battle Maths might never win!

Supoet Srinutapong, director - public sector program, Microsoft Thailand

A note of congratulations to Unlimited Potential Group team member and user experience researcher Masuma Henry, who was recently interviewed through the Discovery Channel’s “Dream Jobs” segment.  Masuma joins a illustrious crew there—including a Mountain Gorilla doctor, Mega-Volcano investigator and “ice guru”!  You can read her interview online here to find out what makes Masuma’s work helping to create new technology for the underserved her dream job.    

Given that most of us have encountered PCs from the time we were in school or college, it may be difficult to think of what it was like to discover the PC for the first time! But most adults in countries like India are new to PCs, and usually view it as a rather intimidating device.

Inspired by the premise of the Hole-in-the-Wall experiments for children, we (the Technology for Eemerging Markets Group at Microsoft Research India) have been running a project called Kelsa+ that allows unrestricted and unmediated access to a shared Internet-connected PC at the workplace for low-income office workers, (i.e. those who are housekeeping staff, drivers, security guards, maintenance crew). These workers have an average class 10 education in the local language often from a rural government school, are aged approximately 26 years, and are male. In the process of observing their usage of the PC, we have discovered that there are particular patterns of usage, content choice, and learning that accompany the adoption of the PC by novice users from this demographic.

I Usability

I.I Keywords as input

Our target users were mostly schooled in their local language at a government school. They recognize English words, but are not fluent in reading or writing entire sentences or paragraphs. For this reason, they prefer entering words or short English phrases describing the website or content within a website that they would like to view, in the address bar or the search bar, rather than memorizing and typing out an exact URL (even if they have visited the site before). Often these search queries have “.com” tag added, pointing to a perception among users that such a tag improves the quality of the search request. Applications that accept words or short phrases as input to load relevant content for users will allow for easy navigation.

I.II Mouse-based navigation

Users prefer minimal usage of the keyboard, and rely almost exclusively on mouse-based navigation. To load a webpage for instance, the browser’s history is used frequently. Going through the list of previously-viewed webpages in the drop-down menu of the address bar, users then make a selection and have that page loaded – all without touching the keyboard.

For the same reason, the dominant usage of email is to forward messages to one another. Rarely are fresh email messages, involving text input, created by users. Instead, those email forwards that arrive in their mailboxes (sometimes 10-15 such messages in a day) are then forwarded on to as many as 10 different friends. These usually contain images and music files as attachments.

I.III Double-clicking

Users most often call on various operations using the right-click menu, rather than double-clicking on a particular application or using the menu options in the toolbar.

I.IV Icon vs. text hyperlinks

While text-based hyperlinks are increasingly recognized as gateways to other pages, users often click on the icons associated with a text-based hyperlink to access the next page. So, having the icons that are associated with a particular text label also hyperlinked would be useful.

I.V Simplicity and consistency

As is obvious, having a simple interface with few core navigation options displayed prominently is necessary. Users like a linear navigation format, and are easily confused by deep pathways to discover applications or features (see Indrani Medhi’s work on this). The application should present the bare minimum options, with an option to access more complex features – should the user desire to do so.

II Content

II.I Engaging through entertainment

The users we have in mind perform physically strenuous jobs, and often prefer to use applications that rely on minimal active navigation. Viewing videos and listening to music constitute the bulk of time spent with the PC. Most often, the content accessed is around local language entertainment.

Windows’ preloaded offline games (Solitaire, Minesweeper, etc.) are very useful in the beginning in having complete PC novices practice navigation with a mouse, especially since each mouse action receives visual and audio feedback. However, given the repetitive content, they move on from those applications to more dynamic content on the web.

II.II Links to wider community

One of the surprising observations over the course of our study was that a few users discovered social networking sites like Orkut on their own. This led to multiple users accessing Orkut (through a single account), not to enter information or create a detailed profile for themselves, but to view other people’s profiles. Similarly, an English learning website that included a social networking option was received with great enthusiasm, with one user establishing contact with more than 50 ‘friends’ through the learning portal. Connecting to those from different classes, cultures, backgrounds through community features, is as important a need for users from this segment as it is for those with higher incomes and higher PC usage.

II.III Personalisation

Users seem to be very particular about personalising their PC, at least for the duration of their individual session. Changing the desktop background selection seemed to be a very important activity for each user. This is indeed a way for individuals to use other apps/tools to build images and content for display. For example, the screenshot below is of two workers using the webcam to take a picture of themselves, following the example of two other workers who had conducted a similar exercise previously and used that image for the desktop background.

Even tools like PowerPoint and Word are used to create personal pieces. For instance, workers combine entering information on themselves (name, age, photo, etc.) with images available on the web (especially pictures of local movie stars) to create interesting modified digital images. That they can represent themselves digitally in interesting ways might be a key component of how usage of a PC boosts self-esteem among such users.

III Learning

III.I Group usage and sharing is common

Many users actively prefer to use the PC in a group, either because they consider a peer to be the informal instructor as he demonstrates how an application is used, or because the content accessed is meant for group consumption. Some workers spend several weeks just observing others’ usage before touching the PC themselves. Music and videos constitute the most popular content accessed, and these are consumed in groups of 4 to 5 at a shared access machine. The creation of resumes and other documents is also often a group exercise.

The group usage preference also means that all users are aware of their peers’ usage and abilities. So applications that have a game-based interactive format, with scores per user, allow for a healthy competitive approach to learning and using that application. This is especially true for e-learning applications.

-- Aishwarya Ratan

Associate Researcher, Microsoft Research Technology for Emerging Markets Group

The Unlimited Potential Group in the Middle East & Africa has been hard at work for more than 6 months to introduce ICT for the first time to a rural school in the village of Ha-Tumo, 30 kilometers outside Lesotho’s capital city, Maseru.

Working with the Lesotho Ministry of Education & Training and technology partners, AstraLab, Learnthings Africa and The Mindset Network, we’ve helped to integrate an innovative Compujector (in other words, a PC + projector), with tailored education content optimized for Windows MultiPoint, to the secondary school of 45 students.

Rather than just providing basic ICT skills training and expecting many of the teachers (many of whom had never used a computer before, let alone a Compujector) to put the technology to work immediately, we’ve paid close attention to making the pilot sustainable by helping the teachers integrate the Compujector into the curriculum and improve the student’s learning and grades. After thorough training, we’ve seen the Compujector become a core part of lesson plans, with the teachers using the education content and applications for math, science, and even religion class.

The school does not have access to electricity either – as is the case for so many schools in Lesotho and elsewhere in Africa – so we’ve also tested a low-maintenance solar array to power the Compujector. So far, there’s been little need for the portable, gas-powered generator we installed for back-up.

-- Kevin Connolly

Business Development Manager for Education Solutions  

Microsoft Unlimited Potential Group - Middle East & Africa

Most computer applications are difficult to understand for those who are unable to read fluently. The heavy use of text in everything from menus to document content means that those who are illiterate are not able to access functions and services implemented on most computer software. According to the UNESCO, there are over one billion illiterate people in the world and 98% of this population lives in the developing countries.

Illiterate people do not have to remain cut off from computer applications this way. In particular, while there might be limits to what static textbooks can convey without text, computers are the ultimate multimedia device. Through the use of pictures, sound and video, they have the potential to be wholly understood by a person who cannot read.

“Text-Free Interfaces for the Illiterate” are design guidelines for computer interfaces that would allow any illiterate person and first-time computer user to extract required information with minimal or no assistance from anyone to use. For this project, we followed a user-centered design process where significant time was spent interacting with potential users of our system to recognize their needs and identify challenges they faced in accessing information. We spent nearly 300 hours in urban slum communities in Bangalore, India where our potential users lived and we spoke with more than 250 people during this project. The design guidelines which we recommended are:

·         Avoiding use of text

·         Heavy use of cartoon-style pictures

·         Voice output in local language

·         Heavy use of mouse-over functionality

·         Help instructions

·         Looping video to explain purpose and mechanism of application

·         Use of numbers in the interface because illiterate people can read numbers “0,1,2,3…”.

We applied these guidelines to designing three applications: a job-search system for illiterate domestic helpers, a health education system for illiterate patients and a map-navigation system for illiterate users. We formally tested whether potential users could use these interfaces and have found that our text-free designs are strongly preferred over standard text-based interfaces and that illiterate users are in fact able to use our text-free interfaces meaningfully.

Recently, we have also begun exploring design guidelines for mobile phones, and have conducted user-centered design with 80 end-users and potential users across India, Philippines and South Africa. So far we have looked specifically at applications for mobile banking. We have observed a number of challenges encountered by these users and potential users in interacting with existing mobile banking services and using mobile phones in general. Broad lessons from this study resulted in developing design recommendations.

We further conducted tests with another 58 potential users in India, in which we compared illiterate potential users on three systems that incorporated the design recommendations: text-based, voice-based, and (pictures + voice)-based interfaces. The tests confirmed that illiterate users were unable to make sense of the text-based interface. Additionally, while all the people who used the (pictures + voice)-based interface were in fact able to use this interface meaningfully, speed was faster and less assistance was required on the voice-based interface.

By Bonnie Mamanua, Unlimited Potential Group Business Manager, Microsoft Indonesia

Last week we welcomed our CEO, Steve Ballmer, to Indonesia. Steve was here to hold meetings with Microsoft staff as well as political and business leaders, but while he had five minutes spare he was also able to meet with the winners of the Indonesian Imagine Cup. The Imagine Cup is Microsoft’s global student technology competition that asks young developers to imagine a world where technology solves some of the fundamental problems we are facing. This year the theme of the competition is the Millennium Development Goals.

Team Big Bang from ITB won the Indonesian competition and the chance to compete in the worldwide finals in Egypt. The team’s project is called MOSES – Malaria Observation System and Endemic Surveillance. The student’s idea is to reduce the time it takes to diagnose malaria in a patient, and contain it, using software. The diagnostic data of malaria-infected patients and the location information can be uploaded to Microsoft Virtual Earth. This helps health officers visualise data to help arrest the spread of the epidemic.

We were really impressed by the team’s efforts, but not surprised. Indonesia has a reputation in this competition for world-leading innovation and excellence. Just last year, one of our teams, Team Antarmuka with Project Butterfly, (see the video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqXk1qV1LzA) won the Rural Innovation Award in the finals held at Le Louvre in Paris. Their solution was based on citizen enablement – by using an SMS server, the team set up a system whereby people could text in instances of environmental pollution to a central server so that environmental issues were reported, and information disseminated, as quickly as possible. In fact, Butterfly automates and streamlines the whole chain, from documenting the issue to public notification.

This got me thinking – clearly, when given the means to do so, Indonesian entrepreneurs, however young, can produce some wonderfully innovative creations that address very real problems that the world is facing. The problem is that just over 10% of Indonesia’s population lives in the economic bracket we call the Top of the Pyramid. That leaves 90% in the middle and lower end of the economic spectrum, with less money for things like computers. In the Asian region, estimates are that 80% of the population lives in rural areas, often on less than US$1 a day. The challenge we face is to encourage innovation where we can, but also apply innovation in the way we getting more people to access technology. And the reason we do this is clear; because when people get hold of technology, interesting things happen. And they can help change the world for the better.

On my first trip to India, I remember going to visit a rural village near Bhopal, where the Union Carbide chemical disaster happened. The visit was prompted by stories about a large agriculture conglomerate which had placed the first PC in the village in the home of one of the local farmers. I’ll come back to the PC, but one of the things that caught my attention on that visit was a rusting tractor in the middle of the fields. Its tires were flat, its exhaust pipe was bent, and it was clear that it hadn’t been operated in some time. Nearby, two buffalo were pulling a large hoe, matter-of-factly skirting the rusting obstruction. It turned out that the families who had bought the tractor, were unable to pay for its repairs when one day, the tractor broke down. The local mechanics couldn’t figure out what was wrong. They had hoped to get it fixed, eventually, but eventually came later than the ravages of weather. There were mixed opinions about whether the tractor was worth the cost, but no one else in the village had been persuaded to buy a tractor since then.

Since that visit, I’ve probably seen hundreds of technology projects, many of them involving computers and mobile phones. One lesson I’ve learned over the years is that technology requires people and institutions to maintain, and that means that for a technology to have long-term impact, it either needs to be embedded in an institution that is willing to support it, or someone has to build the institution that will support it. Just as with the tractor, a technology without support eventually becomes a technology gathering dust. Nowadays, PCs and mobile phones are piling up alongside tractors as equipment that might once have served a useful purpose, but are now slated for the dust bin. If only the people who had put them there had considered what it would take to maintain the technology…

The Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India has spent the last five years trying to see how computing technology can be practically relevant for some of the poorest communities in the world, and our most successful projects have been those where we worked with an organization that had a vested interest in seeing the technology work. For example, our Digital Green project was done in collaboration with GREEN Foundation, a local non-profit whose mission to support local farmers with knowledge of sustainable agriculture aligned with our own goals to support farmers. Today, GREEN Foundation runs its own video production and content dissemination – the key components that make up Digital Green – and it does so entirely on its own. If it wasn’t for GREEN Foundation, the villages we worked with would have probably ended up with a bunch of video cameras and no one to know what to do with them.

It is Imagine Cup season! Known as the “Olympics of Technology,” Microsoft Imagine Cup is the preeminent student technology competition in the world. This year, over 300,000 students from 100 countries are vying for a chance to compete in the Worldwide Finals in Cairo and all trying to solve the world’s toughest problems.

The Imagine Cup is a great entrepreneurial fast track. These students are some of the brightest up-and-coming technologists from around the world, and our future business leaders.

As part of the Finals, I am heading to Egypt to present the Unlimited Potential Group awards. These awards specifically applaud innovative solutions that address the challenges of under-served communities – rural and urban, developed and emerging.

We have already completed the first round of the Design for Development Award competition.  As part of their solutions, students conducted field research on critical issues such as women’s working conditions in Sri Lanka, rural health care in China, and improving agricultural supply chains in India and the Philippines. For a taste for some of the remarkable user research that the student teams conducted, check out the Design for Development video channel.

Last year, the Unlimited Potential (UP) awards highlighted some extraordinary student solutions:

-          Butterfly from Indonesia, which allows citizens to report environmental issues to relevant authorities via Voice and SMS on mobile phones.

-          WhereIsMyShuttle from South Africa, which enables people to more safely use public transport by viewing and tracking bus arrival times using their mobile phones. 

-          We also had great finalist projects from India, Colombia, and Egypt.

With so many great ideas already pouring in this year, the process of narrowing the field to five finalists will be a daunting challenge. Stay tuned for updates on the finalists and their projects, and our judges and their comments. You can follow UP on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MicrosoftUP, and we encourage everyone to use #imaginecup for following or tweeting on the event.

-- Amit Mital

Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Unlimited Potential Group