Team Infusion members (from left: Feng Song Zhe, Mohamad Hanafi Awang, Yadlapalli Priya Bharath and Mohamed Marjuk Ali s/o Jiyavudeen with Mr John Fernandes, Director, Developer & Platform Evangelism, Microsoft Singapore)	Team PlanetKY members Kong Wen Bin (second from left) and James Yeo (extreme right) with mentors Ricky Ho and Kang Siew Hwa)

“Infusion" had emerged as the champion of the Embedded Category in the Singapore Round of the competition. "PlanetKY" emerged as the TOP six teams worldwide in the Mashup Category of the Imagine Cup after beating 50 international entries from the local and overseas IHLs.

The competition, into its seventh year, attracted 300,000 students from 100 countries but only 149 teams made it to the finals.

The Imagine Cup competition encourages students around the globe to imagine a better world in which people are empowered by technology created by the students’ talents and innovation. They are required to base their projects on the eight hardest challenges in the world today identified by The United Nations in its Millennium Goals.

There are nine categories: Software Design, Embedded Development, Game Development, "Project Hoshimi" (Programming Battle), IT Challenge, Algorithm, Photography, Short Film and Interface Design.

“Infusion” will face 19 other teams from countries like Japan, United Kingdom, United States of America and Canada in the Embedded Category.

Their project sought to reduce the overall cost of the The Patient Controlled Analgesia (PCA) system. The PCA system helps to manage the operation of an infusion pump system to allow for intelligent patient controlled delivery of analgesics such as epidural using a high performance Windows CE based computing platform. “Infusion” developed a lower cost embedded solution which leverages on an Ebox 4300 based system.

Team leader Yadlapalli Priya Bharath said, “We were disappointed when we did not win the software category of the competition so we were ecstatic to win the Embedded category. We’ve been busy these past few weeks fine-tuning our system, beefing up our knowledge and presentation skills.”

Expectations will be high following NYP’s “Trail Blazers” which won the Embedded Development category in the prestigious Microsoft Imagine Cup 2008 held in Paris in July last year. The team impressed the judges with their Environmental Monitoring System (EMS), a low-cost, self-sustaining environmental monitoring robotic system that gives high-quality environmental data in real time.

“We’re inspired with their achievements and we will try our best at the finals. Winning will definitely be a bonus,” said Bharath.

“PlanetKY” comprises of two Year-3 Diploma in Multimedia & Infocomm Technology students Kong Wen Bin and James Yeo.

The team created "VENews - Virtual Earth News" that uses MashUp technology to gather the latest environmental news from RSS feeds around the world and present them intelligently on Microsoft Virtual Earth.

VENews uses a Mashup application to retrieve information from various sources and re-mix them together, enabling the user to view a holistic environmental picture of the Earth. The project allows users to have a quick overview of reported environmental issues. It shows real time plotting of location of the affected areas and users can select specific news by category like water and air pollution.

“For the finals, we have upgraded our project to also include environmental solutions by different organisations,” said team member Kong Wen Bin.

	Two other teams from NYP, “Epoch” from SIT and “Green Dream” from SEG(E), made to the Software Category of  Singapore Finals.  Team “Epoch” won the People's Choice Award for their integrated communications system while “Green Dream” came in fourth for their Smart Home Monitoring System project. Good Luck to “Infusion” and PlanetKY in Cairo!
All smiles from Team NYP!