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By Soul Solutions on
Monday, 9 July 2012
 Today was the big day for the top 6 teams. Their final presentation to the panel of judges. It was an interesting morning watching all the cool solutions:
Taiwan – had created a device + software to monitor activity levels and sleep patterns to assist wearers to lose weight. One of the team told his story growing up as a fat kid and how it had effected his life and his journey to change.
Ukraine – have created a glove + software that allows the deaf to use sign language and then the glove + software processes the signs and translates to spoken words using text to speech to allow them to communicate with ordinary people.
Japan – had a very energetic presentation showing off their smart led lighting solution which would dim lights in parts of rooms that are well lit to save extra power.
New Zealand – had created a phone app + online software to allow the blind to take photos of items and get information back about colour / text etc from OCR, family/friends, crowdsourcing or other services to help them with their daily activities.
Portugal – created a kinect-enabled shopping cart to follow shoppers around the supermarket to allow the disabled to more easily go shopping.
Greece – created a kinect software suite to assist Alzheimer patients fight the progression of the disease through exercise and activities design to help them retain memories.
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By Soul Solutions on
Sunday, 8 July 2012
Today was another big day for the competitors and judges. Round 2 meant seeing 3 teams twice in the same day. First up was the normal presentation round where students pitched their solution to a team of 6 judges. The afternoon was a new judging item added this year where the students spent 15 minutes presenting/demoing their solution at their showcase booth to the same set of judges and then had 15 mins of questions from the judges. I really liked this addition as you get to see a lot more detail and spend more time with the students. I think the environment made them a bit more relaxed with us standing around asking questions rather than looking very authoritative behind a desk. All 3 projects I saw today were really awesome, but unfortunately none of them made it to the top 6. Looking forward to seeing the top 6 present tomorrow: Taiwan, Ukraine, Japan, New Zealand, Portugal and Greece. Good luck guys! Technorati Tags: Imagine Cup
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By Soul Solutions on
Saturday, 7 July 2012
Today was fairly massive. Started at 8am and finished about 10:45 pm. Judged 6 teams today. There were lot of nerve but also lots of excitement and passion about their solutions.
Tonight they announced the 20 teams progressing to round 2:
Japan, Romania, Singapore, Greece, Ireland, China, Jordan, Qatar, Slovenia, Germany, Egypt, Australia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine (one of the teams I judged today), Taiwan, New Zealand, Uganda, Portugal, Korea and Oman.
In true spirit of imagine a world where technology solves the toughest problems, Uganda was unable to make it to Australia, so they competed “virtually” through video conferencing. It’s great to see that technology has allowed them to progress to the next round.
Congrats to all the teams and good luck for tomorrow.
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By Soul Solutions on
Tuesday, 3 July 2012
In my PhoneGap project I want to grab some data to display on Bing Maps. Originally I created myself a really neat rest formatted WCF service that return JSON, but after I spent a day pulling my hair out trying to deploy it in IIS I gave up and went for something uber simple. Over on my server I’ve created myself an ashx handler and configured the urlmappings etc. so it looks quite neat and returns a nice JSON data packet.
This is the way I decided to access it from JavaScript – seemed the simplest.
function callASHX(latitude, longitude) {
var request = new XMLHttpRequest;
request.open('GET', 'http://mysite.com/Items.aspx?latitude=' + latitude + '&longitude=' + longitude + '&buffer=500', false);
request.send();
if (request.status === 200) {
var result = JSON.parse(request.responseText);
if (result == null || result.Items == null || result.Items.length == 0) {
alert('No Items here');
}
else {
addItems(result,latitude, longitude);
}
}
}
.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }...
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By Soul Solutions on
Tuesday, 3 July 2012
I’ve been progressing a bit with my little IPhone PhoneGap Bing Maps app today. I’m at the stage where I can show my custom pushpins on the map within a polygon and centre the map on the polygon.
The next ting I want to do is show the user how to drive to the pin nearest them. In my spatial database I have the latitude and longitude values for the items and I can use STDistance to find how far each item is from the user’s position. The problem here is that it give me the distance “as the crow flies” which in most cases it’s fine but if the item is on a parallel street sometimes I think it’s the closet item but would then end up driving past another item on my way around the block to reach it.
I could return my dataset ordered by the closest (as the bird flies distance). Then I’m going to assume if I grab the 5 nearest items I’ve got a pretty damn good chance that one of those is in fact the closest to drive to. I’m going to use the Bing Maps Directions Module to plot the route for each one. I take the trip from my location to an item, then back, then to the next time and back as waypoints so I can process the data.
For the purpose of this example, I’m just grabbing the first 5 points that come back from my service as it doesn’t calculate the individual distances yet. Done like so:
First we create and load the directions module.
var directionsManager;
function loadDirectionsModule()...
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