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The Imagine Cup 2009 finals is in full swing. On July 3, 2009 in Cairo the winner will be announced for the most innovative project. The Imagine Cup is the world’s premier student technology competition, Imagine Cup is one way Microsoft is encouraging young people to apply their imagination, their passion, and their creativity to technology innovations that can make a difference in the world – today. Now in its seventh year, the Imagine Cup has grown to be a global event. In 2008, more than 200,000 students from 100 countries entered the Imagine Cup competition.

The Croatian Team consisting of Tomislav Fotak, Ivan Lozi?, Marko Škvorc, Ivan Švogor integrated Deep Earth (which uses Bing Maps) into their GeoScout.net project. Check out the videos of GeoScout to better understand how they’re leveraging Bing Maps.

GeoScout.Net is a platform which main purpose is emphasizing information flows, bringing experts, organizations, societies and people together. The fundamental assumption of this platform began with e-Governance. To visualize it, you can picture a pyramid. The idea that guides us is to use strong basis, and very general system, which components can later be developed used for specific and specialized purpose. Therefore we developed an infrastructure that is very easily expanded. Integrating a new set of functionalities is a few clicks away. Infrastructure like this can allow any developer to build in independent modules, specialized for solving specific millennium goals. Our experts have advised to build a module that can implicitly help to solve multiple millennium goals, i.e. child and maternal health, stop spreading infectious diseases, and keep a sustainable environment as well as world partnership. GeoScout.Net brings together organizations with same missions, trough an incident tracking module. It is no wonder that you can read in newspaper the entire villages were wiped out by some disease, natural disaster or the flora and fauna are threatened by environment pollution. GeoScout.Net allows organizations to select some endangered areas, and publish this information to all other users. Now, field experts and teams can spend less time organizing and reporting. This time allows them better work and greater service quality for those in needs. System can track the resources and needs of mobilized teams. Organization headquarters users can efficiently track the mission progress, and estimate when more help is needed. Also, when reporting a danger zone, system allows users to estimate risk, and help in supply assessment. When some historic data is needed, it is very simple to travel through it, since it is visualized on the map. Entire system is based on high level of visualization provided by Virtual Earth, and Silverlight web application. GeoScout.Net includes a mobile application which is optimized for field work. I t provides an interface for easy reporting, and browsing data in areas with poor ICT infrastructure. GeoScout.Net can also be used in different purposes; adding new modules application can explore whole new possibilities.

Go Team Croatia!

CP