With Emeka Aginam

STEVE Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, sponsors of the software contest called Imagine Cup, holding in New York, USA has advised participants at the contest, saying it is ideas that matter.

His words: “Ideas matter. Sometimes people get all caught up at speed and agility and execution, which is certainly vital, but part of the reason you’re here isn’t just because you work really hard and you did some really good programming; it’s because you had an idea that somebody thought mattered.

You picked something interesting to do. You picked something that somebody thought was important to work on. In our business ideas matter.

IMAGINE CUP: From left, Alaba Oluwazemi, Kolawole Toluwanimi, David Olanizo, and Taiwo Orogbangba before their presention, Saturday at the ongoing Imagine Cup competition in New York, USA. Photo by Emeka Aginam.

“Secondly, and at least in this industry, you’ve got to find something that you’re passionate about. You’re going to put in way too much time and way too much energy to not be completely fired up about what you’re doing. Some of you probably get quiet and focused and steely.

But you have to find something that you can put yourself into heart, body and soul. And hopefully part of what you learned from this Imagine Cup exercise is you found some part of your passion, something that really resonated with you that you could get very enthusiastic about.

“Third, you’ve got to be tenacious. There’s a view in the technology business that all great things are achieved by three people in three months. Most of you know that the greatness of your project couldn’t be achieved by three people in three months, probably took you more like eight or nine, and probably most of you understand that if you want to take your ideas to the next level, they would require more time, more attention, more tenacity.

You’ve got to keep with these things and keep working on them, because whether you’re Microsoft or Apple or Facebook or Google or Oracle or IBM, it doesn’t matter who you are in this business, there’s no substitute for being tenacious and keeping after those ideas that you are passionate about. He also spoke of the technologies that some of the contestants used.

“I want to give you a little bit of a sense, really, about where things are going, and what some of you did with these technologies. A number of your projects used Azure, and Bing Maps, and Windows Phone 7.

Nearly half of the projects were actually Windows Phone-based. Azure was used in 46 per cent of the projects, Bing Maps in 27 per cent.

“The one that I thought was most interesting was about 10 of the projects actually used Kinect hooked together with the PC, and a lot of the interesting projects in healthcare, rehabilitation, education particularly saw a lot of value in the technologies we’ve built in Kinect that help recognize the voice, and motion, and skeletal tracking, and the like.

So, the kinds of things you’re doing, coupled with the kinds of things we’re doing at Microsoft, I think, are really quite remarkable.

“I encourage you to enjoy your time here in New York, enjoy the Imagine Cup. To those of you who win something I say congratulations in advance.

For those of you who do not, I say congratulations, because certainly everybody who’s here is a winner who’s done incredible work, and you should be incredibly proud.”