A team from Russia took third place in the Imagine Cup competition in Europe, Africa and the Middle East

The Imagine Cup 2019 competition has already begun, and this week we held the second regional final in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. The Finderr team from the United Kingdom took first place and received a ticket to the world finals for their application for finding lost items using a smartphone. Congratulations! Well, the third place was taken by the guys from Russia.

Thank you for translating our MSP, Lev Bulanov .

The goal of the Microsoft Imagine Cup is to give engineering students around the world the opportunity to create great new technology solutions. “We understand that today's students are tomorrow's entrepreneurs. In addition, they will make important technological decisions. And we try to invest in all interesting projects, ”said Jennifer Ritzinger, our Senior Director of Academic Ecosystems.

Students are given the opportunity to travel, receive individual mentoring, develop business and technological skills, and also communicate with like-minded people to bring their ideas to life. To travel to Amsterdam and participate in the regional finals organized by Microsoft Ignite | The Tour , 12 finalists out of hundreds of EMEA entriesfrom 10 countries. First place prize? $ 15,000 and a trip to the World Cup 2019. When creating the original technological solution, the final projects ranged from solving problems in healthcare, agriculture, accessibility and education to many others and used various Microsoft technologies, including Azure virtual machines, mixed reality and AI “The Imagine Cup is amazing, we feel able to do more,” said Ian Kamau of the iCropal team about his competition experience. “For us, this is not only a competition, but also a way of exchanging opinions with colleagues in order to develop ourselves and our product,” the AirCloud team said about its decision to participate.

During the three days of the competition, the teams had the opportunity to participate in the Entrepreneur’s Day and Ignite events | The Tour aims to learn how to improve their technology and integrate the latest and greatest products into their solutions. The regional finale ended with each team presenting to the jury a direct demonstration of their projects, among which the three best were selected.

The competition does not end there! April 1, we will announce the regional finalists of America (Americas Regional), vying for the final place at the World Cup. Finderr and our Asia Regional winners , Caeli from India, will be heading to Seattle this May for a chance to win the 2019 Cup. Who will head home with $ 100,000 and a mentoring session with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella? Follow us on Twitter and Instagram to find out .

Meet the 3 best EMEA teams

1st place - Finderr , Great Britain

The team created an application that uses cognitive services and virtual machines to make searching for lost items accessible to everyone, including people with visual impairments.
Prize: $ 15,000 and a place in the 2019 World Cup.

2nd place - Athena-IO , Tunisia

The team created a cross-platform solution that allows you to create and visualize content on mixed reality devices to help corporations train their employees and make technology more accessible to everyone.
Prize: $ 5,000.

3rd place - π-project , Russia

The team has developed an inexpensive and non-invasive solution for daily monitoring of health status using artificial intelligence to analyze analyzes.

Prize: $ 1,000.

Congratulations to all of our EMEA Regional Finalists for their incredible projects and hard work. The competition does not end there! Sign up for updates to follow this year's competition and find out who will take the Imagine Cup 2019 home.