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Microsoft’s Imagine Cup is the world’s most influential student technology competition, bringing together student innovators from all over the world. If you have a killer idea for a new app, you can make it happen through Imagine Cup. Microsoft resources and support enable you to take a project from concept to market, and potentially win big cash and travel prizes in the process (score!).
It gets even better: Imagine Cup just unveiled a new online competition just for females to participate in, the Women’s Athletics App Challenge in partnership with the women’s national basketball team, the Seattle Storm. The challenge is open to teams of female developers, innovators, and entrepreneurs around the world to create software related to sports, health or fitness. The deadline to sign up and upload projects is June 14, 2013, so start brainstorming! Each student in the winning team receives $1,000 plus a trip to Seattle in August to see a Seattle Storm game and to meet Lisa Brummel, Microsoft’s Chief People Officer and co-owner of the Storm (so cool!).
More and more collegiettes have been entering the Imagine Cup each year (go us!). Last year, nearly 20 percent of students at the World Finals were women. One of Imagine Cup’s goals is to help students build developer skill sets, learn how to launch a start-up, and improve their prototypes based on the advice of mentors and judges, all super helpful tools for collegiettes to gain. Imagine Cup gives women an important platform to pursue technology interests and careers and serves as a launch-pad to becoming designers, inventors, or successful businesspeople.
The Imagine Cup is super interested in having more female students compete to be the best and creating more opportunities for women everywhere to access and benefit from all the incredible technology that is changing our world every day.
Imagine Cup also has 3 competitions open to all students:
The finalists of these contests will be flown to Russia for the world finals this July to compete for $50,000! The deadline to sign up and form a team is 3/15, and then you need to submit your app by 4/15. These contests also have an additional opportunity to win cash via the women’s empowerment award sponsored by UN Women. Check out details here.
Find out more and enter the Women’s Athletic App here now!