Team Taiwan took the US$25,000 first prize and were bestowed the title of Heavyweight Embedded Technology Champion of the World in this year’s embedded development section of the Microsoft Imagine Cup.

The closing ceremony was held in Warsaw, Poland, in early July.

After five days of fierce competition, three student teams scooped the coveted first, second and third places. Scott Davis, group marketing manager for Windows Embedded and the Embedded Team captain, presented the awards.

The Taiwan team’s first prize was for Smarter ME, a smart meter designed to address environmental sustainability for businesses and in the home. It provides detailed power consumption information to homeowners, who can then use the information to reduce energy use and save money.

Second place went to Russian team MCPU for Robonanny, a walking and talking robot aimed at helping socialise and facilitate the education of young children.

France won third place for the Geras clever carpet that senses when an elderly person has a fall and calls the emergency services for help.

“It’s been an amazing journey and many amazing things have happened over the last week,” said Davis. “The unique thing about embedded devices is that they absolutely surround us, they form a kind of background music for technology and are integrated into every aspect of our life. Embedded devices augment the experiences that we have which helps us to solve some of the world’s toughest problems.”

The winning Taiwan team comprised Yung-Chi Chen, Yi-Sheng Lai and Ming-Chun Lin. They said: ‘We were very surprised. We are very proud to be the first place winner. If we didn’t get first place, we said we would cut our hair – we made a pact. Now we can keep our hair.”

When asked what they would do with the money, Ming-Chun-Li said he would marry his girlfriend, while Yi-Sheng plans to upgrade his camera and Yung-Chi had no idea just yet.

“This is about you learning how to take theoretical practice stuff that you did at university, which is always important, but you made it real world,” said Jon Perera, general manager for Microsoft Education. “You learned how to work as a team, you learned how to collaborate, you thought about the business complexity of how to bring these models to market.”