Once again, we FASTians proved to be the best in our business at CIO Campus Connexions held on Friday, 11th February at The Royal Rodale Club. CIO Campus Connexions was an event held to bridge the gap between the academia and the industry. Students from different renowned institutes and personnel from various high-profile companies were invited to participate in this event. CIO Pakistan has been bringing such initiatives to the forefront recently where students and industry personnel engage in various discussions and issues to help understand and negotiate expectations and ideas of the students. There were three rounds in all. The Mentoring Session (the name of which I am unable to recall), the knock-out round and the board of fame round. We FASTians took part in the Knock-out and Board of Fame Sessions, details of which are as follows:
The Knock-Out Round:
In the Knock-out round, the students, faculty and industry representatives were given a chance to debate and convey their perspectives about a hypothesis, which was provided to them on-the-spot. Some of the hypotheses were:
- Companies don’t want innovators, they want team leads.
- Industry doesn’t support research, institutions burden students without experience.
- Branded University, High Salary job in a multinational – Our society just wouldn’t come out of the “comfort zones”.
- There is no IT infrastructure or scope for entrepreneurship in Pakistan
- Individualism vs. Nationalism. What makes a person stay in Pakistan?
We got to hear a bit heaty, a bit rational and some very hilarious point-of-views from the representatives, but all in all, the discussion proved to open up minds and clear up misconceptions.
Arifa Batool won the best student speaker award for her ideas on the hypothesis given to her.
Board of Fame:
In this round, 10 students were to compete against each other and present their solutions to a Business/Technology problem. Ideas were written on Napkins with the best contender selected from 10-15 minute pitches by the participating students.
Syed Ali Raza secured the 1st Position for his technology idea and Arifa Batool clentched the 3rd position!
Ali’s Idea:
Named “Downtown“, it was all about using the power of social networking to uplift our interaction in other fields such as education, business etc. Consider replacing Facebook’s feature of “photos” with actual books and software.
“Application and software downloading is becoming increasingly popular these days with cutting-edge technology available readily over the Internet. But the problem remains in finding the right software from the right place. With the competition increasing, it is often the case that irrelevant or useless software is downloaded because of lack of reviews and guidance available at websites.”
– Quoted from Downtown
Arifa’s Idea:
Twitter for “iPhone”…Twitter for “BlackBerry”…Twitter for “Android”…and here you go, twitter for “Windows Phone 7″. Tired of writing a separate app for every other humanely possible platform ever? Bearing with the platform requirements (in my opinion, nakhrey of the platforms) makes the life of a developer pretty exhausting. Enters “mFusion” – Code once. Run on multiple. With mFusion you just need to write the app in a custom phone XML and mFusion would make it executable on all platforms! This project is currently under-construction as Arifa and her groupmates’ (Niyaz Noor Ali, Bilal Shaikh, Farrukh Zafar) Final Year Project!
Heartiest Congratulations to the winners! FASTians shine once again :) Looking forward to more events like these.
It was a great event indeed! =D Had great time there =)
Nice post tas and please keep your blog ‘alive’ =)
Great work! Great coverage of the event :) And I’m sure the event must have been a great experience in itself! :)
Great! Congratz to both of them :-) this shows how creative our fellows are … but I was really surprised to see that my idea didn’t even come in the top five and a guy who had actually copied the idea of Google Maps for Android was in top five :s Besides, I still can’t figure out why did they award second position to an idea which was in no way near to a computer science/IT application :-S
Well, there must’ve been several ideas hanging there and to be honest, the judges should have been given more time to decide. Plus, a napkin-sized paper doesn’t convey much about an idea so, I believe, they chose only those which had an instant impact on their minds. Not all of us are good with conveying the message in a “short and sweet” manner!
Although the shoe idea didn’t appeal to me much, but the board of fame thingy was for ‘business’/technology ideas. So it was related you know.
Btw, what was your idea?
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