Well Paris was a blast.  We rocked the Paris town hall, we partied hard on our river boat ride, and we got into the groove at the louvre. 
We've had quite a few people emailing us and showing their interest in the Taxibus System which has been great.  We're very open to people contacting us.

Paris was so much fun, that we've decided to head to Egypt next year(hopefully).  We're going to start early (now), and make our software a lot more appealing ot the eye :)

Here's a few pictures from our trip to Paris:

The time is drawing near for the World Wide finals.

All the important things have been done (Booking trips to Disneyland)......  Now we've just got to do a little bit of touching up of presentation and a little more practice :)

We couldn't quite squeeze into the XXL t-shirt we received from Vodafone, so we found a much better use for it. 

The summer is going to be so much nicer than freezing cold flats in Christchurch... not to mention the 4 star hotel     hmmm...... I feel warmer just thinking about it. 

Along our Journey, there have been many companies helping us out, and we've just gained an extra helper or two :)

So far, we've been given a free developers licence for Telogis' Geobase software, which our Simulation and algorithm hook into to calculate distances on roads etc - all the mapping stuff.

We're also getting some TrimTrac devices from Trimble, which will allow us to track vehicles driving around :) hehehe.....

The TrimTrac devices need SIM cards to get transmitting their locations, and that's where Vodafone come in! As well as providing some SIM cards, they've also given us a phone to take to France to act as a modem, which will receive messages from passengers, and allow us to have input into our simulation.  We got our contact to Vodafone through Clarus, so big Ed has been very helpful.

Our fame continues, with a story being printed in the Christchurch Star newspaper this Sunday I think*, as well as another local newspaper.

I've got a Vodafone Motorola charging at the moment, and should be able to test it out tonight :D

Here's an article from computer world magazine, where we featured :)

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/devt/EBD595EF6826FCD0CC25743D001BCC1F

Well the other night we had a meeting at Clarus.  This is who our Industry Mentor Mike works for - they're a software contracting company in Christchurch. 
They've been helping us throughout the competition, and are offering even more help with the next stage of our competition. 

The meeting involved eating lots of pizza and chips, with some wine to wash it down :D

Clarus has organised for us to do our presentation on 10 June at the Canterbury Software Cluster, and representatives from Microsoft will be there as well, telling everyone about the Imagine Cup event.  This will be a good practice for France, as we'll have to improve our presentation, and internationalise (or should I say internationalize) our presentation.

We've made it to the front page of the Software Cluster's website: http://www.canterburysoftware.org.nz/Home and we've had lots of people commenting on seeing us in the local newspaper :)  I'll leave the fame stories for another blog - I'll take some screen shots of some of the sites where we're mentioned.... more to come soon....

So recently, we've been thinking about whether we could patent the 'Taxibus' idea.  We've talked to lots of different people, including Intellectual Property professionals, and we've been learning lots.

There seems to be a bit of a difference when it comes to patenting software, compared to other areas.  Patenting laws are also different around the world, and so if you go somewhere like the web, and ask for some advice, you'll get many different answers (some conflicting)!

It seems that we wont be able to patent our idea, as it seems to have been thought about decades ago!  This doesn't meant that the idea has been implemented yet, and so we really have first movers advantage.  You can patent algorithms in software, as part of a system, however we've decided against this - we believe it would be too easy to work around an algorithm, and we've been told that "A patent is only as good as your ability to defend it (in court)". This doesn't mean all hope is lost - a Patent is by no way a miracle cure!  Many companies protect their ideas by way of 'trade secrets'.  This basically means that anyone that looks at the 'secret' - in our case our code, must sign a non disclosure agreement, promising not to tell anyone or disclose any details of the system.

After months of development on our project, we've managed to take out the New Zealand finals!

Paris here we come!!  (apparently Singapore Airlines have some fancy flights as well :))

It was good times up in Auckland - we stayed at the luxurious 'The Westin' and enjoyed the indoor pool and jacuzzi.  Friday night's dinner was awesome - it was at a small restaurant at the side of the Westin, and it was like a little night club -snoop doggy dog style. There were florescent green, blue, yellow lights on the ceiling, and the food was immaculate.

The 5am wake up call made a bit of an impact, and we retired to our soft fluffy beds at 10pm.

Everything came together on Friday morning.  We were having some wireless internet issues, and a fixed connection soon eliminated our worries.  Our presentation went smoothly, and most importantly to plan. 

The competition was strong, and the other teams had some really good ideas.  When it came to first and second place we couldn't be sure where we stood, but we prevailed.  Soon after, we were swamped with media and became the center of attention.

How much work will do we have ahead of us?  Well... it looks like we're going to have to go back to the drawing board.

So everything builds fine, and Everything was running wonderfully last night.

Suddenly, I try to run the same app this morning, and I get the following error:

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Microsoft Visual Studio
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Error while trying to run project: Unable to start program 'C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop\TripBooker April 25\TripBookerController\bin\Debug\TripBookerController.exe'.

This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Review the manifest file for possible errors. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem. For more details, please see the application event log.
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OK  
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The solution to this problem is quite interesting - remove the xmlns attribute from the configuration tag in the App.config, and it all works again.... how interesting.

Ok, so Team Phoenix has made it to the New Zealand finals, and we've got a week and a bit left to get perfected :)

We did take a little break over the last week - which has been quite nice, and I'm feeling quite good now (Ready to soldier on!) - now we've got a bit more coding to do - we're developing a cellphone app that will link into our software, and we're having a meeting today about that.

On top of the software things, we've got to make a poster for the media, and of course we've been asked to blog, and hence I'm writing now.  We're a bit cautious about our blogging, as we don't want to give the other groups any ideas :D - hi to the 3 other teams if you're reading this - see you up in Auckland.  I'm looking forward to having a swim in the indoor pool! (at "The Westin")

Anyway, this has been a great learning experience, and as always, there's always more learning to do.