Dziękuję Warszawa, Dziękuję Microsoft! [Chapter 1 – Departure]

I just returned from my first ever trip outside Asia – an all expenses paid outing to Warsaw, Poland for a week. It was, as you would expect, a really amazing experience and I felt it deserved a nice long account for 3 reasons.

1) To consolidate all that I learnt and experienced in the trip so I can chuckle over it on my 35th birthday.

2) To have a readymade link that I can point people to when they ask "Hey, how was the trip"?

3) To attain closure and move on with my relatively mundane existence in Singapore.

So, what was I doing in Warzsawa (read WarshAwa)? Representing Sweden (Heja Sverige! {read Heya Sveriya} [wow so many brackets in one line]) in the Imagine Cup 2010.

Sweden? Imagine Cup?

Imagine Cup is the world’s largest student technology competition, organized by Microsoft. The supposed aim of the competition is to tackle UN’s millennium development goals using technology; but I figured it was more of an effective way for Microsoft to rebrand themselves as the friendly and socially responsible corporation which makes cool software – a title that belongs to Google right now.

A close friend who is on an exchange-ish type of programme in Sweden, thought it might be a good idea to repackage an ambitious concept we had been working on to connect banks and villagers, and submit an entry into Imagine Cup. The idealist that I was, I felt we were fooling ourselves. But the great presenter that he was, he talked his way to the top in the Swedish regionals (ably supported by myself of course ;)).

Realizing that we were 3 Indians (another friend from India included) in a Swedish team, we decided to recruit a cool Swedish entrepreneur who was doing his masters. My friend in India sadly couldn’t make it for various reasons, so 2 Indians and a Swede got a trip to Poland to represent CreditMobile in the worldwide finals fully sponsored by Microsoft.

And so it came to be that after a crazy few weeks of juggling Credit Mobile, my internship, random freelance projects and house-shifting, I left on a 12-hour Airbus 380 (double decker :D) SQ flight to Zurich on the 2^nd of July.