Making Humanitarian Apps

Microsoft’s Imagine Cup challenges high school and college students to develop apps that address the world’s most pressing problems. The result is humanitarian mobile devices. “Imagine Cup projects are aligned with the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals, which include eliminating poverty, promoting education, improving health care, and providing clean drinking water by 2015. Projects in this year’s competition trended toward education and global health, although several teams tackled another pressing problem worldwide—traffic management—with applications for improving bus routes and a social networking tool for organizing car pools, says Jon Perera (pdf), Microsoft’s general manager for education.”