Reaching out to students with innovative ideas, Ericsson, TeliaSonera and HiQ have sponsored an IMS application contest, at Stockholm Royal Institute of Technology.

Tania Leppert, from IMS Expert Center in Canada, and responsible for university collaboration around IMS application development, says the contest was also a way to build IMS competence among students and spread awareness of the opportunities it brings.

Students were judged on their business case (50 percent), technical solution (40 percent) and presentation (10 percent).

"Over the past semester, students attended several seminars and then developed IMS applications using Ericsson's IMS Service Development Studio (SDS), an end-to-end development and testing environment," Leppert says.

First prize of SEK 45,000 went to Chinese students Lele Cao, Kai Xie, Wenhui Cai, Fenni Kang, and Tingran Tao, whose application, RadarWiki, allows users to combine location-based services with interactive information.

Cao, who has worked at Ericsson in Shanghai, said: "Not being business students, it wasn't easy to learn how to do the market analysis and a business case. It took a lot of effort.

"IMS is a powerful technology. It seemed complicated at first, but once we got started with it, it got easier. We had many ideas; the hard part was identifying the right market segments for our ideas," Cao says.

Leppert says the plan is to repeat the competition's success in other markets: there are already two events planned for later this year, in Canada and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US.

"The contest gives Ericsson the opportunity to demonstrate to customers and the community some of the different ways IMS can be used, and show the kinds of applications that can be developed in just a few months," she says.

Todd Ashton, head of IMS sales at Ericsson, was present at the June 8 award ceremony. He says: "This type of competition helps us open our eyes to how our technology could be used, in ways that we do not necessarily see within the telecoms industry.

"It fosters the development of a steady supply of young innovators who are competent with IMS technology and who can employ it in ways we have not yet even imagined. Such activities are key in speeding up the adoption of IMS and making the multimedia business fly."

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Julie De Angelis Skörd