Right now, I am attending the Imagine Cup competition in Warsaw. For those that don't know, the Imagine Cup is a Microsoft sponsored competition in which teams of students present software projects (based on Microsoft kits, of course) which aim for a better world. Specifically, they have to tackle one of the Millenium Goals of the United Nations. Today the six finalists from each categorie (I attended embedded and software design) got a chance to woo the judges. Tomorrow, we'll find out who the winners are.

While the competition on first sight has not much to do with data centers (I mean, one solution was a program that converts documents into a sound file that can be transmitted over a radio frequency, and distributed to OLPC laptops in a radius of 400 km), that is actually farther from the truth than you think. Actually, many projects showed ideas that I have seen in data centers before.

For example, a very nice project from a Romanian team shows a solution that maps the use of all different electronic equipment in a household, and that can cut the power to them separately using a webinterface. I mean, how long has the data center world been using a similar solution!

Another idea came from Singapore, and involved the ability for Third World teachers to send questions to an electronic database, that would send a reply back by sms. If the database can't handle the question, it is crowdsourced to peers instead. That strikes me as a comprehensive modification of the good ol' sms module. The French had a very practical solution where a smart carpet detects a fall by an elderly person, and would send a message to an alarm number. Again, that is monitoring.

Other solutions were very dependent on cloud computing, and therefore on data centers. A British student developed shades with built-in camera and headset. That one is wirelessly connected to a phone (or other device), and that in turn is connected to 'the Cloud.'

When the blind person (it is aimed at the visually impaired) looks at someone, it connects to Facebook, and links that person by face recognition to online picturs, trying to identify that person. Same goes for written text: it uses script recognition in the cloud. That makes it quite dependent from data centers.

(And the concept struggles on the fact that a blind person still has to *aim* the glasses towards someone or the sign. As aiming is done on *sight*, we have a bit of a chicken-egg problem, but we'll disregard that)

So actually, data centers make the world a better place.