Indonesia Imagine Cup Team is Worldwide Runner-up in the Games Competition

Solite Studio, Indonesia’s National Winner, has been announced as the Worldwide Runner-up for the Games Competition at Imagine Cup 2013 with their ‘Save the Hamster’ project!

Built on the Windows® Phone platform, ‘Save the Hamster’ is a game app that serves as a learning tool for young people to exercise their mental arithmetic skills in a fun and engaging manner.

Coming from a virtually unknown campus, Universitas Trunojoyo Madura, the team was considered the underdogs in the local competition. They came, they saw and then won against much more experienced Indonesian teams from award-league campuses such as ITB and IT Telkom. And now they have taken the world stage and flown Indonesia’s flag proudly for all the world to see!

This win was not a surprise. A lot of people at the worldwide finals in St Petersburg, Russia, said that Team Solite Studio’s presentation was one of the few where the audience gave several rounds of applause. Judges were surprised to know that Save the Hamsters had been downloaded 30,000 times in just two weeks (20,000 times on Windows Phone and 10,000 on Windows 8). A lot of Microsoft employees came to the booth, played the game and then returned with other people due to the cute and fun game.

Judges from other categories came over to the booth just to check on this “cute game that people have been talking about”. And, Team Solite Studio even received a few “please call me” invitations from venture capitalists during the Public Exhibition.

“Several people told us that they are willing to bet that Solite Studio would be on the stage during the Awards Night, and they were correct! A 1st place winner would have been fantastic, but Worldwide Runner-up is also an amazing achievement!” exclaimed Irving Hutagalung of Microsoft Indonesia’s Developer and Platform Group who attended the finals with the winning team.

It has been an amazing journey for Solite Studio - congratulations!