Team Guids advances to next round of Imagine Cup 2012 – India

They started as off a few members. They wanted to do something new in the software field. They had an idea which might just bring in a revolution. More importantly, they believed in themselves. They constitute Team Guids, Microsoft Imagine Cup 2012 Participant under the Software Design category which has now advanced to the next round.

Team Guids is working hard on bringing the best from Nutri Leaf onto the Windows Phone platform. For the unknown, Nutri Leaf is a Windows Phone application which acts as the health counsel for the user and advises him/her what to eat and when. The user can review his/her calorie intake, energy chart, find out healthy recipes and suggest some too, locate restaurants in and around, place tips for a particular diet/food item and more. In short, Nutri Leaf dons the second avatar of a health counsel which takes delicate care of the user’s food intake, hence contributing in maintaining the healthy state of the user.

With an aim to not just win Imagine Cup 2012 but also win the hearts of millions through this revolutionary Windows Phone app, Team Guids is working hard day and night to ensure Nutri Leaf comes out in its best form.

As for now, it’s time to congratulate Team Guids for their entry into the next round of the local finals of Imagine Cup 2012 India. But the champagne popping will happen only after the finals.

Support Team Guids as they put together their efforts in helping reduce Obesity and Malnutrition.

Service to humanity is Service to God.

Catch Team Guids on Facebook, Twitter , Flickr and YouTube. Also download the Team Guids app to stay updated about their next move.

Team Guids – Targeted for a healthier tomorrow

Stay aware about Team Guids, download the Windows Phone app now!

Tired of switching between various social network platforms to get updates about us? We have a solution: a Windows Phone application which lets you know every new thing posted about us, including this blog. Read our interesting Facebook posts, follow us on Twitter and browse through inspiring pictures on Flickr all while using the Team Guids Windows Phone app available now at the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Help us in our fight against obesity. Help us in saving the best for a better tomorrow.

Support Team Guids and you’ll have a reason to smile.

Download our Windows Phone app from here.

“Only a life lived for others is a life worth while.” –

Albert Einstein

How a small kid made a HUGE difference

Picture this:

Heavy rain. Busy street. Cars honking. Mopeds blaring with their horns. Cyclists animatedly expressing disgust. Passerby’s engaging in serious conversation on the present situation. Everything is at a standstill. Reason? A tree just broke off from its trunk and fell right in the middle of the road, thus jeopardizing the route and turning out to be a huge obstacle to pass by. The tree portion fell right in the middle, against the passing route which means people on left side of the fallen tree couldn’t move to the right side and vice-versa.

If seen, there was a lot of activity going on there. Businessmen in Armani suits were discussing about removing the tree from within the bullet-proof glass of their BMWs, passengers parked their two-wheelers carefully ensuring it doesn’t fall and were trying to analyze the length of the tree. Everybody was committed in removing the tree. But was anybody serious enough? There definitely was a lot of serious talk but was there any action? NO!

Out of nowhere came a small kid, probably 10 years of age, stood beside the tree for a min and started pushing the tree away from the road with his bare hands. It can be easily said that after analyzing the kid’s physical strength and the tree’s weight/height, it would be impossible to move the tree had the kid continued doing the same for years together. A few minutes later, he was joined by a bunch of school kids who were also standing at this chaotic point. Seeing a few kids trying to push a HUGE tree, a vendor selling bananas stepped forward and offered his hand. He was later joined by a postman. ‘Please don’t go’ cried a middle-aged man as his wife rushed to lend her support in shoving away the tree. The businessman dropped his Armani suit/tie into the car and stepped out to also lend a hand in this. This inspired his driver to join him and later college teens with their heavily drenched bags, aunties and uncles and a few elderly people joined in too.

Result: With a huge force of more than 50 people, this fallen tree was finally removed from the road and normalcy was restored thus allowing business to happen as usual. The businessman sat back in his car and drove off, the banana vendor started his daily hawk of selling bananas and the uncles and aunties drove off to their respective functions and relatives house. One small figure could be seen still standing. He was the small kid who touched the tree first. There was a cute little smile on his face. A smile of satisfaction. He was the one who inspired people, both a banana vendor and a BMW owner to help him against this common problem. He was the one who made the college teens worry more about this tree problem than getting their bags wet. He was the one who initiated the effort of looking after the inconvenience of the passerby’s when they themselves were just TALKING. And he was just a 10-year-old.

It sometimes takes a small initiative to bring about a change. That initiative may be from a ‘somebody’ or ‘nobody’ but it’s the start and the end that matters the most.

Team Guids plans to help reduce obesity among the present generation through Nutri Leaf, a Windows Phone Application that acts as a health counsel thus assisting the users in staying fit and healthy.

Support Team Guids now! Help them in promoting their work to a larger audience for they too share the same noble thought as the small kid above.

Follow them on

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/TeamGuids

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/TeamGuids

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/guidsoftwares

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/teamguids

[Psst: Stay tuned. We have something interesting coming up soon.]

Why support Team Guids?

Phew! Life today is running at break-neck speed. School, job, children, daily commitments, hobbies and the list goes on. Removing 8 hours of daily sleep, an individual gets only 16 hours to accomplish the hurriedly-scrabbled points in the above to-do list. And in between all this, suddenly we ask you to Support Team Guids, read our blog posts, tweet about us, like us on Facebook and what not. We might be obsessed with gaining more followers and spreading our word to a larger audience, but a few questions may crop in your mind, the primary being ‘Why support Team Guids?‘.

(‘We’ or ‘we’ will henceforth refer to Team Guids and/or members of Team Guids)

Team Guids comprises of a bunch of simple students who often turn up late for their morning class, lookout for excuses to skip punishment for bunking classes, train hardly in the gym to shower their friend with birthday bumps while happily eating away that expensive cake, use a lot of emoticons while chatting on Facebook with ‘:P’ being the most used one and more. In fact, we are just like other students with respect to behaviour. But while others watch Pogo or F.R.I.E.N.D.S and go to sleep, we prefer the desktop / laptop computer to our bed and try to work on new algorithms, methods, logic for Nutri Leaf.

We are committed in bringing a change through our actions and abilities, a positive change. Under this motive, Team Guids has got Nutri Leaf under their belt and are constantly working hard in improving various aspects of this mobile application which acts as a health counsel (more about Nutri Leaf here).

Windows Phone is one of the most promising mobile platform today and we plan to launch the second version of Nutri Leaf on the Windows Phone Marketplace soon.

No, our motive is not to be felicitated in a glittering ceremony with applause all around. Its good if that happens but we aren’t seeking just that. Our main aim is to see a healthy younder generation; to be able to assist the common man with his eating habits, his nutritional intake, his Calorie Burn graph and more such that under the tips which we offer through Nutri Leaf, it brings out a positive change in user’s eating diet.

This is what Team Guids is burning the midnight oil for!

So here we are, nagging you again to follow us, like us, tweet about us and give us little of your precious time. But trust us, it’ll be all worth it!

You can catch up with our actions, find out what we are upto at

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Flickr
• WordPress (You are here right now!)

[One last nag: Please to spread the word, if you like us (Team Guids)]

Nutri Leaf and importance of health in daily life

Life has become so busy these days. It’s like a train with no final destination, stopping at stations for quick breaks and moving on hurriedly. In this haste of moving on and catching up with the rest, we sometimes do forget the importance of few things in life. One among them is self health. People are so occupied and busy with their materialistic tasks that they do not mind skipping their health checkup for a business meet or binging on junk food against the strict nutritional diet they follow. In this effort to catch up with the fast-moving train, little do they know that in order to catch up, they need to run which one can, only with a healthy body. This implies that a mortal human being may end up missing out on life and its important stages if he tends to overlook a few basic health measures.

Mahatma Gandhi rightly said:

Consuming unhealthy food may end up distorting the protein balance in one’s body, thus leaving some drastic effects on the human body like obesity, stress, malnutrition, food poisoning etc. Ofcourse no one wants to spend the whole 24 hours in a bed being ill due to mis-consumption of food. Being unhealthy on a frequent basis decreases the self-confidence of an individual and contributes to a lazy mind. And a lazy mind is a devil’s workshop.

But in today’s busy scenario where working professionals change flights almost everyday for their business meetings, students engage themselves in multiple activities with hardly eking out time for lunch/dinner and the concept of ‘Brunch‘ has evolved taking the place of breakfast and lunch, the question that arises is as to how can an individual stay updated on healthy matters, especially on diet matters? In this age of smartphones and technology, should one physically meet his doctor regularly or arrange for a virtual meeting? Or do we have another option? Yes we do.

A mobile application which analyses your diet and then advises ‘what to eat’ and ‘when to eat’. Sounds cool, eh?

Q. Where does this mobile application stay?

Right in your trouser pocket.

Q. Availability?

All throughout the day. 24 x 7

Q. What exactly it does?

It analyses your food intake, readies its database and advises you on what is healthy for you to eat and when.

Q. Thats all?

No. You can write a recipe, calculate the amount of calories burnt, churn out tips about a particular food item, search for restaurants in your vicinity with healthy food on their menu list, connect with friends on what you eat and more.

Q. Wow, great! Does it have a name?

Yes. Nutri Leaf.

Stay Tuned!

Nutri Leaf: Features and Updates

We presume that you are now pretty well aware of Team Guids which comprises of three young and dynamic students working hard to help make this world a healthier place to live through a Windows Phone App. But wait, it’s not just an App. In fact it is your health counsel. We call it Nutri Leaf. In one sentence, Nutri Leaf is all about collecting nutritional information of a user’s daily intake/diet and providing the right healthy choice of what to consume as food. Inputs like age, height, weight, gender, activity level etc. are assessed including the calories intake too and with the help of Nutri Sense Algorithm, suggestions are doled out to the user on ‘What to eat‘ and ‘When to eat‘.

 

Ever heard of connecting users and the food they consume to social media platforms? Team Guids has grand plans to incorporate the above functionality into the second update of Nutri Leaf since a user does want to be connected 24X7. In short, Nutri Leaf can be called as a Social Nutrition Application.

Nutri Leaf comes with a wide range of features; features which would want you to say ‘This is what I have been looking for’. Read on to know more about them:

 Bar code Reader:

• When a user ventures out shopping for food, Nutri Leaf scans the bar code of the particular food item which is being bought and lets the user know immediately if the food item is healthy to buy or not, thus helping save a lot of time and money for the user.
• It has the ability to suggest healthy recipes to the user, based on the nutritional database that gets collected within.
• Nutri Leaf can display the health rating of the just-scanned food item and also the Total Shopping Cart health rating of that particular shopping event.

Smart, isn’t it?

 

Recipe

• Users can write a new recipe. (It has to pass the Quality Test, checked by the Nutri Leaf Admin Team)
• Users can read, comment and rate recipes.
• Users can sort out the recipes and get a new list based on parameters like Category, Location and Time of the day.

 

Exercise

• A user can calculate the amount of Calories he/she burns per day.
• A user can also obtain a pictorial representation (Graph) of the calories burnt in a day/week/month.

Tips

Tips are short-worded information bits which keep the user informed and updated within the specific module/category. Nutri Leaf displays tips while a user interacts with the application. These tips provide information on Nutrition, Diet and Health Activities of the Human Body. Users can view tips, like tips or even disable the tips feature by switching it to ‘Off’.

 

Restaurant

• Nutri Leaf can suggest a restaurant name to check in while friends can also suggest a restaurant/eatery for hangouts.
• On the Nutri Leaf taskbar, the restaurant admin can add more information about the variety of food they offer, their nutritional content, value and more.

 

Friends

• Users can add or delete a friend.
• Users can also check out the eating schedule of their friends, their check-ins to restaurants, their intake and also obtain the health ratings.
•  Nutri Leaf also presents seamless integration for Facebook with the ability to post updates, add friends, look out for potential lunch/dinner options etc.

 

Impressed? We bet you are. With its second update coming soon to the Windows Phone Marketplace, Nutri Leaf will be the premier Nutrition Application with loads of enhanced features right at the user’s disposal. Team Guids believes in ‘Health is Wealth’ and these three words have been the core motivation factor for them to put together such a useful application for mobile users. Did we say it’s coming to the Android marketplace too? Yes, very soon.

 

Watch out for interesting stories about Team Guids and Nutri Leaf in the upcoming posts. At the end, we believe you will be mighty impressed and even want to say a ‘Thank You’.

Stay tuned!

Team Guids – Imagine Cup 2012 participant: What, Why, Where and Who?

What?

Team Guids consists of a bunch of enthusiastic young minds passionate towards technology, wanting to help the common people lead an even better life. Team Guids plans to make a difference, not by studying rocket science but instead through means of software [/* Life does run on code */]. Change is imminent and Team Guids believes in it. As time flies, human interaction with the computer tends to change and the computer or the software application must be smart enough to adapt to this change. By change here, we mean Windows Phone 7. It has helped Microsoft re-write the rule books, erase a few old records (replace them with new ones) and most importantly, bring a smile on the user’s face. Team Guids plans to enlighten the daily user about healthy habits, best practices, daily tips and suggestions on food intake, calories, nutritional value and more while also allowing the user to share the same with friends etc, all through Nutri Leaf, an app targeted for the Windows Phone platform. It does sound exciting when a phone, which stays right in your trouser pocket 24×7, dole out tips and important information regarding your health.

Why?

Microsoft Imagine Cup is the perfect platform for bright minds to display their talent and creativity in the field of software, helping solve the common world problems and enabling a better tomorrow.

Supported by Microsoft, Imagine Cup 2012 is scheduled to be held in Sydney, Australia this year and members of Team Guids, participants of Imagine Cup 2012 under Software Design, are busy burning the midnight oil to proudly wear the Indian flag on the stage at the finals. However, the next stop for Team Guids is the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2012 India Finals.

Where?

Right on your Windows Phone device. Yes. Nutri Leaf helps the fitter generation stay even fit by acting as a regular health counsel and being by their side every time there is need.

Who?

One is okay. Two is good. Three is great. And Team Guids is great, i.e. for the moment, it comprises of three passionate students, each wanting to contribute something to help make the world a better place to live. And they are:

• Nawaz Dhandala: A Microsoft Student Partner who loves writing tons of code in the dark, is the founder of Guid Softwares – a startup aimed at improving the quality of education in India in the Software Engineering field. Besides that geeky avatar, he also loves Skateboarding.

Role: Software Architect, Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure Developer.

• Abdul Rahmaan Janoo: Presently pursuing his undergraduation in the Electrical and Electronics stream, loves fiddling with Robots while the Animation industry also excites him. He is involved in preparing eye-catchy presentation material for Team Guids while also helping do some background research for the project.

Role: Animation specialist and Presenter

• Tushar Tazz: An IT engineer in the making, Tushar has had an early crush on computers right during his childhood. And that ‘crush’ turned into love with time. Quite certain about making his mark in the Software Industry, he loves working on Microsoft technologies and finds Imagine Cup 2012 as the ‘perfect’ opportunity to showcase his talent.

Role: UX Designer

Stay tuned for more upcoming info on Team Guids and Imagine Cup 2012.

Wish them all the best. Ciao!

Microsoft Imagine Cup 2012 is here!

The Microsoft Imagine Cup 2012 is world’s premier technology competition where talented students help solve the problems of the world through technology coupled with their imagination and driven by their passion. The Imagine Cup 2012 theme says it all:

“Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems”.

To be held in Australia this year, Imagine Cup was first held in Barcelona, Spain in 2003 and since then, it has witnessed a huge growth in the number of participants with more than 1.4 million students representing more 183 countries having wanted to create a difference through Imagine Cup till now.

Students compete under various categories like

• Software      Design
• Game      Design: Xbox/Phone
• Game      Design: Phone
• IT      Challenge
• Kinect Fun      Labs Challenge
• Windows      Metro Style App Challenge
• Windows      Azure Challenge
• Windows      Phone Challenge

Imagine Cup represents the will to help make the world a better place to live and its participants, both, get inspired and later inspire others. From software which helps prevent drunken driving on the roads to fighting malaria, from Sudan to India, from geeky nerds to fearless presenters; Imagine Cup gives birth to them all.

Here, we shall frequently talk about Imagine Cup 2012 and also get to know the inside story of a participant team on why/what/how it is to compete in Imagine Cup 2012.

Exclusive videos, inspiration stories, tips and more about Imagine Cup to follow.

Stay Tuned.