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  • MDM Team Wins Top Telefonica Award at International R&D Fair

12th December 2008

MDM Team Wins Top Telefonica Award at International R&D Fair

Vancouver – Movisphere, a virtual world games arcade developed by students of the Masters of Digital Media (MDM) Program in collaboration with Telefonica, won top honours in the “Best New Business Opportunity” Category at Telefonica’s Second Annual Research Fair, held in November. More than 60 entries were received from Telefonica’s Research and Development Centres around the world.

Movisphere earned the award for its multiplatform virtual world arcade. Based on a microtransactional model, the platform will enable third party developers to upload multi-player games to an environment where users can play them on either PC or mobile device.

Based in Spain, Telefonica is a leading telecommunications provider with more than 245 million customers in 25 countries. Telefonica actively encourages and supports innovation through initiatives such as the Research Fair where the best new ideas in Internet, mobile technology, videoconferencing, P2P, TV, 3D Visualization, e-Health and other technologies are presented and judged. More than 800 of its top executives, directors and senior managers participated in this year’s event.

Fernando Fournon, President of Telefonica’s research arm spoke at the Research Fair about the company’s commitment to innovation. “This is a great opportunity to see first-hand products currently under development and how these innovative ideas can become reality.”

Recognizing the expertise and talent at the Centre for Digital Media, Telefónica sought out the students of the Masters of Digital Media Program to work on a prototype. For the past two months MDM graduate students Elmar dela Cruz, McKane Lee, Karthik Venkateshan and Bill Zhao have been working on this innovative and technically challenging project with Telefonica’s Juan Jorda del Amo and Alberto Lumbreras. A prototype which will include a number of fully-functional features will be presented December 2008.

The MDM/Telefonica team were thrilled with the award, as was Dr. Gerri Sinclair, Executive Director of the MDM Program. “The fact that they did their presentation over video conference and still won is absolutely amazing and a testament to the fantastic accomplishment of the team” she said.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 12th, 2008 at 12:55 am and is filed under Game Dev, National News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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