Contest winners declared

The winners of the Web site design contest co-sponsored by Web Technology Club and Discover Financial Services were announced Saturday at a banquet held at the Bloomington Convention Center. Entrants had two days to construct an online shopping mall with a personalized feel.\n"The case was to design a virtual mall Web site," explained senior Kristin Wagner, WTC president. "The teams were to design a site that would make you feel like you were shopping at a mall so that you could visit specific stores if you knew what you were looking for and also browse if you were unsure."\nAt noon Thursday, the contest topic was posted on the WTC Web site (www.indiana.edu/~wtc). The 16 teams, consisting of three club members each, had until Saturday to complete their projects.\nAll teams presented their sites to one of four judging panels Saturday at 10 a.m. Each panel was composed of one faculty member and two Discover employees. Professors Dwight Worker, Thom Gillespie, Patricia Setser and Brian Arthaud-Day and graduate student Nate Stout participated as judges.\n"The judges were looking for a 3-D look, which was more futuristic," Wagner said. "The basic idea was to create something that would replace going to a mall."\nAfter the first round of presentations, four teams advanced to the finals. Those four teams consisted of: juniors Chris Hilbert, Cliff Dickinson and Aaron Dobbins; junior Ajit Kalra, senior Sidharth Bhatia and sophomore Namrata Gandhi; seniors Vicky Dugar, Mani Sidhu and Christine Villano; and seniors Amy Jeffs, Lawrence Fraser and Elizabeth Leuck.\nThe four finalist teams presented their sites to Eugene Thomas, business school lecturer, and two Discover representatives at 5 p.m. in the Bloomington Convention Center. At 7:30 that evening, the WTC held a banquet in the convention center that was open to all members.\nDuring the banquet, the judges' decisions were announced. The winners were Dugar, Sidhu and Villano, who each received $1,000. The runners-up were Jeffs, Fraser and Leuck, all of whom were awarded $250.\nJeffs said she and her teammates were satisfied with the results.\n"Our team worked together before on another competition and we made it to the finals there, and when we were finalists again this time, it really made us feel good," she said. "We were happy that the judges liked what we had done."\nFraser said he felt he had benefited from entering the contest.\n"In any e-business competition, you get a chance to apply what you learn in a curriculum to a real world situation, and that kind of experience is very valuable to me," he said.\nWagner noted that WTC and Discover are planning another case competition and banquet for next year.\n"We are definitely talking about doing a case competition for next year and making it even bigger," she said. "We're looking to have more teams enter and other companies attend the banquet for next year. We want to make this an annual event and by the response we got this year, I think it will definitely happen"