Rewind 9 months, in a cold snowy winter night of Canada, my groupmates and I were working away for what will constitute for the biggest chunk of our final marks in my marketing class. The project was to choose a company that has gone relatively downhill and hypothetically suggest a marketing scheme that will help turn the company around.

Being a group project, I was chosen to do the graphics and design portion while others worked on other, equally if not more, important parts of the project.

Night before the presentation, I had finished the Treo mockup and was half done with the Centro design. With no time to add the slide out keyboard, we decided it was important to finish with what we had and proceeded to work on the magazine ad (special thanks goes out to Jonathan for volunteering to write all those little writings with a marker!) and the 30 second television commercial of the Centro.

4 AM in one of the empty lecture rooms at Hagey Hall, we snapped few shots of Jonathan's hand against the plain white deskface with my camera. Half an hour later with a few tweaks here, a few there, the fullpage Centro magazine ad mockup was born.

Couple hours later, with the help of Murtaza's amazingly skilled brother in London, UK, we were able to obtain a 3D rendering of the Centro and encode it into video just in time for our presentation in the morning.

We were supposed to go last. Waiting for our turn, it must've been centuries before we stepped up to the front of the lecture hall. We still wasn't sure how everything would've worked out considering we were procrastinating (and subsequently rushing) our work to the last minute. Luckily, the presentation was a hit with the professor as well as the rest of the class.

After the presentation, I decided to post my creation to my rather empty deviantART gallery. I'm a computer science student, not a marketing or graphics design student. When I had posted the ad, I never had even imagined that this would cause quite a rumour and commotion on the blogosphere 9 months later.

Fast forward to Sunday, August 11th. After bombing my finals, I drove over to my friend's house in the suburb of Toronto on the way to visiting my parents in Ottawa. Following morning, I continued my trip to the nation's capital. Sick and tired of looking into computers all semester, a long drive on the open road in my Volkswagen was a nice change.

Tuesday morning, I woke up and checked my e-mail. Sifting through the usual e-newsletters and useless Facebook notifications, I noticed I had an an unusual entry in my inbox. A Palm shareholder had seen my work on deviantART and was seemingly impressed. He asked for my contact info so that he could connect me to Palm. Even then, I had no idea that by this time, the blogosphere was filled with an apparent news that Palm had accidentally leaked an ad for their second generation Centro. Still being sick of looking at computer screen, I casually walked out of the house to go shopping.

That evening, I got a message from my classmate in my Numerical Computations class, Andrei, that my mockup had somehow ended up on Engadget and the rest is history.

I would like to thank all my group members from my marketing project, Jonathan, Murtaza, Ajeet, Jason, and Jonah for their amazing contribution to this project, my marketing professor, Geoffrey Malleck for his amazing lectures that gave me the inspiration, Palm shareholder, Randy for connecting me with Palm's marketing department, as well as my good friend Andrei for bringing this to my attention.

Oh, and as always, I would like to thank all of you in the dA community for all your insightful comments and constructive criticisms!

Stay tuned for more...