Overall Winner of Vodafone Appstar Competition Announced
Pedro Campos, an independent mobile developer, has been awarded a prize of €75,000 – on top of the €25,000 local prize he picked up from the first round of the competition.
Beating off competition from seven other country winners, FlickrShow was awarded the top prize for its innovation and the great user experience it offered. FlickrShow accesses Flickr in an unprecedented way, offering stunning slide slows and allowing you to search photos by keyword, username, colour and even by location using your phone’s GPS system. Find out more at www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXrZnI2jiFs
Pedro, aged 26, only took up mobile app development nine months ago and was attracted to the Vodafone 360 platform due to its open web standards policy and its cross platform reach, which he felt offers an intelligent and developer-friendly approach to the market. Based in Porto, Portugal, he is planning on using his winnings to invest in a local Portuguese web development company, to expand its mobile section.
Pedro said: “Winning the final stage of the Vodafone App Star competition is brilliant news. I made sure my app was not only easy to use but could help people in their everyday lives and it’s great to see that it’s been so well received by customers across Europe. Competitions like this really give developers a chance to shine and I’m grateful to the team at Vodafone for all their support. I’m looking forward to developing more apps for Vodafone 360 in the future.”
Second place in the competition was awarded to a group of Italian students from Politecnico di Milano, for their travel app, Cool Traveling. Raffaele Bisogno, Marco Cavone, Tommaso De Pace and Stefano Francavilla, who are currently studying for a Masters in Computer Science, will now receive a further €25,000, taking their total prize winnings from the Vodafone AppStar competition to €50,000. Cool Traveling lets you plan a trip around Italy in a simple and cost effective way providing information on a range of travel services such as train and plane tickets, weather forecasts and accommodation guides. Find out more at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9768dlwnB0
The full shortlist of country winners that FlickrShow competed against includes:
- Germany – Lootogo: The world’s first review guide to public conveniences where you can evaluate the best place to go, wherever you are. Find out more at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdD3ghyD3iY
- Greece – Social Whale: Lets you read and post status updates to all your favourite social networks with just one click. Find out more at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82J0Fg_iDuE
- Ireland – Dublin Bus Info: Uses your mobile GPS to find bus stops near where you are in Dublin whilst providing bus stop and timetable information. Find out more at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqcwThoFN6A
- Spain – Yata! - A location based application that provides user generated geo-located info created by other users in a given area, so customers can easily see their recommendations and tags on a map. Find out more at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7K4xwbT-j4
- Netherlands – Happy Birthday: A new, improved version of the best birthday reminder there is. Don’t ever forget the birthdays of those you care most about again. Find out more at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OstFepFAlsM
- UK – Jogger Tracker: Uses GPS to calculate information such as the amount of calories burned and distance travelled during a run. Info is then stored on the handset and converted into a graph. Find out more at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6YBu5ymQAc
“Customers have an insatiable appetite for mobile apps, so it made sense to give them the chance to judge for themselves who our winner should be. It’s clear from the hard work and effort of our finalists that there is a lot of talent out there and it’s great to be able to reward the best of the best, while demonstrating our own commitment to supporting the developer community,” said Lee Epting, Director of Content Services at Vodafone. “The Vodafone AppStar competition is just one of the ways we are working with developers to help them reach customers worldwide. In future we will focus on providing developers with more of the right tools and support, as well as additional competitions to reward innovation in this space.”
The Vodafone AppStar competition is part of Vodafone’s ongoing engagement with developers. Vodafone recently announced a new publishing process for developers via the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL) portal, enabling developers to use open web technologies to create, monetise and distribute apps to customers with JIL-enabled handsets. Apps submitted through JIL.org are supported by 50 different handset models across multiple European markets and offer an attractive revenue model for developers. In addition, developers benefit from a quick and transparent review process, which sees all apps assessed in 10 business days.
For further information about developing for Vodafone, go to http://developer.vodafone.com.
For further information, please contact:
Ruth Walters
Skywrite
ruth.walters@skywritecomms.com
+44 (0) 784 198 2633
Vodafone Group Media Relations
+44 (0) 1635 664444
groupmediarelations@vodafone.com
Vodafone, the Vodafone logo and Vodafone 360 are trade marks of the Vodafone Group. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trade marks of their respective owners.
More stories
No results found