In the UK, JoggerTracker, an application developed by 18 year old university student, Mark Salvin, which uses GPS to calculate information such as the amount of calories burned and distance travelled during a run as well as displaying this information on a graph along with previous runs information, took the top spot, with judges particularly praising the user experience of the app.
The app claimed the €25,000 local prize and will now go head to head against the seven other country winners in a public vote to decide the overall winner of the competition and a total prize of €100,000.
Also highly commended by the Vodafone expert panel were Richard Wilson for Pokerzzle, who claimed second place, and Nick Sheard for TrailTrak, placing third. They will each receive €15,000 and €10,000 respectively.
From 29 April to 21 May mobile enthusiasts can view the entire shortlist and vote for their favourite at the VodafoneAppStarEntries website. Voters will automatically be entered into a prize draw to win one of ten Samsung H1 devices. The results of the public vote, and the overall winner of the Vodafone AppStar competition, will be announced on 24 May 2010.
Salvin said: “I am delighted to win the UK round of the Vodafone AppStar competition. Central to my strategy was creating the best user experience possible, allowing users to quickly and easily monitor their performance during a run, as well as keeping track of their progress over time. Developing for Vodafone 360 has been a seamless experience and it’s great to see an operator provide the level of support that Vodafone has throughout the whole development process. I look forward to publishing a lot more apps in the future.”
Entries have flooded in from across Europe with tough decisions taken by the official judging panel to narrow them down to just eight local country winners. The full shortlist includes: Germany – Lootogo: The world’s first toilet search engine where you can evaluate toilets and find the best toilets wherever you are; Greece – Social Whale: An extended social media client with support for Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Identica and Google reader; Ireland – Dublin Bus Info: Uses your mobile GPS to find bus stops near you in Dublin whilst providing bus stop and timetable information; Italy – Cool Traveling: Allows you to plan a trip around Italy in a simple and cost effective way with all services (train, plane, weather forecast and accommodation) directly available from your mobile; Netherlands – Happy Birthday: A new, improved version of the best birthday reminder there is. Don’t ever forget the birthdays you most care about again; Portugal – FlickrShow: Accesses Flickr in an unprecedented way, offering stunning slide slows and allows you to search photos by keyword, username, colour and even by location using your phone’s GPS; Spain – Yata!: A location based application in which Yata users can share information and vote for the best things in any given area of Spain. It offers user generated geo-located info created by other users in your area, so you can easily see their recommendations and tags on a map.
Lee Epting, director of content services at Vodafone Group said: “We are delighted to see such high quality apps come through the competition and we’re proud to recognise the innovation and effort of developers everywhere with big monetary rewards. The public vote now has the tough job of deciding who will be crowned the overall winner. With the quality we’ve seen across the board, we’re expecting it to be a close contest. Given customer demand for our mobile apps is incredibly high, we felt it was important for the public to have the final say in this competition. We are sure that the public will recognise the value of these apps and the talent of our developer entrants.”
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.