Nokia today announced the winners in the first "Open C
Challenge," a global mobile application development contest encouraging
open source and freeware developers to port innovative software
applications with Nokia's Open C environment to the S60 mobile platform
on Symbian OS, the world's leading smartphone platform with millions of
devices in the marketplace today.
Sponsored by Nokia's global developer support program, Forum Nokia, in
conjunction with Orange and the Symbian Developer Network, the Open C
Challenge invited developer entrants to submit open source applications
built for mobile or desktop environments and ported to S60 on Symbian OS,
or Native Symbian C++ applications developed in the Open C environment.
Open C Challenge winners announced today culminate a four-month selection
process and final judging by a select panel of software and mobile
industry experts, including journalists, analysts and academic members of
the Forum Nokia PRO Champions program, on criteria that emphasized the
developer's innovation, creativity and degree of difficulty in the
porting process, as well as the quality and usability of the applications
themselves.
Nokia's recently announced Open C Plug-In lowers the barriers to entry
and reduces the learning curve for developers porting an application's
logic and core components to the S60 platform. Utilizing eight standard C
function libraries, Open C enables developers to more easily migrate a
broad range of open source and desktop applications to Symbian OS.
The Open C Challenge Grand Prize Winner announced today is Sittiphol
Phanvilai from Bangkok, Thailand for his MobiTubia application, receiving
a cash prize of $10,000. First Runner-Up Winner Pu Zhihua for his
application LiveTraffic, Second Runner-Up TongRen for the MobiClass
application and Third Runner-Up Steve DeLaney for ViewRight receive cash
prizes of $5,000, $3,000 and $2,000, respectively.
"The developers participating in the global Open C Challenge have shown
remarkable creativity and innovation in the use of Nokia's Open C
environment to develop applications for the leading smartphone platform
in the market today," said Lee Epting, Vice President, Forum Nokia. "By
providing a bridge by which existing mobile or desktop applications can
easily move to S60, while easing development in native Symbian C++ for
the S60 platform, the Open C environment helps developers address real
business opportunities for high-value mobile applications in the rapidly
expanding smartphone market worldwide."
The Open C Challenge Grand Prize and Runner-Up Winners named today
include:
Grand Prize Winner
Developer: Sittiphol Phanvilai (Bangkok, Thailand) / Application:
MobiTubia
MobiTubia is a Flash Lite video player and YouTube portal application
with real-time decoding for the S60 platform, developed by Sittiphol
Phanvilai of Bangkog, Thailand, a graduate student in the Master of
Engineering program in Computers at Chulalongkorn University. MobiTubia
enables mobile users to access flv clips using several different methods.
Additionally, the application allows users to browse and search for
specific content on YouTube. The developer ported 25,000 lines of code to
the Open C environment to make the application compatible with S60 on
Symbian OS.
1st Runner-Up
Developer: Pu Zhihua (Shanghai, China) / Application: Live Traffic
Live Traffic is a traffic assistance software that provides real-time
traffic volumes, developed by a project team of four developers, led by
by Pu Zhihua of Shanghai, China. Live Traffic adopts FCD (Floating Car
Data) technology to acquire road traffic information anywhere anytime,
and publish mapped traffic information to Nokia phone users via GPRS or
EDGE connections. The developers ported 2,500 lines of code via Open C.
2nd Runner-Up
Developer: TongRen (Shanghai, China) / Application: MobiClass
MobiClass is a virtual multi-media courseware application, developed by a
team led by TongRen of Shanghai, China, a researcher in the E-Learning
Lab at Shanghai Jiaotong University, porting 16,000 lines of code using
Nokia's Open C Plug-In. MobiClass is designed to deliver an integrated
learning experience with active notes and video playback. Courseware is
downloaded to the device memory card for playback.
3rd Runner-Up
Developer: Steve DeLaney (Carlsbad, California) / Application: ViewRight
ViewRight is a streaming mobile video application developed by Steve
DeLaney, CEO of SDC Labs in Carlsbad California, with more than 20 years
of application development experience. Verimatrix, a market leading
CA/DRM supplier, contracted with SDC Labs to develop the ViewRight
application, which enables users to watch television from their mobile
devices. The application includes mobile video wireless download UI,
proxy streaming, client and crypto middleware for Symbian 3G DVB-H H.264
platforms. The developer ported some 5,000 lines of existing Posix code
and implemented new Posix for integrating mobile platform streaming
support.
In addition to the cash prizes, all of the winners receive a free year's
membership in the Forum Nokia PRO developer program, free Symbian Signing
for their winning application and additional Nokia marketing and business
support.
Open C delivers to developers significant portions of three open source
projects - OpenSSL, GNOME, and LIBZ - providing the S60 and Symbian
developer communities access to middleware functionality that is shared
by many important open source projects, including Apache and Firefox.
Nokia's Open C Plug-In enables deployment of Open C projects on existing
S60 3rd Edition devices, millions of which have already been shipped into
the global marketplace.
More information about Nokia's Open C can be found online at:
http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/resources/technologies/open_c/
About S60
S60 platform built on Symbian OS is the world's leading smartphone
software, and is licensed by some of the industry's foremost mobile
device manufacturers. The flexibility of the S60 software allows for
various hardware designs and software configurations, as evidenced by the
multitude of S60 devices already available on the market. Through its
award-winning user interface, extensive support for new mobile services
and the innovation potential for partner solutions, S60 provides an open
and scalable business opportunity for mobile operators and 3rd party
developers. For further information and news about S60 and the S60
community, please visit www.s60.com.
About Symbian
Symbian is a software licensing company that develops and licenses
Symbian OS, the market-leading open operating system for advanced,
data-enabled mobile phones known as smartphones.
Symbian licenses Symbian OS to the world's leading handset manufacturers
and has built close co-operative business relationships with leading
companies across the mobile industry. During Q1 2007, 15.9 million
Symbian smartphones were sold worldwide to over 250 major network
operators, bringing the total number of Symbian smartphones shipped
up to 31 March 2007 to 126 million.
Symbian has its headquarters in London, United Kingdom, with offices in
the United States, England, and Asia (India, P.R. China, Korea, and
Japan). For more information, please visit: www.symbian.com.
About Symbian Developer Network
The Symbian Developer Network (http://developer.symbian.com) is the
first port of call for all developers working with Symbian OS. The
developer can find downloads, technical papers, system documentation as
well as more interactive elements such as the Symbian Developer Network
Forums, Wiki, and access to the Symbian Signed portal. Developers can
also join the 50,000 developers who currently receive the Symbian
Community Newsletter by subscribing online.
About Orange
Orange is the key brand of France Telecom, one of the world's leading
telecommunications operators. France Telecom serves more than 167 million
customers in five continents as of September 30, 2007, of which two
thirds are Orange customers. The Group had consolidated sales of 51.7
billion euros in 2006 and 39.4 billion euros for the first nine months of
2007. At September 30, 2007 the group had 106.9 million mobile customers
and 11.4 million broadband internet (ADSL) customers.