Developers from Bangkok, Shanghai and California Win Cash Prizes, Developer and Business Support from Nokia

 Nokia today announced during Nokia World 2007 in Amsterdam 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.

 Winners of the Open C Challenge were introduced during a special Dec. 3 Forum Nokia reception and presented during a Dec. 4 Nokia World session titled “Driving Innovation with Open Platforms,” part of the “More Innovation” stream at Nokia World 2007 chaired by Lee Epting, Vice-President, Forum Nokia.

The Open C Challenge Grand Prize Winner presented today is Sittiphol Phanvilai (Bangkok, Thailand) for his MobiTubia application, receiving a cash prize of $10,000.

Download brief MobiTubia video demo here.
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.
 
First Runner-Up Winner Pu Zhihua (Shanghai, China) received a cash prize of $5,000 for his application LiveTraffic.

Download brief LiveTraffic video demo here.
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.
 
Second Runner-Up TongRen (Shanghai, China) received a cash prize of $3,000 for the MobiClass application.

Download brief MobiClass video demo here.
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.
 
Third Runner-Up Steve DeLaney (Carlsbad, CA, USA) received a cash prize of $2,000 for ViewRight.

Download brief ViewRight video demo here.
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.
 
Open C Challenge winners announced at Nokia World 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.

 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.

 More information about  Nokia’s Open C can be found online at: http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/resources/technologies/open_c/