Nokia  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.