Vodafone have announced the local winners of its Vodafone AppStar competition, a list of eight mobile apps that will now fight to become the best app in Europe and claim a share of the €1 million Vodafone AppStar prize fund.
In the UK, JoggerTracker – an application developed by Mark Salvin that 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 here. 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.
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.