Celcom Axiata Berhad has announced the winners of the App Developer Challenge 2012 – an Android app development challenge which gave Malaysian mobile app developers to showcase and commercialise their talent to a global audience.
[Afizulazha bin Abdullah, Chief Digital Services Officer of Celcom Axiata Berhad (3rd from right), Vincent Tan, Chief Executive Officer of MyAppzil (1st from left), and Ng Wan Peng, Chief Operating Officer of MDeC with the winners and finalists of the App Developer Challenge 2012]
The challenge attracted 57 registered ideas and a total of 22 app submissions in anticipation of the grand prize of an all-expense-paid industrial training trip to Seoul for seven days hosted by UbiNuri Inc.
Six shortlisted finalists were invited to present their ideas before peers and En. Afizulazha, Ms. Ng Wan Peng, Chief Operating Officer of Multimedia Development Corporation, and Vincent Tan, Chief Executive Officer of MyAppzil. In a surprise announcement, Celcom announced that the grand prize of the all-expenses-paid industrial training trip to Seoul would be extended to the two top finalists instead of just one.
After five-minute presentations each, the first winning app was revealed to be Malacca Offline Travel Map by Steven Low and Tan Aik Keong of Agmo Studio Sdn Bhd which featured pinned tourist spots, user check-ins, and photo capabilities. The judges were impressed by the app’s potential to cover the whole of Malaysia in line with Visit Malaysia Year in 2014 and integrate advertising from businesses in tourism hotspots.
The second winner was Tang Tung Ai of Icon Mobi Solution with Penyu, an interactive wallpaper featuring a swimming turtle that grows bigger day by day. Tang’s app was unique in that it incorporated an element of social responsibility – 50% of the developers’ profit from each sale will go to the WWF Malaysia’s Save the Turtles Fund.
Other promising entries who presented their apps at the event included Mobile Jawi, a system-wide Jawi input method; KlyqMe, an instant messaging service with a unique “self-destruct” privacy setting; and Halal Scanner, a halal product identification barcode scanner.
Announced in September 2012, the App Developer Challenge 2012 is a joint collaboration between Celcom, Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), and MyAppzil – an independent regional app store under principal UbiNuri Inc, South Korea’s biggest content aggregator with more than 6,500 apps and a talent pool of 1,100 developers worldwide.
The challenge was open to all Malaysian app developers under Celcom’s League of Extraordinary Developers Challenger programme (LEDC) and MDeC’s Integrated Content Development Programme (ICON). All submissions were reviewed and evaluated by a panel of judges from Celcom, MDeC, and MyAppzil for criteria such as innovation, appeal factor, usability, technicality, and the total number of user downloads from the MyAppzil app store.
At the winner announcement, En. Afizulazha Abdullah, Chief Digital Services Officer of Celcom Axiata Berhad, said, “The App Developer Challenge is not a one-off initiative but part of Celcom’s continued efforts to grow Malaysian talent in the global digital content economy. We are proud to host this one-of-a-kind challenge for Android app developers in Malaysia together with our
partners MDeC and MyAppzil and have been very impressed with the ideas coming from the local app development scene.”
“However, our efforts do not end here. Celcom will be working very closely with not just the winners but also the other participants who have met our standards and have demonstrated great potential for commercialisation. With this initiative, we hope that we will motivate more local talent to make full use of their unique Malaysian perspectives, ride on first-mover advantage, and position Malaysia as a leading mobile app development producer in a global arena,” added En. Afizulazha.
The App Developer Challenge 2012 is a part of Celcom’s ongoing League of Extraordinary Developers (LEDC) initiative, which was launched in 2008 and has since organised various content application challenges and conducted workshops for platforms including Android, Blackberry, Symbian, and Nokia’s S40 platform. LEDC also works with local tertiary institutions for the LEDC Ambassador Programme to cultivate a new generation of app developers.
