Celcom Axiata Berhad has announced the three top winners of the Nokia S40 Challenge in a prize presentation ceremony at Menara Celcom recently.
[The three top winners of the Nokia S40 Challenge]
Ker Jia Chiun was crowned the top winner with a cash prize of RM10,000 for his creation – MobiEye – which allows colour-blind people to identify the colour of any item through text and an audio notification simply by taking a picture of it. The 22-year-old student got his inspiration from a visually-disabled friend he met at an international youth conference who got him thinking about ways to empower others through simple mobile phone apps.
Software developer Vincent Wong was named as the runner-up with his creation – One Stop Cookbook – which won him RM5,000. The app features Malaysian, Southeast Asian and international recipes together with ingredients and pictorial serving suggestions intended as a family-friendly resource for cooking.
The third prize of RM3,000 was awarded to freelance developer Tan Jit Ren for Baby Care, an app that provides expectant mothers with tips and information on how to care for their baby featuring a baby name chooser function.
The Nokia S40 Challenge, which was launched virtually in December last year, is a partnership between Celcom, Nokia (M) Sdn Bhd, and Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) that gave app developers around Malaysia the chance to commercialise their creativity and unleash the market potential of Nokia’s widely-used Series 40 mobile platform by developing and submitting apps for the platform – all while standing a chance to win prizes worth more than RM30,000.
The initiative comes under Celcom’s League of Extraordinary Developers Challenge (LEDC) programme which was launched in 2008 and has since organised various content application challenges and conducted workshops for leading platforms. LEDC also works with local tertiary institutions for the LEDC Ambassador Programme to cultivate a new generation of app developers.
Suresh Sidhu, Chief Corporate and Operations Officer of Celcom Axiata Berhad, said, “The Nokia Series 40 platform is a widely-used platform worldwide for many first-time smartphone users. With the backing of our esteemed partners Nokia and MDeC, the Nokia S40 Challenge provided local app developers the opportunity to explore this platform while showcasing their talent and commercialising their ideas with our support.”
Throughout the challenge, Nokia provided training for app development on the Series 40 platform and sponsor cash prizes and 25 Nokia Asha mobile phones as prizes. As the official endorser of the challenge, MDeC promoted the initiative to their pool of developers under its Integrated Content Development Programme (ICON).
