Sam Pitroda felicitates winners of Reliance's 2nd Mobile Developer Awards

New Delhi, May 10, 2006: Sam Pitroda, Chairperson, National Knowledge Commission, felicitated the winners of 2nd Mobile Developer Awards organized by Reliance Developer Programme (RDP) that aims to acknowledge and encourage outstanding young talent in the area of mobile application development in India. Organized under the Corporate and Student categories, the contest was open between November 2005 and February 2006. Over 60% of the submissions were from students.

The contest was adjudged by IT educationist and cyber security expert Vijay Mukhi, Datta Subrahmanya, vice president (Customer Advocacy), Cisco, and Prashant Dogra, technology marketing specialist, Nokia.

In the Corporate category, Astute Systems, Indore won the first prize of two lakh rupees for its Hanuman Chalisa application, while in the student category, Aditya Sharma, Siddharth Shah, Vasundhara Kantroo from DAIICT, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, walked away with the first prize of Rs 50,000 for their Prashnavali application.

In the Corporate category, the second prize of rupees one lakh went to Tinfo Mobile, Kerala for its Teach Me Hindi application and the third prize of Rs50,000 by Limited Edition Mobile for its Delhi's Mobile Blogger Application.

In the student category, Sheetal Chauhan, Swapnil Nikhade, Kalpana Khandare and Amit Pol, Isquare IT, Pune and Sirish Vemuganti, Hyderabad shared the second prize of Rs 30,000 for their Snake Catcher and Karaoke applications respectively. The third prize of Rs 20,000 was shared by two gaming applications--PixO developed by D. Sribabu, Shah & Anchor Engineering College, Mumbai and Pongball developed by Abhishek Srivastava, Rohailkhand University, Bairely, UP.

In the Hanuman Chalisa application, music is played on the mobile while the 'dohas' are displayed in Hindi or English. The graphical application provides 'dohas' in detail or brief. Prashnavali is based on Ram Charit Manas of Sant Tulsidas. To use the application, the user needs to think of a question and then scroll the blinking dot on the location of choice. The answer to the question is presented in the form of a 'doha' with English translation of the same.

"Reliance's developer programme is a massive talent hunt of its kind the fruits of which the country will reap in the years to come," said Sam Pitroda. "Our country has so much of raw talent, but having it alone isn't enough. Unless encouraged and honed, they'd go waste. Reliance's developer programme is doing just that."

Speaking on the occasion, Vijay Mukhi said, "Both the Corporate and Students categories demonstrated excellent skills and talent. It was like judging the first among equals. It was very difficult. Going by what we have been seen over here, days are not far when these kids will spoil the entire world."

Mahesh Prasad, President, Applications Solutions & content Group, Reliance Communications, said, "The major change has been in the quality of applications. Last time round, many of the applications were information centric, short on creative graphics and intrigue and were lacking inventiveness. But this time, applications were truly amazing, very professional and highly innovative."

To encourage greater participation from the developer community, the terms and conditions of the programme were suitably modified to ensure intellectual property rights of the applications remained with the participants and secondly, the developer gets to share revenue after the application has been commercially deployed on Reliance network.

"We were pleasantly surprised by the overwhelming response from the student community this year. We would like to dedicate a percentage of the revenue share of the winning applications put on our network for the development of independent facilities for application development in the colleges. In this regard we seek the support from college management," added Mr. Prasad.