On 31st March 2004, an exclusive event to recognise the winners of the Mobile Application Contest 2003, was organised by Reliance Communications at Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge City, Navi Mumbai. Shri Kiran Karnik, President of NASSCOM presided over the function and gave away the prizes to the winners.

In the Mobile Applications category, a total of 15 winners were selected and 3 winners were chosen for the Application Ideas contest. The winners represented a mix of companies and independent developers who had submitted innovative applications to walk way with the prizes.

Recognition and Rewards!

All winners - both organizations and independent developers- along with their developer team members, senior management of Reliance Communications and the media attended the event. The Grand prize of Rs. 5 lakh was won by ITIDA Cad Services, New Delhi; Gametrix Entertainment Pvt. Ltd. from Hyderabad won the first prize of Rs. 3 lakh and an independent developer duo - Mustansir Kaizar & Sumit Kumar - students from IIT Kharagpur received the second prize of Rs.1 lakh. Besides this, there were 6 special prize winners and 6 consolation prize winners.

Mr. Mahesh Prasad, President, Applications and Solutions Group, heartily congratulated the winners for the high quality entries and the motivation and enthusiasm shown by the developer community as a whole in their involvement with Reliance Developer Programme right from its inception in December 2002. "The objective of the programme was to have an active community of developers, in sync with the Reliance environment and who are able to conceptualize, develop and deliver world-class applications, which would work seamlessly on the Reliance network. This has been ensured by providing a forum and a support system for the developers to understand the Reliance Application Platform (what we refer to as Reliance Developer Programme), our CDMA 2000 network, phones, and our java implementation," added Mahesh Prasad in his welcome address to the participants.

Mr. S. P. Narayanan, Head - Reliance Developer Programme praised the winners for their commitment and efforts towards developing innovative applications for the contest. He said the response was commendable "considering the fact that each application development required an effort of at least three to six staff months. We had taken every care to ensure that deserving entries win prizes as impartially judged by an independent panel of judges."

Prizes & Praises

The highlights of the event were the distribution of prizes by Shri Kiran Karnik of NASSCOM, who was also the Chief Guest for the event and the demonstrations of select winning applications by the developers themselves. The winners of the national contest were duly recognised for their contributions by Reliance and NASSCOM with a certificate of merit.
Later in his speech Shri. Karnik praised the programme for its uniqueness saying " Reliance Developer Programme program is quite unique because it tries to get in expertise and talent from outside the company, and partner with them to create new applications. The Mobile Application Contest is particularly exciting. Traditionally you get partners from the corporate world. Here is a case where Reliance has thrown it open to individuals. From NASSCOM's point of view, it has set a new trend, which is very positive, because it enables us to tap Indian talent across the board, and does not limit it in-house or to a few partner companies. I am very impressed with the kind of programme and applications that have been suggested. Some of them are really interesting, particularly the one that that would be of use to the visually handicapped people. There are also some very good commercial applications. We are looking from the industry and NASSCOM perspective in particular, to continue our association with such contests and Reliance Developer Programme as a whole, and more proudly with Reliance Communications."
Boosted by the tremendous enthusiasm and participation in its first Mobile Application Contest and the excellent momentum generated by its various initiatives, Reliance Developer Programme plans to launch many more such developer-driven programmes in the future, to nurture talented software developers in the mobile application space.