Android’s Winners Speak Up
Muthu Ramadoss
Android’s Winners Speak Up
Image courtesy of Google
By James Zipadelli
The Android Developer Challenge winners were announced recently by Google. Here’s what some of the developers have to say about their winning apps.
Juan Carlos Viota Garrido, a developer for Málaga, Spain-basedInizziativa Networks, says a high priority for developing SweetDreams was that it needed to be user friendly and useful to the consumer.
“We came up with SweetDreams’ concept trying to meet those features in the same application,” Viota Garrido says. “SweetDreams is an optimization tasks’ activator that allows you to manage your device resources in a simple manner in order to save energy by deactivating high consumption resources (Wi-fi, Bluetooth, screen illumination, background applications, volume/vibration) basing the decision on environment information such as geographic location, movement of the device or ambient sound.”
This wasn’t the first win for Viota Garrido’s company, either. “Last year we submitted an entry for the ADC1 for our application GolfPlay, which was selected as one of the 50 finalists and won a prize of $25,000,” Viota Garrido says. “GolfPlay is a field assistant for golf players. Its objective is to give support to all the real-time necessities of a golf player during a game. We are still working on that product in which we have very high hopes.
Darius Cheung, CEO of Singapore-based tencube, developed one of the Overall Winners, WaveSecure. According to tencube’s entry, WaveSecure “is the innovative security product that provides users with complete mobile device and data protection. It enables users to remotely lock down and track down lost phones, get a copy of their data securely backed up, and remotely wipe data of the phone to protect user privacy.” Cheung says developing the app was “fantastic.”
“We started doing this four years ago trying to solve a problem we faced ourselves — one of our founders lost a phone and was convinced that this is a big problem that has a solution to it,” Cheung says. “So we were very passionate about building the product. The Android version is particularly exciting because we see a huge growth potential for Android and because Android users are particularly active. The Android edition of the product is actually developed with a lot of users’ help, advice and support.”
Cheung has big plans for WaveSecure. “[The] app is only the first step; we will be looking into integrating the product directly into devices, and expanding to cover more devices such as netbooks, ebooks, etc., as well,” Cheung says.
One of the winners in the Games: Casual/Puzzle category was an app called, ‘What the Doodle?!’ “‘WTD!?’ is a real-time online multiplayer game where one player tries to draw out a given phrase and others try to guess it,” according to their entry on Google’s website. The developer, Che Jami explains the process behind the app:
“‘WTD!?’ grew from that simple ‘why not?’ thought to a proof of concept to a full-fledged game that is constantly evolving due to solid feedback from the community,” Jami says. “What was seen and judged in ADC2 was a version that is now months old. It has come a long way since then (around 25 updates at time of writing) and still has quite a way to go.”
“During ADC2 there was an ongoing beta version of the game that people could grab off the Android Market. As ADC2 and the beta phase progressed I soon learned that all I was doing was giving players the tools to interact with each other and express their own creativity. For example, one feature is that players can doodle up their own avatars, which has turned ‘WTD!?’ into a dynamic piece of art (take a look at the top 20 players),” Jami says.
As for what’s next on the agenda, Jami says, “For the time being I’ll still be working on ‘WTD!?’ Its only about half of what I envision it to be - there’s still a ton of game modes and features I wish to implement. Once I’m happy with it I’ll be moving onto another fun online real-time multiplayer game for Android.”
Viota Garrido says his two projects he’s working on are SweetDreams and GolfPlay. “SweetDreams will be released by the beginning of next year. We are including new functionality in addition to the features that users could try in the ADC version and solving a couple of bugs,” he says. “GolfPlay’s release is scheduled for June 2010, and we promise it won’t disappoint golf lovers.”
The winners were chosen by 14 panelists, including representatives from Google, MTV networks, T-Mobile and Twitter. None of the judges returned calls seeking comment. For information about contest rules, click here; for information on the Open Handset Alliance, click here.
James Zipadelli is a Connecticut-based freelance journalist. He has written for CTNewsJunkie.com, Helium.com and several publications in Boston. You can contact him at www.jameszipadelli.com or on Twitter @redsoxlive.
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Muthu Ramadoss.
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