Last night I ventured into New York City to check out an event being held for the BlackBerry Developers Challenge. There they announced all the regional winners (four in total) that will be moving on. The participants competed for over $1.5 million in prizes. The regional winners are:
- North America: Poynt
- Latin America: Vlingo Plus
- Asia Pacific: Love Indonesia
- EMEA: UbiNav EU
You can check out a video from the event above. All in all some great stuff from all of these super apps. Congrats to all the winners! Keep reading for the full press release.
Poynt, Vlingo Plus - Voice App, UbiNav EU and Love Indonesia Win Third Annual BlackBerry Partners Fund Developer Challenge
TORONTO - November 18, 2010 - After rigorously testing almost 400 applications for BlackBerry® smartphones, Poynt, Vlingo Plus - Voice App, UbiNav EU and Love Indonesia were named the Regional Winners in their respective regions in the third annual BlackBerry Partners Fund "Super Apps" Developer Challenge.
Winners in this year's Developer Challenge each receive a Regional Winner Prize package valued at more than $85,000, including an Elite membership in the BlackBerry® Alliance Program, an App Promo package, BlackBerry smartphones, prominent placement on BlackBerry App WorldTM for three weeks, and much more.
· North American Winner: Poynt, which is developed by Multiplied Media Corporation, enables users to find businesses, retailers, restaurants, movies, gas prices (US only) and weather information. It uses GPS or cell-site location to quickly deliver the information users need, whenever and wherever they need it to their BlackBerry smartphones. Visit http://about.poynt.com/ for more information.
· Latin America Winner: Vlingo Plus - Voice App is the intelligent voice app that turns a user's words into action. Developed by Vlingo Corporation, Vlingo enables users to simply speak to their BlackBerry smartphone to send a text or email message to any contact; search the web using Google or Yahoo!; call a friend; update their Facebook or Twitter status; use instant messengers; and, speak to virtually any application. It also reads incoming text and email messages while users are on the go. Visit http://www.vlingo.com/ for more information.
· Europe / Middle East / Africa Winner: Developed by Ubiest S.p.A., UbiNav EU turns a BlackBerry smartphone into a reliable GPS mapping solution with real-time turn by turn navigation on screen. Users can listen to the turn-by-turn vocal instructions and find whatever they need wherever they are. They can find, map, navigate to, or simply call over 10 million businesses listed within the database. Visit http://www.ubinav.com/ for more information.
· Asia Pacific Winner: Love Indonesia is an all-in-one guide for Indonesia on BlackBerry smartphones. It is a free location-based lifestyle portal that guides users in finding anything they need with its different search features. It provides regular reviews and discount promotions of merchants for each city in Indonesia, along with information on restaurants, hotels, shopping, movies, news, traffic, events and more. Visit http://www.loveindonesia.com/ for more information.
"This is the biggest and most exciting BlackBerry Partners Fund Developer Challenge yet. We not only exceeded the number of submissions in past years, but also saw tremendous innovation across the apps that we evaluated during the judging process," said Kevin Talbot, Co-managing Partner at BlackBerry Partners Fund. "Congratulations to this year's winners for taking home top honors in their app category and region. They developed extremely high caliber apps that deliver a great user experience and exemplify the new generation of ‘must have' apps that people cannot live without."
Applications in this year's BlackBerry Partners Fund Developer Challenge were judged on quality, user experience and how effectively they incorporated "Super App" characteristics. The BlackBerry Application Platform allows developers to quickly and easily build applications that seamlessly share information and interact with core BlackBerry applications or other third party applications. These applications are personalized and contextualized and can integrate with a BlackBerry smartphone's inbox, calendar, address book and other native BlackBerry applications to deliver a highly engaging user experience.
Participants in this year's BlackBerry Partners Fund Developer Challenge competed for a total prize package valued at over US$1.5 million. Prizes were made possible with the help of members of the BlackBerry Developer Services community - including 151 Ventures, App-Promo, DeviceAnywhere, Medialocate, Mob4Hire, and Perfecto Mobile - who provided numerous services to participants.
Full contest details - including links to applications that were named Regional Selections, Regional Semi-Finalists, Regional Finalists and Regional Winners - are available at http://www.blackberrypartnersfund.com/2010challenge.
