Posts tagged n97

The winners of Nokia’s N97 Widget competition have been announced. So far so good, but hang on a second.. the N97 isn’t out until June? That apparently didn’t stop Nokia having a 24-hour Hackathon event a few days ago in Monaco, where handset developers from around the world were pitted against each other to win a place on the soon-to-be-launched N97 Ovi store.

Mexico’s David Emmanuel Castro Guerro’s ‘Rocket’ – a swine-flu tracking social location widget – which shows the nearest three friends in any given place – won the competition, having been built on-site as part of the Nokia Developer Summit.

So what does he win apart from a place on the Ovi store? You guessed it – a brand new N97, complete with his app pre-loaded. And he’s quite chuffed too: “It’s mind-blowing to think that my application could potentially be used by millions of people on their Nokia handsets,” commented David Emmanuel Castro Guerrero. “It’s been such a great experience to watch these masters at work and see how an app is build from start to finish.”

“We received over 1,300 submissions, many of which were exceptional. Pitting the best Forum Nokia developers in the business against each other and watching the apps being built in front of summit delegates was so exciting,” said Pekka Pohjakallio, Vice President, Services. “By distributing through Ovi Store by Nokia, developers benefit from Nokia’s global scale to provide a potentially lucrative and unrivalled opportunity at reaching a global audience of consumers.”

The competition’s runners up – Marco Lobb from Italy, who designed the widget, Shoppy, a shopping list application and built on-site by Inova IT from Slovenia and Bruce Hopkins, who designed Travel Planner and built by PavingWays from Germany, will also be featured on the homepage of store.ovi.mobi.