Friday, 3 October 2008

Yahoo Unveils 1st Ever Mobile Developer Awards in S’pore

Yahoo! Thursday announced the launch of the Yahoo! Mobile Developer Awards (YMDA), a competition that encourages tertiary students in Singapore to build innovative mobile widgets.

This is the first competition to be held in Singapore.

“Aligned with Yahoo!’s company-wide plan to re-wire itself and open up assets to third party publishers, developers and advertisers, this competition reinforces our commitment to open technologies and create opportunities for young developers to build the next generation of innovative content for mobile devices,” said Mr. David Ko, Managing Director and Vice-President of Yahoo! Connected Life, Asia Pacific.

“We are pleased to see the enthusiasm of the participating schools and really proud to have the support of the corporate sponsors.”

The award is sponsored by four corporate organisations – DBS Bank, Kellogg Asia, Malaysia Airlines, and UEEEU.com.

A total of 24 teams are taking part from six tertiary institutes that include Nanyang Technological University (NTU), National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Polytechnic (NP), Ngee Ann Polytechnic (NAP), Singapore Polytechnic (SP), and Temasek Polytechnic (TP).

The participating teams will submit their mobile widgets on 17 October 2008 and the award ceremony will be held on 23 October. The winning widgets will be showcased on the mobile widget gallery in Yahoo! Go 3.

Earlier this year, Yahoo! also announced its Mobile Developer Platform, a one-stop solution for developers to create mobile-optimised applications that are easy to build, quick to deploy and run across a wide selection of devices, thus making it much easier for Internet content and services to ‘go mobile’.

There are currently more than 80 mobile widgets, built by developers globally.