On the mobility front, Nokia has selected nine new mobile application developers as part of its 2008 Forum Nokia Innovation Series program. The program provides select small- and mid-sized developers with business and market support while showcasing their next generation mobile applications and services for consumer and business audiences worldwide.
Developers chosen to participate in the program has to demonstrate that their application or service provided specific benefits to Nokia mobile device users not otherwise available, and that a clear market demand existed for such a solution.
Developers recognized for the 2008 Forum Nokia Innovation Series include:
- One View Systems, Trivandrum, India, with its Voice Reminder -- an application that lets users keep track of important events through voice and text message notification at predefined times. www.oneviewsystems.com.
- Maverick Mobile Solutions, Maharashtra, India. Maverick Secure Mobile is a mobile security application that helps users protect confidential data on the mobile device, track a device if lost or stolen, retrieve their phone book and disable the stolen device remotely.
- Navitime Japan, Tokyo, Japan. Total NAVI is a point-to-point navigation application for mobile devices, enabling users to find the fastest and most practical travel route from point "A" to point "B" through a combination of transport options.
- tenCube, Singapore. Wave Secure is a security application for Nokia S60 devices that helps users protect their data, their privacy and the device should the handset become lost or stolen. WaveSecure provides easy backup of a user's phone data over the Internet as a precautionary measure.
- Moket, Brisbane, Australia. Mobi Screen Maker creates Adobe Flash Lite mobile content, enabling consumers to customize their own animated screen savers and wallpapers and have them delivered in real-time back to their mobile handsets.
- Kuneri, Oulu, Finland. KuneriLite is a Rapid Application Development toolkit to extend Flash Lite capabilities and create S60 applications without any Symbian knowledge.
- Adtronic, Stuttgart, Germany. Adtronic offers advertising in a new and innovative form -- through display of ad banners on mobile phones for direct one-to-one viewing by users who opt-in to receiving the ads with incoming calls, text messages or missed calls.
- Shape Services, Stuttgart, Germany. Mobiola Web Camera is an application which provides additional functionality for mobile phones. It lets you tuse your mobile phone as a Web camera for your PC desktop computer or notebook. Video can be streamed from the camera of the phone over WiFi, Bluetooth, or USB interfaces to your computer, and used in any application that uses Web cameras.
- uLocate Communications, Boston, Massachusetts. WHERE location-aware consumer widgets leverage the same GPS-based technology underpinning MapQuest Find Me and other popular mobile applications. WHERE mark-up language and scripting to allow developers to write in their preferred development language and assemble applications on mobile handsets.
"Our program is dedicated to speeding the growth and development of innovative companies building next-generation applications and services for the global mobile marketplace," said Tom Libretto, Vice President, Forum Nokia. "Developers of all sizes around the globe are now producing exceptionally creative and attractive mobile software and services. Forum Nokia is pleased to provide the technical and business support services to help bring these applications to the attention of consumers and business users worldwide."
At the same time, Sony Ericsson announced the winners from its global mobile camera phone photography competition, World View 2008.
The camera phone photo entitled "Peace" won the 'Expert's Choice Award' for Sony Ericsson's World View 2008 competition. Taken by Marriane Nill from the Philippines, her photo impressed the international panel of photography experts, and was chosen as the winner from over 64,905 photos submitted from 27 countries. The two experts' runners-up photos include: "Switching a Bulb" by Minghui Li from China and "Going Upstairs" by Riemer Dekker from the Netherlands.
This year Sony Ericsson introduced "The People's Choice Award", which let public to vote for their favourite camera phone image entered into World View 2008. Gisela Canete from Argentina received the most votes with "My best memories". The runners-up were Fan Lin's "the scent of Wuzhizhou island" to showcase the beauty of this island, and Fredy Aguilar's "Colombian Butterfly" because he thought the transparent wings on this butterfly were extremely beautiful and unique.
Now in its third year, the 2008 competition has seen more than double the entries since its first year with 27 countries activating the competition and over 64,905 entries.
