Blog - Entries by john.wyer

Following on from our recent announcement of the Vodafone Foundation Smart Accessibility Awards winners we are also delighted to announce the winners of the inaugural Vodafone App Star Challenge! The international challenge included top winners from six countries across the Middle East and Africa, who were unveiled at Vodacom World in Midrand earlier this month.

Participating countries included Egypt, Kenya, Lesotho, Qatar, Tanzania and South Africa who competed in the finals held in South Africa. While the App Star challenge has been held independently in some of these countries in the past, this is the first international challenge that brings ...

Last night we were delighted to announce the winners of the 2012 Vodafone Foundation Smart Accessibility Awards. A €200,000 prize fund for the best Android apps to assist those with disabilities and the elderly has been shared between four winners. At the awards ceremony in Brussels last night, a keynote speech was delivered by Viviane Reding, Vice-President of the European Commission, responsible for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship.

The competition opened in May and after a number of judging rounds the final four winners were decided by a panel consisting of representatives from Vodafone Foundation, Vodafone Group Services Limited ...

You might have heard us talking recently about Rich Communications Suite / joyn and hopefully you’re as excited as we are about this innovative technology! And the fantastic news is that our friends at GSMA are running the joyn Innovation Challenge which is an initiative to encourage innovation based on joyn. Here’s what the GSMA have to say about the challenge,

The challenge will stimulate mobile and web app developers and technology innovators to build on the core capabilities of joyn (Contact management, Chat and File Share) and explore ideas for new and attractive services.

Developers are invited to ...

This year we’ve been delighted by the amount of competition entries, and impressed by the quality and innovation of them.

Our specialist first round Judges from AGE and EDF have now completed the first round of judging and we have our final 12 entrants that will be competing in the finals.

To view the 12 Apps that will be in the finals, please click here: http://developer.vodafone.com/smartaccess2012/saa-2012-finalist/

Thank you again to all the entrants for all their submissions and be sure to keep an eye on the site for updates and to see who the ...

On 25-26 October Nicholas Herriot and Ashley Mills from Vodafone Group R&D joined forces with developer.vodafone.com to showcase some of the demos from their collaboration with ARM's mbed platform for rapid prototyping. The picture below shows the demo part of their stand:

This comprised of:

A) An SMS driven, websockets triggered live tile guessing game.
B) "The Question Mark" - an adhoc feedback point for anywhere gatherings (prints out SMSs sent to it).
C) The color changing light (changes color according to remote instructions).
D) The Dwarf Door (remote access enabled).

In addition to these four interactive ...

Update (16th October 2012) - AppSelect will close on 21st November 2012.

In light of the number and variety of application stores already available to our customers, Vodafone has been reviewing its own AppSelect service. The review has now concluded and Vodafone has decided to phase out AppSelect by 31 January 2013 at the latest, as its customers are already well-served by existing application stores. Other Vodafone content services will not be affected and our Emerging Market Apps Store is still accepting applications.

Vodafone will continue to offer opportunities to developers to monetise their applications through services like charge to bill ...

There is just a month left to enter the Vodafone Foundation Smart Accessibility Awards and be in with a chance to win a share of a €200,000 prize fund for the best smartphone app to help older people and people with disabilities.

The competition, now in its second year, will close to new entries on Monday, 15 October 2012 and culminate in an award ceremony in early December at which four winners will each be presented with a cheque for €50,000. The four award categories include: social participation; independent living; mobility and wellbeing. Entries should be submitted to ...

Over the coming weeks we’ll be making a number of changes to the Vodafone Apps Publication Platform. These changes will be related to the following:

• A new improved, streamlined publication platform including a new front-end for developers, updates to your reporting, device configuration and front-end user management.
• The introduction of charge to bill in-app billing which introduces new opportunities for you to monetise your apps, including micro transactions and demo versions.

To operationally manage these changes the Publication Platform will be taken offline from 3rd September 2012 until late October 2012. During this period you will be able to ...

In support of the Vodafone Smart Accessibility Awards, Vodafone, Mobile Monday, in conjunction with NDRC Inventorium have partnered with the NCBI Centre for Inclusive Technology and the Irish Internet Association (IIA) to run a two-day workshop 21-22 August from 12:00 - 18:00h to stimulate the generation of smartphone app ideas to submit to the competition for a share of €200k worth of prize money.

The two-day workshop will explore the challenges, problems and commercial opportunities that exist for developers and entrepreneurs when building smartphone applications that consider the needs of this significant demographic.

For more information about the Dublin ...

Vodafone India has signed up with Vserv.mobi to provide App Monetization to its developer partners.

Vserv.mobi is a leading Global Mobile Ad Network with strong presence in emerging markets. Vserv's pioneering technology AppWrapper powers One Click App Monetisation for 10000+ Apps across Android, WP7 & J2ME platforms. The AppWrapper is the World’s Simplest App Monetization - it enables premium advertising & innovative pricing models on any app, without coding, in just one click.

Dippak Khurana, Co-Founder and CEO, Vserv.mobi said “AppWrapper is a first-of-its-kind platform that enables both - free and paid App Monetisation models in One Click, without ...