BIG SMILES: Maxis Mobile Content Challenge 2009 winners posing with their mock cheques. Source : The Star Online
KUALA LUMPUR: An idea for a system to create electronic flyers and greeting cards on the go netted RM60,000 for two Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) students.
Hasnol Ariff Hussin, 23, and Muhamad Bukhairi Samsudin, 24, developed their idea into an application and submitted it to the Maxis Mobile Content Challenge (MCC) 2009.
It won the grand prize in the competition. UTM lecturer and advisor to the two students, Dr Mohd Yazid Idris, assisted in the development of the application, named Flyer Composer.
Flyer Composer enables its user to compose digital flyers and greeting cards by selecting images, text and/or audio from a mobile portal or via SMS (short message service).
The finished flyer or card is then delivered via MMS (multimedia messaging system).
The application works from a smartphone or other portable Internet-enabled devices.
“We came up with this idea because we want to give an opportunity for people to create their own personalised greeting cards instead of using the standard cards found on the Internet,” Muhamad told In.Tech.
“Here, users can be creative in designing their own cards by choosing images they prefer, including message texts, etc, and send them to their loved ones.”
With guidance and support from Yazid, the two final-year software engineering students took about six months to develop Flyer Composer.
More winners
In the mobile entertainment category of the contest, Mohd Yazid Mohd Jaafar, 21, and Ahmad Arsyad Aripin, 22, of Universiti Sains Malaysia took first place.
They won for developing an offline SMS-based program that has the ability to host various social network online games.
The product, which is called Gomicle, monitors your favourite online games at social networking websites (such as Facebook), and alerts you via SMS whenever there are any updates.
In the mobile information base category, Muhammad Zahid Ismail, 22, and Mohd Hafiz Mohd Annuar, 22, from the International Islamic University of Malaysia, won for developing an application that reminds fellow Muslims of prayer times.
The application, called Azan Reminder with GPS Map, also enables Muslims to more easily locate a mosque nearest to them using the Global Positioning System.
A special award was presented to Universiti Putra Malaysia for its 1Malaysia communal portal that has the ability to integrate global social networks with Malaysian online and mobile communities.
For the MCC 2009, a total of 180 submissions was received from 37 institutions of higher learning nationwide.
Added incentive
It is a competition designed to spur on young application developers to join the nation’s content developer community and foster innovation involving mobile devices.
It is a joint effort involving telco Maxis Bhd, the Ministry of Information, Communications, Culture and Arts, as well as the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission.
At the prize-giving ceremony, Deputy Information, Communications, Culture and Arts Minister Datuk Joseph Salang said the contest plays an important role in the national strategy to nurture the next generation of mobile-content developers.
“We are giving them a viable infrastructure of support, incentives and guidance to successfully launch their ideas and creations into the commercial market,” he said.
In conjunction with MCC 2009, Maxis announced that registration of content developers for its Maxis 1Store is now open.
1Store is a one-stop applications and content store that allows Maxis customers to purchase mobile applications. It has more than 2,500 applications developed for Symbian and Java platforms.
++++ http://mdp.maxis.com.my www.maxis.com.my
Source : The Star Online
