Towards the end of 2010, 16th December to be exact, Samsung announced the winners of the Samsung App developer contest. The contest was aimed at local application developers who were required to develop applications for the Samsung Bada platform.
Robert Ngeru deputy MD Samsung electronics, thanked the developers for their participation and said this was Just the beginning. A lot more planned by way of supporting the development of local apps. He said Samsung was dedicated to advancing the local market, as Samsung as a brand is going local and were committed to offering local solutions. Around 25 entries were received and a panel from Samsung did selections. The successful apps will be driven on Samsung servers – and once up in 6 weeks time an award of 200K will be given to the five winners.
The winning apps were

Eat out Mobile – Mikul Shah. This is Kenya’s first mobile restaurant guide allowing users to search for restaurants using location, cuisine and budget – The application also benefits from having a popular website www.eatout.co.ke and facebook.com/eatoutkenya presence.

Nelly Data – Nelly Ndonye Mobile application for providing real time data from the Nairobi Stock exchange (NSE)()

Tweet Drill down– Paul Mungai, Using the phone’s current geographic location as a reference point, the application will retrieve geo-located tweets within a given geographic radius and provide the capability to filter the data based on certain criteria e.g. crime, food, sports, politics, people.

Zynde Money manager – Bernard Owuor The application plugs into Zynde .com –A Kenyan money management (budget, expenses, income taxt etc) website. The Bada application allows individuals employees and SME’s to track their finances through their Bada phones on the move.

Geuza – Sam Kariu- Geuza is a Swahili translator game app that test’s your your knowledge in Swahili vocabulary and helps you improve your Swahili fluency.

The app winners will be awarded at a ceremony on the 21^st of January 2011, where a grand prize of ksh 200,000 and a Samsung handset will be awarded. The total prize money is ksh 1,500,000.

Ngeru encouraged the developers to come up with more apps and should not be discouraged if they did not win this time but the opportunity exists and Samsung will be interested in adopting many more applications. In response to a question regarding the number of handsets available on the market running on Bada system as it links directly to the potential to generate income for developer as it is based on usage, Mr Ngeru said Samsung would apply the same muscle they use in marketing their products in driving the apps. He stated that Handset costs are now 12k and are coming down.