'Smart Services' tops Pinoy BB Challenge

MANILA, Philippines - A fuss-free, user-friendly application which allows smartphone users to subscribe to Smart services without memorizing keywords, recently gained top honors at the first-ever PinoyBBDev Challenge 2011.

The winning app, simply named “Smart Services,” stood out among 13 entries to the competition organized by the Philippine BlackBerry Developer Group (PinoyBBDev), the only Research In Motion-sanctioned developer community in the Philippines.

Randolph Valencia, a 26-year-old developer from Smart Communications Inc., created the app, now available for free download from the BlackBerry App World.

Scoring high for its uniqueness, relevance to potential users, and “sharability,” the app emphasized an easier and more pleasant way for BlackBerry users to browse and choose among various Smart services without having to input subscription keywords, and the ability to share them with their BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) contacts.

“We are very proud that we have in our team these young and driven local developers who continue to find ways to create relevant and delightful experiences for Smart subscribers,” said Orlando Vea, Smart’s co-founder and chief wireless advisor.

Over the past few years, Smart has been actively engaging Filipino developers on various fronts. Banking on the imagination and creativity of the “data generation” (the successor of the “text generation”), Smart sees only great potential in the development of apps in the local landscape.

“The growth of the number of apps available for smartphones, and the number of hits or downloads they get have been simply phenomenal. Smart is in a unique and pivotal position to encourage both the development and consumption of locally relevant apps — at the same time as we make data connectivity more pervasive in the country, and make connected devices more widely available,” Vea said.

The winning entry of Valencia’s team to PinoyBBDev Challenge 2011 is now one of over 70,000 apps available for download from the BlackBerry App World, which has seen over two billion app downloads, at about six million downloads per day, or 177 million app downloads every month.

To encourage Filipino and Philippine-based developers to take advantage of opportunities in this space, PinoyBBDev organized the competition to discover more local apps for RIM’s BlackBerry smartphones or BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

Other PinoyBBDev Challenge 2011 winning apps were “Dama” by John Bibal III, a BlackBerry PlayBook game based on the Filipino checkboard game of the same name; and “BuddyBump (Beta)” by Frytz Razal, which is a new way for users to socialize using Near Field Communication (NFC).

“In the hands of Filipino developers, the possibilities are virtually endless. With these apps, using smartphones no longer means just mobile Web browsing and communication. Apps can be developed and used for a myriad of other beneficial services like in education, health care, disaster preparedness, among others, and allow mobile users to live more by becoming more informed, entertained, and productive,” Vea said.

A team from wholly owned Smart subsidiary Chikka Inc. also recently won the Asian leg of the Facebook Hackathon in Singapore.

The group created an iPhone app which enables users to post audio messages onto their Facebook homepage.

The Chikka team conceptualized and created the app in a span of only four hours — beating teams from India, Indonesia and Thailand that even had a two-week head start.