Happy day! We've got winners!
We're proud to announce the winners of our first developer contest. As expected, we had tons of great entries, and we were hard pressed to pick the best. But, alas, we had to. So, here they are:
1st Prize: Yokel
Winning entry Yokel is a location enabled shopping portal that helps consumers find the availability and pricing of products in nearby retail stores based on their current location. Yokel's unique interface allows users to search for virtually any type of item including electronics, home appliances, clothing and more.
2nd Prize: Proxido
Proxido leverages WHERE's location enabled technology to allow people to organize their lives through a task list of geographically placed reminders. For example, a person can receive a Proxido alert reminding them to pick up milk at a nearby convenience store on their evening commute home from work.3rd Prize: CellSoul
CellSoul calculates the precise timing of the five daily Muslim prayers based on a user's current GPS coordinates. In addition to prayer times, users are notified of nearby mosques and can access contact information and driving directions to these locations.
Details
(contest closed)Dates
Prizes
Some concept ideas
Dates
Competition began: August 20th, 2007
Final date for entering was: October 15th, 2007
Winners announced: November, 2007
Prizes
First place:
- $5,000 cash
- Promotion on where.com
- Meeting with Venrock, Kodiak Venture Partners, and GrandBanks Capital
- $3,000 cash
- Promotion on where.com
- Meeting with Venrock, Kodiak Venture Partners, and GrandBanks Capital
- GPS mobile handset
- Promotion on where.com
- Meeting with Venrock, Kodiak Venture Partners, and GrandBanks Capital
- Promotion on where.com
- Opportunity to launch app to WHERE mobile GPS users
Getting started as a WHERE Developer: The best way to get started with WHERE is to take one of our samples, upload it to your server (we can recommend a hosting provider if you'd like), and use the WHERE developer dashboard to edit the URL to that of your server address. We provide an online phone emulator, so you don't need a specific mobile phone in order to build using WHERE.
If you have any questions, or want advise on how to build your WHERE applications, feel free to contact us at create@where.com.
We lined up a group of industry experts as judges for the WHERE Developer Contest:
- Brady Forrest, O'Reilly Radar
- John Musser, ProgrammableWeb
- Diana Hwang, Research Manager, Mobile Consumer and Enterprise Metrics, IDC
- Chris Hazelton, Senior Analyst, Mobile Device Technology and Trends, IDC
- Brent Iadarola, Global Research Director, Mobile & Wireless, Frost & Sullivan
- Jill Aldort, Senior Analyst, Consumer Mobility Applications, Yankee Group
For the full official rules, click here.
Some concept ideas...
Not sure what to build? We've listed some ideas below based on our experience of what mobile phone users might be interested in. We've intentionally avoided ideas that are very obvious (a starbucks finder) or very technically difficult (location alerts).
Choosing one of these concepts is not a requirement for entering the contest! If you have a better idea, go ahead and build it. We don't want you to be limited by our lack of creativity.
Games:
Geo-caching: Geo-caching is a very popular activity which involves hiding objects and publishing their GPS coordinates so that other people can hunt for the geo-cached object. The WHERE version of geo-caching would help people look for geo-cached objects on the spur of the moment, without needing to carry around a separate GPS unit.
Capture the Flag: Most of us remember the game of capture the flag from childhood. Using WHERE, you search for virtual flags, but you have to physically travel to the location where the flag is. Players compete with others for points. And maybe provide some weapons to make things a little more interesting.
Virtual objects game: Find virtual objects (fishing, buried treasure, or anything else) that can be collected by traveling to a physical location. Players get points for the things they collect.
Everyday Use:
Commuting: If you commute, there are likely thousands of other people who share a similar commute. All these people need a way to share information about traffic conditions when they're on the road, and what better tool than a GPS enabled mobile phone.
Finders: There's a lot of useful content buried on the Internet. It needs to be freed for the mobile phone. Some examples are playgrounds, bathrooms, restaurants with changing tables, historical information, altitude level, skate parks, etc, water levels, tides, sunrise/sunset, etc.
Geo Web Search: Do a search of Google and Yahoo for the area you're currently in. Would display a list of web search results for your city/state along with the first paragraph of the results. To get more information, you would have to go to the Internet.
Web location bookmarking: There's a lot of location content on the web, and it's not easy to move it to your phone. A WHERE-capable browser toolbar would allow someone to pull a location off of a web site and make it available to WHERE. Once that location is in WHERE, you can view it on a map, search for businesses nearby, or get driving directions.
Communication:
Contacts & addresses: Put all your contacts and addresses in one easy to access place. Find out who lives nearby when you enter a new city. Get driving directions to visit a friend or colleague.
Coordinating meetings with friends: Trying to get several people to meet at the same time and place can be challenging. One person gets there on time, another one is circling the block looking for parking, while the third person is stuck in traffic 20 minutes away. How do you know when to order your drink? No one has yet created the killer app to make this process easy.
Arts and Entertainment:
Celebrity finder: Use your mobile phone to get real-time information about celebrity sightings in your area. View the latest news and pictures about them.
'Pick a path' / 'Choose your own adventure': Why have only one ending to a good story? Create a story that changes based on where you are located.
Art projects: Place a real art object in a physical place (a sculpture, a sticker, a piece of graffiti), then publish the location virtually. Allow people to search for the object and add their comments for others to read.
