ECE and IT engineering students who have the talent to develop innovative mobile applications that address consumers’ needs can participate in the first nationwide open competition on mobile apps development, an added feature of the 11th Smart Wireless Engineering Education Program (SWEEP) Innovation and Excellence Awards, the first-of-its-kind industry-academe linkage program that aims to help schools produce industry-ready ECE and IT graduates.
The mobile apps development competition is open to undergraduate students from both SWEEP and non-SWEEP partner-schools and participants of the 11th SWEEP Awards. They will compete for the Smart DevNet Innovation Award where a special prize will be given away to entries that will meet the requirements and criteria set by the Smart Developer Network (Smart DevNet), the telco’s developer community program targeted at developers on desktop and mobile platforms.
According to Stephanie Orlino, Head of the Academic Partnership at Smart, an entry is required to undergo a customer validation process to know the problem the concept can solve and it should have a concept plan to use APIs.
The following are the criteria used in selecting the winners: Relevance (market need) and potential business model – 40%; User experience (design and ease of use) – 25%; and Innovation (technology to be implemented in the product) – 35%.
Entries are now being accepted for the open competition. The deadline for pre-registration is on November 30, 2014. For the submission of final and complete entries, the deadline is on December 5, 2014 while the announcement of the top 10 entries will be on December 12, 2014.
The top five entries will be chosen by the Smart DevNet as winners and will be given up to P250,000 in cash prizes. As these winning mobile applications will be given a path to commercialization, the teams who developed the winning apps will have until January 16, 2015 to submit a working mobile app.
Meanwhile, for the 11th SWEEP Awards, Smart requires participating teams from SWEEP partner-schools to develop cloud-based applications, a systems which run on the Web and all files are saved on the Cloud. With a theme, “Building Cloud-Based Communities,” Smart hopes to showcase apps that are innovative, community-based, sustainable, and technology-focused.
The cloud-based app is cost-effective as there is no need to maintain infrastructure and hardware, and provides mobile access to data through Internet-capable devices. This system also helps users deliver more efficient and resourceful work outputs.
Orlino emphasized that there should be a member of the participating team that is, or has knowledge, on the business aspect of their app.
Each participating team is allowed to submit a maximum of up to 10 entries that will be subjected to a five-step screening process as follows: online registration, project concept video presentation, validation, bootcamp, and final judging.
The deadline for registration is on January 9, 2015 while the submission of entries is set on January 16, 2015. The announcement of the top 10 entries, which were shortlisted from 120 actual prototypes submitted this year, will be on January 23, 2015.
The winning entry in the 11th SWEEP Awards will receive P1 million, while the first and second runners-up will be given P400,000 and P200,000, respectively.
Like in previous years, SWEEP, with 43 member-schools, focuses on customer validation and the path to productization. Apps must solve a local issue and can be commercialized.
Orlino said that SWEEP is also geared towards providing periodic trainings about data analytics and other latest technologies. It will also conduct leadership forums where different speakers will be invited to participate every year, and is open to community startups.
Chino Atilano, Co-Founder and CEO of TimeFree Innovations, shares his ideas about becoming a startup and TimeFree, their winning app. A finalist of the 6th SWEEP Awards, TimeFree is a queuing application.
“TimeFree addresses the problem of long queues,” said Atilano. It focuses on enabling users to get tickets to save time.”
Atilano said that TimeFree Innovations has already closed accounts in the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. It is now negotiating with a California-based firm.
Atilano further said that part of their expansion plans next year is to aggressively drive the solution in the market.
