How Flowit Won the Smarter App Challenge

RMN Digital | June 20, 2012 | Applications, Asia Pacific, Consumer, Enterprise, Enterprise Events, Events, Mobiles, Regions | No Comments

Mobile industry association GSMA today announced Flowit as the winner of the “Smarter App Challenge” developer competition at the Mobile Asia Expo.

This challenge called on all developers to submit their commercially available mobile apps, on any platform, that meet the growing market need for greater efficiency as defined in the GSMA Smarter Apps for Smarter Phones guidelines launched at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year.

As the grand prize winner, Flowit will receive $10,000, with each runner up receiving $2,000 and all three received a trip to this year’s Mobile Asia Expo in Shanghai for the final round of judging.

“There were some incredibly original and inspired apps submitted for the Smarter App Challenges and Flowit truly represents the most creative and innovative developer minds,” said Michael O’Hara, chief marketing officer, GSMA.

The three finalists for the Challenge were:

‘Flowit’ – a photo magazine application where members can post, share and view pictures of their favourite local restaurants – Mr. Jun-Ho Choi, aFactory, South Korea.
‘Metrowizard’ – a Navigation App using Location-Based Services (LBS) for the Seoul subway system – Mr. Kyung Hum Kang, Merlin, South Korea;
‘New Dance Tracks’ – a Music Aggregator that retrieves data remotely from APIs of three online music stores – Mr. Marco Valent, Dedicado, the Netherlands.

Flowit was chosen particularly for its ability to provide rich functionality including sharing user-generated images but also making optimum use of network resources and importantly having minimal impact on battery life.

Flowit can also reduce data traffic by using compressed XML, image caching, thumbnail generation on the client and lazy image loading and adaptive image resolution depending on the connected network (mobile or Wi-Fi).

It reduced the amount of XML data traffic by more than 70 per cent by compressing the data and removed the transmission of thumbnail data by creating it with the original image on the client. All the images are cached and lazily loaded and the image resolution is determined by the connected network.

The judges for the Smarter App Challenge were Alex Sinclair, chief technology officer, GSMA, Dr. Terry Ahn, executive vice president, KT, and Olli Andersson, head of Smart Lab, Nokia Siemens Networks.

The announcement was made today, June 20.

Photo courtesy: GSMA