Alcatel-Lucent is on a major push in the app development/enablement area, with a developer-savvy team pushing new approaches to telco service development, below-the-radar content deals and now its very own developer contest – a staple of the app dev world. The contest (which in full disclosure, I helped to judge) was won by a Swedish computer science student, Margaryta Skrypachova, whose LateRunner app used network location APIs and social media services to build a mobile app that lets users track the on-the-go location of friends or colleagues running late to a real-world meeting or get-together.As the winner of Alcatel-Lucent’s ‘100 Apps in 100 Days Challenge,” Skrypachova won $10,000 and a trip to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The app tapped into the deep mobile network awareness of user location and presence and coupled that with more Web 2.0 style APIs into social networks to provide the type of real-time application capabilities that would be much more difficult to deliver without access to mobile operator data. Built-in controls let users control with whom they shared their location information, alleviating privacy concerns.
Other notable apps in the contest included GPS Now, which used network location APIs and Google Maps to provide voice-based turn-by-turn directions to users of feature phones, a capability typically limited to smart phone users. Other apps included: Smart Redirect, which lets users accept or re-route calls based on their current location; SMS Geo Notify, sort of a location-based “getting things done-style” task list; and Cheapee, which brought comparison shopping to feature phones via SMS.
The contest exposed (ah, a pun there!) mobile operator network capabilities to developers, in many instances for the first time, enabling developers to discover the unique value of the network as an application platform,” said Justin Tormey, Alcatel-Lucent’s Senior Manager of API Programs, who oversaw the contest.
There’s no doubt that the network holds great power to bring new capabilities to mobile apps. The challenge, for Alcatel-Lucent and its operator customers, is to promote those APIs to developers that are used to looking elsewhere — mainly to the Web — for different ways of adding those same capabilities to their apps.