Public judging attracted more than 80,000 downloads region-wide

Singapore, 6 February 2003 – The inaugural Asia Java Mobile Challenge has identified five winning entries.The contest winners, who hail from Brazil, China, Finland-Singapore, India and Korea, all submitted games applications.

The winners of the Asia Java Mobile Challenge are:

They each won US$5,000 in prize money in addition to business contracts from SingTel and its regional mobile associates.

The Asia Java Mobile Challenge was launched in June 2002 to find application development talents and interesting contents.The initiative was spearheaded by SingTel, Sun Microsystems and SingTel Optus, together with SingTel's regional partners AIS (Thailand), Bharti (India), Globe Telecom (the Philippines) and Telkomsel (Indonesia).

The five winners were among the 1,000-plus participants from 23 countries worldwide who came up with innovative applications for mobile phones.These applications are written in Java™2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME), the de facto computing language for writing wireless programs.Apart from games, the contest received entries such as utility and functional applications.The entries were evaluated on a number of criteria, including appeal, quality, usability, ease of deployment and commercial potential.

Mobile subscribers with Java-enabled handsets throughout the region also played a major role in determining the winners from the 20 finalists who were shortlisted.This was because a key evaluation criterion was the number of downloads for each application during the public trial which ran from 15 October 2002 to 31 December 2002.More than 80,000 downloads were registered for the 20 finalists’ applications during the period.

Mr Lucas Chow, Chief Executive Officer of SingTel Mobile, said: “The Asia Java Mobile Challenge started as a regional effort to unearth talented individuals and developers who can come up with new applications and services that will appeal to mobile users.

“We are excited by the overwhelming response to the challenge and amazed by the large number of public downloads of the finalists’ submissions when they were put on a market trial.This clearly shows that there is a huge interest and demand out there for fresh and innovative mobile phone applications.Our next step will be to look at offering the winning applications to the 30 over million mobile customers of SingTel and its regional associates.”

“The Asia Java Mobile Challenge is really a milestone in telco history as it brought together six telecommunications providers into one common goal; to enable the proliferation of wireless Java applications,” said Craig Lim, Senior Manager, Market Development Organisation, Sun Microsystems.

“SingTel has done a world’s first by offering commercial contracts to winners of this competition. This has provided business rationale to developers and correspondingly, the response to the competition and the quality of submissions has been high. This really is a testament to Sun’s Java developer community for its ability to respond to a challenge.”

The Asia Java Mobile Challenge marked the first time in the world that six regional mobile operators have come together to push the development of content and applications for the mobile industry.The competition was also supported by Motorola, Nokia, Siemens and Sony Ericsson.

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Asia Java Mobile Challenge - Top 5 Winners
   (alphabetical order according to country)