Today, uLocate Communications announced the winners of their groundbreaking WHERE Developer Contest. The contest for GPS applications was run through the WHERE Developer Program and winners were selected by a panel of wireless industry experts from Yankee Group, Frost & Sullivan, IDC, Programmable Web and O’Reilly Radar. The winning entries, Yokel, Proxido and Cell Soul will receive cash prizes and an audience with venture capital firms. Further, these applications become publicly available today on multiple carriers via the WHERE platform.
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.
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.
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 easily access contact information and driving directions to these locations.
"The overall volume and quality of entries in the WHERE Developer Contest was impressive," said judging panel member John Musser of Programmable Web. "The WHERE Developer community is bringing a very high level of talent and innovation to mapping mash-ups and, as
traditional web developers seek to bring their content to mobile devices and carriers, it's clear that the WHERE Developer Program will prove to be a very valuable tool."
“Judging by the number of contest entries, developers now understand that WHERE provides them with an unprecedented opportunity to quickly create and distribute their mobile applications on a single platform,” said Jill Aldort, a member of the judging panel and an analyst at Yankee Group. “Navigation is Location 1.0, but location can enhance so many other applications. It is very exciting to see the creative location enabled content that becomes available to consumers as more members of the development community take advantage of this platform.”
“We congratulate Yokel, Proxido and CellSoul on winning the first WHERE Developer Contest,” said Matt Gross, General Manager, WHERE Developer Programs. “This was the first developer contest that provided the programming community with the tools required to easily build mobile location enabled applications and participants have been rewarded for their efforts with prize money, industry recognition and distribution on carriers.”
For more information on WHERE, please visit www.where.com. For more information about current contest opportunities for WHERE developers, please visit www.where.com/create.
About WHERE
WHERE, a service of uLocate Communications, Inc. is the world’s first mobile GPS widget platform. WHERE was developed to provide consumers with the ability to customize their mobile lifestyle and to eliminate the difficulties that content owners encounter when bringing a mobile application to market. For more information, please visit www.where.com.
