Nokia has awarded 10 local independent developers and six local student developers Nokia Lumia smartphones in a bid to support application developers to build locally relevant applications for its Windows platform.
At an event at Microsoft’s office Monday, Nokia fulfilled the promise it made to developers at a Microsoft Developer Phone Camp event earlier this year.
Nokia has promised that it would award each developer who succeeded in publishing an app to the Windows Phone Marketplace after their training with a Nokia Lumia as well as the top two teams who came out of the Imagine Cup National Finals in Port Harcourt.
“Nokia and Microsoft as partners are working very closely, on a global and local level, to create opportunities for entrepreneurs and students to bring their ideas and products into global awareness, said Teemu Kiijarvi, head, Developer Experience, Nokia West Africa.
“Both Imagine Cup and the developer training event are great examples of our partnership” Kiijarvi added
At the ceremony, Nokia and Microsoft encouraged awardees to continue to innovate and turn their ideas into working applications.
The two companies emphasised their commitment to supporting developers and providing a marketplace for them to put their products into the hands of millions of consumers.
Awawu Olumide-Sojinrin, marketing lead for Microsoft Nigeria, said, “We have a wealth of talented developers in Nigeria and are happy to see them being recognised. We hope that the Nokia Lumiaphones they receive today will inspire them to start thinking about new ideas for the Imagine Cup 2013 competition in Russia next year. We hope that this year’s competition will be the best year yet for Nigeria, and we hope to see more participants than ever before.”
The top two teams from the 2012 Imagine Cup National Finals to be awarded phones are the winning national team, Team Gravity, who attended the worldwide finals with their project, SwiftER, an emergency response healthcare solution and the second-place team, TechInnovations, who designed a solution called ‘Eye On’ to solve medical issues.
Oludayo Alli, one of the Imagine Cup Awardees said ‘We appreciate the partnership of Nokia and Microsoft and hope to see more of this to encourage developers to put in more efforts to the development of apps on the Windows platform’.
The Imagine Cup 2013 season was officially launched on 29 August, along with the announcement that Microsoft has redesigned the competition around three new core competitions – World Citizenship, Games and Innovation – and more than doubled the prize money to $300 000.
Through these changes, Microsoft hopes to inspire more students and encourage a wider variety of aspiring innovators to participate.