Join us in congratulating the winners of the Smart MobDev Competition.

In the next few weeks, we shall feature the competition’s participating teams, their apps and what they went through (fire, rain, flood, traffic, brownouts and bugs) to create the Android Apps that won the Smart MobDev Competition.

We start the series with Grand Prize winner, GeoMob.

Team name/company

GeoMob Team-QubTek Labs of GeoSpatial Solutons, Inc

Team members

* Diane Kristine Campos – Bug Exterminator
* Gabriel Ricalde – Binary Master

App Name and Category

DisasterAlert / Location Based Services

How would you describe your app to your Lola?

Lola this is the coolest mobile app ever for our country! It is high-tech, uses mobile phones and has social relevance. It is useful for reporting disaster and other emergency events where gov’t or private response is needed.

What inspired you to create this app?

Our main inspiration was the recent typhoons and floodings in the Philippines and the urgency of having a tool which can be used to improve disaster response.

What were the challenges?

1. No Google Maps/Android Market/r00t on devices available from Smart
2. Server side: Android sends broken HTTP requests.
3. Short time to develop the application being first-time android users

How did you overcome the challenges?

* (secret!)
* Hack the server. Open source makes this possible.
* Time is of the essence thus consumption of loads of black brewed coffee greatly helped to lengthen the “awake” hours?

What did you learn during the competition?

PASSION, TEAMWORK & TECHNICAL EXCELLENCE all blend together towards a focused goal. We got tremendous support from our co-associates during the challenging days.

What are your future plans for your team or your app after the competition?

We acknowledge that we can still greatly enhance the functionalities which we are doing right on. Then we would like to let the public as well as the government use this app – of course using the infra of SMART. The application could be deployed to the ASIA PACIFIC region where effects of climate change such as flooding are being experienced.

Other people/groups who helped in your app (time to thank them)

* Efren Ricalde – for providing direction and idea on which application we should do
* Gemma Pelagio for providing the architecture and use cases of the application
* Leo for extending his creativity for greatly improving our UI design.
* Our Admin team – for the support during the coding days.
* Our officemates who acted as our main advertisers for garnering votes.
* All our family, friends, old schoolmates, ex-officemates and acquaintances for their support.

Your message for Filipino Mobile Developers

Android development is fun. The learning curve is not that steep if you have prior knowledge of Java. Though there are some bugs(?) in the Android OS itself which we have is already corrected in the future v1.6 release (Donut). We hope that an Android Development group be formed so that it can serve as a venue to encourage the other programmers to learn and code in Android.

As part of GeoMob’s prize for winning the Smart MobDev competition, GeoMob will represent the Philippines at the Conexus Android Showcase in HongKong on Nov 17.