MANDALUYONG CITY –Students from two Ateneo universities bested seven other schools to dominate an annual mobile application competition.
Teams from the Ateneo De Manila University bagged the top prize of P500,000 pesos for a project called “Smart Goods” in this year’s 2009 Smart Wireless Engineering Education program or SWEEP.
A team from the Ateneo De Davao University won P300,000 pesos for a project that combined global positioning system and a geographic information system.
Another team from the Ateneo De Manila University, who was behind the “Iwas Baha” project, won third place and took home P150,000.
Over 70 teams joined this year’s competition, which encouraged students from engineering colleges and universities to create real-world mobile applications.
The Ateneo De Manila University and Ateneo De Davao University would also receive cash equivalents in terms of grants.
Seven other teams have received P30,000 as consolation prizes.
Ramon Isberto, Smart Communications Public Affairs Group head, said the competition’s theme this year focused on mobile applications that would be used for disaster and emergency-related incidents, such as earthquakes, typhoons, floods and tsunamis.
Isberto said this year’s competition was more complex and involved real-world situations.
To encourage more participants, Smart has changed its rules regarding ownership of the applications to allow students to pursue their projects after the competition.
“Before, we practically owned the intellectual property of the students in previous competitions. Now, we only have right of first refusal for the first six months and then students can start looking for potential partners to develop the projects,” Isberto said.
It is also during this competition that Smart partnered with the Department of Science and Technology to identify projects that can be given funding for possible commercialization.
“We hope to engage more schools in future competitions and to encourage students to pursue careers in research and development,” Isberto said.
