Android Portal

Yesterday we found an interesting video on YouTube showing the first real android device with real nice applications like google street view including a compass system. also a nice feature of unlocking the android home screen was shown, you simply have to paint a line on the device which will then unlock the device if the line was correctly painted. Simple but usefull and cool idea instead of using passwords or a pin. The webbrowser (web kit engine) supports nearly the same features like the iphone safari browser, but on addition to the apple one, it supports zooming into page content via a magnifying glass. So i must say, i was impressed by the features and hope they will release an android mobile devide as soon as possible.

Now that round 1 of the Android Developer Challenge has come to a close everyone in the community is obviously anxious to see the winning 50 entries. The ADC organizers have promised to publish an opt-in list of winners very soon. Unfortunately that’s not out yet, but we can already give you an early look at some of the winning applications.

Please note: This list is based on what we learned on the ADC mailing list and various blogs, so it’s neither complete nor confirmed. We will updating this post as new info becomes available. If you’re one of the lucky 50 and wish to be included/excluded or have any corrections to offer, feel free to contact us or post a comment.

Update 1: Added Marvin, BreadCrumz and Eco2Go.

Update 2: Enhanced “callacab-android”with the help of the developers of the project.

So here they are (in no particular order):

CALL A CAB – ANDROID

With CallACab it is possible to get a cab anywhere you are with just
a single click. No need to know a cab company number, no need to know
your current address. Just a single click and the cab is on its way.”

LOCALE

(picture courtesy of www.crunchgear.com)

Locale is one of 7 Android applications submitted by MIT students. It enables you to set up location- and time-based profiles for your phone, so you can make it shut up when you’re at work, forward calls to your landline when you’re at home. This could save forgetful church-goers a lot of embarassment, I imagine.

POCKET JOURNEY

(picture courtesy of www.pocketjourney.com)

Pocket Journey is an application that lets you access user-generated audio and video guides based on your location. There’s a neat demo video on the developers’ website.

ANDROID SCAN

(picture courtesy of scan.jsharkey.org)

Android Scan lets you scan barcodes and searches a number of stores for the best prices. It can even find reviews for CD’s and books, play sample tracks and search your local library for the titles. More info and a demo video to be found on the author’s website.

SPLASHPLAY

(picture courtesy of www.splashplay.co.uk)

SplashPlay is an interactive guitar-trainer for Android. More information here and here.

COMMANDRO

(picture courtesy of www.commandro.net)

Commandro offers location-based social networking and instant messaging. More information at www.commandro.net.

GOLFPLAY

GolfPlay is an application for Golf players. It provides rotateable maps, scoring, statistics and weather information. Website: http://www.inizziativa.com/GolfPlay/

MARVIN

(picture courtesy of marvin.lpontier.com)

Marvin is a geo browser that lets you place user-desined objects on a map. More info at http://marvin.lpontier.com/

BREADCRUMBZ

Apltly named BreadCrumbz is an application that provides picture- and map-based navigation and enables you to generate and share geo content with other users. Project website: http://www.bcrumbz.com

ECO2GO

(picture courtesy of www.eco2go.org)

Eco2go calculates your carbon footprint, finds public transit alternatives for your trips and provides sustainable living community functions. Website: http://www.eco2go.org

BIOWALLET

A biometric authentication system for Android. This application features iris recognition and can act as a password safe and provide single sign-on for other Android apps.

MOBEEDO

Mobile search engine.

And here is a list of the “50″ winners, as you might notice, the list contains “46″ Winners, this is due to the privacy of 4 submitters. They want to keep their app secret.In my opinion, these 4 hidden android applications must be a killer if they still hide them.

• AndroidScan – Jeffrey Sharkey
• Beetaun – Sergey Gritsyuk and Dmitri Shipilov
• BioWallet – Jose Luis Huertas Fernandez
• BreadCrumbz – Amos Yoffe
• CallACab – Konrad Huebner and Henning Boeger
• City Slikkers – PoroCity Media and Virtual Logic Systems
• Commandro – Alex Pisarev, Andrey Tapekha
• Cooking Capsules – Mary Ann Cotter and Muthuselvam Ramadoss
• Diggin – Daniel Johansson, Aramis Waernbaum, Andreas Hedin
• Dyno – Virachat Boondharigaputra
• e-ventr – Michael Zitzelsberger
• Eco2go – Taneem Talukdar, Gary Pong, Jeff Kao and Robert Lam
• Em-Radar – Jack Kwok
• fingerprint – Robert Mickle
• FreeFamilyWatch – Navee Technologies LLC
• goCart – Rylan Barnes
• GolfPlay – Inizziativa Networks
• gWalk – Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus ten Hagen, Christian Klinger, Marko Modsching, Rene Scholze
• HandWx – Weathertop Consulting LLC
• IMEasy – Yan Shi
• Jigsaw – Mikhail Ksenzov
• JOYity – Zelfi AG
• LifeAware – Gregory Moore, Aaron L. Obrien, Jawad Akhtar
• Locale – Clare Bayley, Christina Wright, Jasper Lin, Carter Jernigan
• LReady Emergency Manager – Chris Hulls, Dilpreet Singh, Luis Carvalho, Phuong Nguyen
• Marvin – Pontier Laurent
• Mobeedo – Sengaro GmbH
• Multiple Facets Instant Messenger – Virgil Dobjanschi
• MyCloset – Mamoru Tokashiki
• PedNav – RouteMe2 Technologies Inc.
• Phonebook 2.0 – Voxmobili
• PicSay – Eric Wijngaard
• PiggyBack – Christophe Petit and Sebastien Petit
• Pocket Journey – Anthony Stevens and Rosie Pongracz
• Rayfarla – Stephen Oldmeadow
• Safety Net – Michael DeJadon
• SocialMonster – Ben Siu-Lung Hui and Tommy Ng
• SplashPlay
• Sustain- Keeping Your Social Network Alive – Niraj Swami
• SynchroSpot – Shaun Terry
• Talkplay – Sung Suh Park
• Teradesk – José Augusto Athayde Ferrarini
• The Weather Channel for Android – The Weather Channel Interactive Inc.
• TuneWiki – TuneWiki Inc.
• Wikitude-the Mobile Travel Guide – Philipp Breuss
• Writing Pad – ShapeWriter Inc

As of 10:30am (Pacific time) emails have started going out to the over 1700 ADC participants. A public announcement including a list of the lucky top 50 is scheduled for Monday the 12th. Below is the email that one of the winners received and posted to the official mailing list:

During the past few weeks, 100+ judges around the world reviewed over
1,700 applications.  They were extremely impressed with the diversity
and the large number of high quality entries submitted. We’re pleased
to inform you that your entry is among the top 50 submissions and that
you will be awarded $25,000 USD.  Your application has demonstrated
originality, indispensability, intuitiveness, and good use of the
Android platform – which are all attributes that our judges looked for
while evaluating submissions to the challenge.

We’d like to bring a few items to your attention:
1. Due to the high quality of the submissions, many of the judges who
are also members of the Open Handset Alliance have shown interest in
contacting some of the participants regarding their applications to
explore further opportunities.

2. We would also like to publish a list of the Semifinalists and their
entries this coming Monday, 5/12.  In particular, this would include
your name, a screenshot, and a short description about your
application. The description we’ll be including regarding your
application is attached to this email.

To protect your privacy, we will not publish or share your information
without your prior consent. If you are interested in having your
information published and/or being contacted by a judge for potential
further opportunities, please use the following form to give us your
consent:

[URL removed]

You may also submit changes to the description of your entry at the
above location. The requirements for the description are: Description
(20 words max); Bullets (3 bullets, 46 words max); Tag line (10 words
max). You may change the screenshots later.

We need all responses to the above form submitted no later than 9a PDT
Monday, May 12.

3. If you happen to be in San Francisco, CA on May 28-29, we hope that
you’ll join us at Google I/O, Google’s largest developer event, where
we will be holding many technical sessions on Android and other
relevant technologies. We’re providing you with a complimentary pass
hoping that you’ll attend as our guest. Many Android team members will
be present and are looking forward to meeting you.
If you’re interested in attending Google I/O please fill in the
appropriate information in the above form and we’ll get you your
complimentary event pass.
We will be contacting you next week regarding the payment process and
next steps involving the final round of the challenge.

Congratulations and thank you again for participating in the
challenge!

Android Developer Challenge Team

A lot of you iPhone users are probably familiar with this nifty music app already, so the Android version is a welcome addition to the stable of promising Android software. It will let you catalog your media collection, play files, download lyrics and even album art.

There’s also a neat little demo on the TuneWiki website.

According to the info I just received, the results of the developer challenge are expected for Friday the 8th, May 2008. So only 1 day left, then we will get to see some more examples of the power of the Android platform.

Here are some details about the prize money distribution which Dan Morill posted a few days ago. Wishing luck to all those who are participating!

ADC 1 == this $5,000,000 prize event going on now.
ADC 2 == the second $5,000,000 prize event that will begin later this year.
ADC 1 Round 1 == open participation with the deadline of 14 April, with 50 winners
ADC 1 Round 2 == participation limited to the winners of ADC 1 Round 1, with 20 “final” winners
ADC 1 Round 1 Phase 1 == reducing the original set of 1,788 submissions to 100 finalists
ADC 1 Round 1 Phase 2 == picking the 50 ADC 1 Round 1 winners from the 100 finalists

Okay, phew. :) With those definitions, here is where we are:

* We sent out the submissions to judging a few days after the submission deadline of 14 April, and judging began.
* Our 100 or so judges received the judging guidelines we provided, reviewed their assigned submissions, and reported data back to us.
* Late last week, we applied our outlier mitigation techniques, identified the top 100 results, and sent them on to the final, separate panel of 15 or so judges to score and produce the final 50 ADC 1 Round 1 award recipients.

So in other words, we are currently in ADC 1 Round 1 Phase 2 as defined above. Once data from the judges comes in, we will notify the 50 award recipients and ADC 1 Round 2 will begin.

It has not escaped my notice even on vacation that there have been a number of discussions on server hits and so on. Obviously we don’t have access to everyone’s server logs, and we can’t monitor what the judges have actually been doing (nor would we snoop if we could, since that seems really sketchy.) We’ve tried to automate everything we possibly can about the judging process, but the one thing we can’t automate is the actual act of assigning scores, since that requires a human’s brain.

The judges were given fairly detailed guidance on how to calibrate their scores, and what to review. For instance, they are aware that they are supposed to read documentation and do their best to test all the features. In the end, though, each judge is going to test to his or her own satisfaction. I’m not sure how reliable it is to correlate judge reviews with observed server hits. Some apps might have sporadic bugs that prevent network accesses. Some judges may have decided they didn’t need to see a particular feature. And before you cry foul, know that some people who have inquired about “missing” server hits have actually done quite well. Judges are just as likely to say “this is cool, I don’t need to see any more” as they are to say “this is so uncool, I don’t need to see any more.” On the whole, our judges have been excited to participate, and I expect that they are being as conscientious as they can be.

The one thing I can tell you with certainty is that I have answered quite a few private inquiries, and in all but one case the judges responded with legitimate scores, rather than scores that say something went wrong or the review was incomplete. Our only data points are what the judges give us, because that’s the only factor we can’t automate. Since the judges are telling us that they reviewed to their satisfaction, we can only take their word for it.

We’ve tried really hard to make sure that the only thing that affects scoring is what you put in front of the judges. But the entire goal of the ADC is to leverage plain old human judgment.

- Dan
P.S. – watch for gory details on the nuts & bolts of all this in the near future.

Some days ago I got a few emails about whether we could activate the RSS/Atom feed option for this site, so If you wanna subscribe via RSS/Atom to www.android-portal.com, its now possible. Just browse to : http://www.android-portal.com/feed/atom/ and subscribe via your preferred RSS reader.

We also changed the Logo/Banner to the new one above. Great work Matt. Thanks for contributing to our site.

Have fun…

A few days ago Dan Morill (Android Developers Advocat) posted in the Android Forum that the first 50 winners will be notified some days later than originally planned. This is due to some legal issues brought up by the Google lawyers after the 50 winners are named by the judges. Here is the original post:

Actually, if I recall correctly the judges are due to have their scores on the 100 back to us by Wednesday. Then we have to tabulate the scores, and I think the legal department has to finish their eligibility review (to make sure no submitters are known terrorists, and that sort of thing. ;)

So I don’t think we’ll be able to announce anything before Wednesday. But as far as I know we are still on track to announce sometime next week.

- Dan