On the second weekend in May, Google announced the winners of the first round of the Android Developer Challenge. Among approximately 1800 projects 50 were chosen. They awarded mobile applications that were convincing in terms of innovation, originality and usefulness. Among the semifinalists was Zelfi with the interactive gaming platform JOYity.

At the end of Juli, after the second round, 20 finalists will be awarded for the enhancement of their application. They will receive a prize of in total 3.75 million dollars. Thus, a very good reason for putting much effort in the applications to optimize them.

These are the semifinalists and their applications:

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.

First and foremost, there are games that take advantage of cell phone tracking via GPS. Especially interesting in this context is the combination of different features from the fields gaming and social networking. Some of the game titels do not offer any information on the applications themselves. Thus, let’s look forward to finding out what applications belong to the cryptic names.

It is remarkable that relatively few companies qualified for the second round. In addition, just 46 names of the 50 winners of the first round have been announced. The names of 4 misterious participants are still unknown to the public. Obviously, these 4 want to work on their applications without anybody knowing about it. This makes the second part of the challenge even more thrilling.

A short presentation of the individual applications is available on http://code.google.com/android/images/adc1r1_deck.pdf.