MONACO, Monte Carlo – 10 developers went head to head this week in a Calling All Innovators Hackathon event, to create a winning app in just 24 hours. Three finalists were chosen at the closing of the Nokia Developer Summit 2009 event yesterday but there could only be one winner.

With its Social Location Widget, Plusmo scooped the top prize of €15,000 and four weeks spotlight promotion in the Ovi Store, which launches next month. Inova IT and it’s Shoppy widget picked up the first runner-up prize, and with it €7,000 and three weeks of spotlight promotion. Taking the second runner up prize of €3,000 and two weeks promotion was PavingWays with their Travel Planner app.

250,000 Ovi Mail users in four months

GLOBAL – “We just put it up there, and more than a quarter of a million people signed up”. So said Purnima Kochikar, director of consumer messaging at Nokia, in a speech to developers this morning at the Nokia Developer Summit in Monaco. And that’s just in four months, with little or no marketing behind the service.

Ovi Mail is designed as a consumer email service where the users don’t need to access a PC to set up an account – the whole thing can be done right there on the device. And it shows too, as the service was designed mostly for those of us who don’t have ready access to a computer, and aims to help the other part of the world to get online and connected. The result? 10 of the top 12 countries using the service are emerging markets.

Comments (3)

Nokia developer summit announcements

MONTE CARLO, Monaco – The inaugural Nokia Developer Summit kicked off in Monaco today with a host of announcements designed to make it even easier for developers to extend the functionality of Nokia devices. Alongside news of a new Nokia N97 SDK (Software Development Kit), come the first five applications to receive funding from the Nokia and Adobe Open Screen Project Fund, an update from Aptana and an N97 Widget competition. Full details on all these after the jump.