Applications and connectivity crucial to young developers Tweet

Some of the world’s most promising student developers believe that mobile applications and a more connected society are the key factors if the ICT industry is to have a successful future.
We caught up with the students at the Ericsson Application Awards, part of the Nordic Mobile Developers’ Summit in Stockholm.
Robert Mullins, a researcher from the Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland, says applications are already a part of everyday life. "Applications are definitely where the focus is right now," he says. “"fact that there are millions of downloads happening every day proves that people love applications, use applications and want applications."
Mullins and his college teammates – Mark Williamson and Kieran Ryan – won the top prize for their Caller Profiler application for Android. It combines social networking with IP telephony by displaying information from Facebook and other social networking sites on a phone when a call is received.
The winners believe that mobile broadband and 4G technology will drive the applications industry.
"It will be absolutely core," Mullins says. "At the moment, I think mobile applications are where PC applications were about 20 years ago – running in isolated mode, such as when we had Windows 3.0 running on a PC. In the future mobile applications will be connected into the network and with each other and will use network based information to behave intelligently."
The team from Tor Vergata University in Rome finished in second place. Team member Daniele Albanese agrees about the importance of mobile applications to an increasingly connected world.
"Mobile development will revolutionize society, so connectivity is the most important thing for the future," he says. "Without connections, applications would not have any use."
The Rome team developed the Childroid, an application that can be used by parents to locate their children, or vice-versa, in urgent situations.
"We wanted to do something that was not just innovative but that would also be useful for society," Albanese says.
More than 120 student teams from all around the world registered for the competition.
"A competition like this is extremely useful to students," Mullins says. "It was our first time doing Android applications, so we have definitely learned new skills."

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