Lancaster Students Scoop Vodafone and Nokia Competition

Lancaster University students have taken first and third place in an international mobile web technology competition.

Initiated by Vodafone Betavine and sponsored by Forum Nokia, the WidSets Challenge 2008 was open to students from all universities, polytechnics and colleges across the world. It aims to encourage student innovation in mobile Web 2.0 technologies by providing a showcase for their ideas and working models.

Lancaster University Communication Systems MSc students Lyon Laxman and Klen Copic Pucihar took first prize for their game 4 in the row – a multiplayer game whereby you can challenge, play and chat with a player anywhere in the world across the mobile network

Meanwhile, third place was taken by Lancaster University Communication Systems PhD student Will Bamford who redeveloped his popular Bombus game (which has achieved over 268918 downloads) in 3D space.

Lancaster University Dr Paul Coulton said: “We’re really proud of this result. Lancaster students have again demonstrated they have the creativity and technological ability to take new developments in mobile technology and dream up interesting user-friendly applications .”

Lancaster University is the only University in the UK to teach mobile phone game design. The MSc in Mobile Games and Social Networks was launched in 2004. For further information on the department of Communication Systems go to http://www.dcs.lancs.ac.uk/

WidSets service by Nokia is a popular consumer Internet service where users can create, publish, enjoy, and share their favourite Internet content on their mobile phones. It uses mini-applications called 'widgets' to identify updates made to the user's favourite Internet sites and pushes the content to a phone as soon as it becomes available.

Vodafone Betavine is a site designed to encourage mobile applications developers and enable them to test their designs across the Vodafone network.