In the Vodafone App Star competition, the emphasis is on innovation and user experience. Following a public vote, FlickrShow was declared as the best new app in the whole of Europe, on the basis of public opinion. FlickrShow was awarded the top prize for its innovation and user friendly experience. It competed and beat seven other country winners.

The novel way in which FlickrShow accessed Flickr, its stunning slide shows, and the new search function, which allowed searching for photos in different ways were factors, which impressed a great deal.

FlickrShow competed against Germany's Lootogo, a review guide to public conveniences, Greece's Social Whale, a social networks update and posting site, Ireland's Dublin Bus info, which uses GPS to locate bus stops and provides timetable information, Spain's Yata, a location-based application, Netherlands's Happy Birthday, a birthday reminder, and U.K.'s Jogger Tracker, which gave information on calories burnt and distance traveled in a graphical format.

Pedro Campos, an independent mobile developer, picked up a local prize $30,655 from the first round of the competition in addition to the $ 91,911 that he was awarded. A native of Portugal, he plans to invest his winnings in a local Web development company with a focus son developing its mobile section.

Aged 26, Campos took up mobile app development just a short while ago and was attracted by Vodafone's 360 platform, which offered an intelligent and developer-friendly approach to the market.

Pedro said: 'Winning the final stage of the Vodafone App Star competition is brilliant news. I made sure my app was not only easy to use but could help people in their everyday lives and it's great to see that it's been so well received by customers across Europe."

Expressing his gratitude to the team at Vodafone for its support, Pedro said that such competitions really gave developers a chance to show their talent. He said he was looking forward to developing more apps for Vodafone 360 in the future.

A group of Italian students from Politecnico di Milano were placed second in the competition, for the travel app that they produced. Currently studying for a Masters in Computer Science, they will now receive a further $30,632, taking their total prize winnings from the Vodafone AppStar competition to $61,265.

The Cool Traveling app allowed users to plan a cost-effective trip around Italy, while providing information on a range of travel services ranging from tickets to weather forecasts.

'Customers have an insatiable appetite for mobile apps, so it made sense to give them the chance to judge for themselves who our winner should be." Lee Epting, Director of Content Services at Vodafone, said.

Epting was impressed with the hard work and effort of the finalists and the immense talent that had surfaced. The Competition was just one of the many ways to help developers reach customers and said that they would focus on providing more tools and support to developers, while rewarding innovation.

As part of its commitment to help mobile developers, Vodafone has announced a new publishing process for them via the Joint Innovation Lab portal, through which open Web technologies could be created and distributed to customers with specific JIL-enabled handsets.

Vodafone Essar, one of India's leading cellular services providers, announced that its Vodafone Mobile Applications Store in India has already seen thousands of downloads of applications by enthused customers. There were more than 10,000 downloads in the first few days of launch in Mumbai, on March 5, 2010.

By Mini Swamy.