Betavine turns two and announces £20,000 widget competition

Last Thursday evening we attended the second birthday of Betavine, the developer program of Vodafone, and one of our valued affiliate partners. For Samsung Mobile Innovator, represented by Cheng Luo and Suman Chatterjee, it was a great to meet developers and hear their current thoughts.

In addition to fantastic hospitality, excellent compeering by Stephen Wolak and a great venue at the Frontline Restaurant, Betavine also used the event to launch the Betavine Widget Competition. As you can see from the photo whoever is announced as the winner of this competition in May will win £20,000.

In keeping with this theme, Bruce Lawson from Opera gave a brief overview of the functionality available through their Widget Manager. As a way to develop UIs that will run on a variety of platforms, this is definitely a compelling proposition for developers.

To celebrate Betavine turning two – relatively old compared to Samsung Mobile Innovator – there were also a couple prizes. One was for Golden Gekko who created the LynxFX application. Excluding Vodafone material, this is the most downloaded application on Betavine.

There lucky door prize was a Samsung i8510 (Innov8) phone that we happily donated to congratulate Betavine on their success so far. The winner of this phone was Tim Ocock, VP Business Development, from Symsource.

And finally thanks to the folks at Opera who gave us all a t-shirt, emblazoned with the logo below, as a parting gift. According to our technical team, this is a love affair that will continue to gather momentum.