14.3.2012

Games, applications and other future hit products

Disc golf, ice fishing and Intensive Care Intelligence for mobile devices, tablets and traditional computers. Almost 50 student groups from the universities in Turku participated in the fifth ICT Showroom event. One of the aims of the competition is to boost universities’ abilities in the commercialisation of their research results.

Building the exhibition is underway, the teams collect their posters.

“This year the event was open for all students in the ICT field, not only for those studying at ICT House. Thus the number of projects was considerably larger than last year”, says Degree Programme Manager Janne Roslöf from TUAS.

For example, four Japanese exchange student groups presented their projects. Furthermore, the amount of ideas that were already well productised was exceptionally abundant.

Lumia interests

The interest in Nokia’s Lumia phones has been increasing in Finland and they can already be found on several operators’ lists of most sold phones. The engineering students at TUAS have also developed plenty of Windows Phone games and utility applications. Petteri Lehtonen, a member of the winning team at the 2010 ICT Showroom, has now worked as a teacher at TUAS’s Windows Phone 7 software project course, where completely new ideas and applications have been built using the Windows Phone 7 development tools.

“Designing Windows Phone games has been especially popular”, says Petteri Lehtonen from eCraft.

“Changing over from student to teacher has also been quite easy”, adds Petteri. 

Anglers on Ice: the best mobile game

The jury evaluated the outputs both in terms of presentation and technical content. Attention was paid also to the business potential of the projects. The audience could also vote for their own favourite, and the winning project in the categories of presentation and technical content was HistoGlobe.The winner of ICT Showroom this year was Åbo Akademi’s team Chilly Framework with its game development tool. The winning team members were awarded with Nokia’s Lumia 800 phones.

TUAS’s team Anglers on Ice received a special nomination in the mobile games category. The ice fishing game designed by Klaus Mäkelä, Kalle Nisula, Antti Talvitie and Kari Heinonen will soon be available also at the Microsoft webstore.

The winning team and all teams that received a special nomination will be invited to commercialise their business and product ideas with the help of Boost Turku.

The jury consisted of representatives from Logica, Nokia, Teleste and Vaadin.

The jury faced a demanding task. They had to evaluate 46 student projects.	The ice fishing game Anglers on Ice by TUAS Information Technology students (Kalle Nisula, Klaus Mäkelä, Antti Talvitie, Kari Heinonen) was chosen as the best mobile game of the event.

Photos: Janne Roslöf