World Summit Awards WSA Gala Just Ended, Here Some Highlights and Winners

Lets talk about the WSA, the World Summt Awards, the only global tech awards that are endorsed by the United Nations, so this is the pinnacle of any mobile industry awards. The 'Oscars' of mobile or the 'Nobel Prizes' of mobile so to speak. I was honored to be invited to return and present a keynote to the World Summit Awards Gala event and met up with many friends and even participated a little bit as a replacement juror to the judging (there were some visa problems with some of the WSA judges, utterly mind-boggling when these prestigious mobile industry thought-leaders had been attending the WSA there, the same event in Abu Dhabi in the past. Esteemed colleagues, authors, respected worldwide. What is wrong with the world today?)

The quality of the finalists was incredible and there was a lot of world-class brlliance in the concepts and services and apps that we saw. There are 8 award categories in the WSA and the finalists in each category got to do a presentation but even with a 4 day event, the finalists had to be split into two streams running in parallel, so I had to chose always one out of a pair of award categories, so I only saw the presentations from half of the finalists. Please bear that in mind in what I will discuss in this blog story.

M GOVERNMENT

So lets start the review from the category of mobile government services and apps. The winner of the category was the Dubai Police Department App which lets Dubai citizens interact with the police through their smartphones. The smartphone penetration rate for Dubai is well above 90% by now and overall mobile phone penetration rate per capita is over 190% (it was over 200% but then the government required that all SIM cards have to be registered and 3 million 'orphaned' SIM cards were removed from the system which brought about that weird instance where the penetration rate actually declined haha). So the Police Department decided to create an app to let citizens conduct their police-related affairs through their smartphones, such as reporting a crime or a car accident etc. The app also includes the ability to have your driver's licence activated onto the smartphone - so you don't need to carry your physical 'card' driver's licence in your wallet anymore. This is a true world's first and I reported about it as breaking news over the weekend. This app was the category winner for mGovernment. But let me mention three other finalists that I also saw which were amazing:

From Latvia we had finalist in mGovernment which was called 'Pass to get a Better Result' Futbols. It is a concept around Latvian passion in football (ie soccer, the game most of humans think of when you say football, ie with the round ball, not the thing they play in the USA which has a thing which is not played with the foot and is not a ball). The idea here is that wherver Latvian citizens find a government employee being a bit 'bureaucratic' and not working hard, rather than saying 'do your job' they can now say 'play good football' instead. And of course all sorts of feedback systems and incentive ideas.

From Uganda we had a finalist called U Report. It uses SMS (yeah!) to have citizens respond to various surveys and interviews, as well as report on what is going on. Its kind of citizen journalism meeting Gallup polling. 260,000 Ugandans have joined to voice their opinions. The results are collected with local/regional focus so the local government and related authorities and media and businesses can find out what is on the minds of the Ugandans.

And from Brazil there was a very strong entrant called Colab.Re which lets citizens report on issues they find as problems, and these are directed to the appropriate government authority, so for example a car parked in a way that obstructs traffic or a public toilet that is filthy, or a pothole on the street that needs to be fixed etc.

M TOURISM

The mobile Tourism category is a category that I would have wanted to attend but couldn't because of the conflict at another stream and by the finalist descriptions in the WSA Annual Booklet, the finalists were very interesting. But the winner certainly was. From Italy, Ancient Aguileia 3D, is an Augmented Reality (YEAH!) app to explore the UN World Heritage Site historical Roman city of Aguileia, through AR to see what the city looked like before it was destroyed.

M COMMERCE

In the mobile business and commerce category we had several payments related finalists but the winner was Mobizy from Portugal, a platform for businesses (typically small businesses) to automate their business processes through their smarpthones and the Cloud, providing things like customer relationship managment, inventory management, payroll etc type of business functions. Its a platform where individual app developers can offer business apps and the target is the B2E (Business to Employee) and B2B (Business to Business) markets rather than B2C (Business to Consumer).

M EDUCATION

My personal passion is in the area of mobile education and of course I attended that session in the streams. I need to remind readers that I interpret in a strict way 'mobile' to mean 'cellular' ie 'mobile phone' and similar tech and thus a 'tablet' is not a mobile, it is only an ultra-portable PC. But tablets make excellent learning tools and several of the finalists in the mEdu category were apps built onto tablets. I won't bother with those on this blog, they are of interest to those who specialize in the relatively small industry of tablets and ultra-portable PCs (as my readers know, the tablet industry is already nearing its peak and smartphones alone outsell tablets by a factor of about 5 to 1, all mobile phones by a factor of 8 to 1). But there were a few very interesting entrants aside from the tablet apps.

Cure Runners is a game for 14-19 year olds to teach them financial matters, from Austria. Its built around the idea of a virtual world which is attacked by a virus. To win in the game the youth have to master basic concepts of financial literacy. From Ireland there was Life in the Womb, a visual illustration of what is happening to in the stages of pregnancy with pictures and the story of how humans grow before birth, as an app for Android and iPhone.

The winner in the mEdu category was Lifesaver from the UK, a game as an app and web version, to teach first aid in a more realistic situation than typical Red Cross arranged 'tea and bisquits' sessions using a CPR dummy. In most real life emergencies where people are at risk of dying like in a deadly car accident or fire etc, the voluteers who know CPR are often screamed at and the situation poses a lot of stress from the situation, not related to the person who has stopped breathing... So this very realistic and shocking videogame will continuously have the victim die, until the game player figures out ALL the right moves to save the person regardless of the others standing by who scream and yell and offer wrong advice etc.

M ENTERTAINMENT

I wasn't able to attend the mEntertainment session which seems to have had very strong entrants. The only one we saw briefly summarized in the Awards Gala session was the eventual winner, Createrria from Poland. That is a gaming platform which allows kids to create their own adventures and games (based on some templates) that seems incredibly addictive while also teaching some basics of game development. I will want to learn more about this winner and wish it well.

M HEALTH

The mobile healtcare category had a wonderful winner from Spain, called Universal Doctor Speaker. It is for doctors to use when dealing with patients who can't speak the language of the doctor. This is a common problem at all hospitals and medical emergency situations around the world, always some patients arrive who are from some other country and don't speak the local language of the doctor. This app has 500 typical phrases a doctor will need, and can speak and display he text of those phrases in 13 different languages. A wonderful, 'magical' and potentially life-saving solution from simply our pocket and the Android or iOS platform.

Meanwhile the Finnish finalists in the mHealth category was BetterDoctor which is a smart doctor-finder. It identifies the specialities of the doctors in your vicinity, plus what experience that doctor has in the procedurs you are interested, what insurance companies are accepted, and if there have been any malpractise claims against that doctor. Over 10 million American consumers have already used this app in the USA for example.

M NEWS

The mobile media and news category I also missed, but its winner comes from Russia and tells the news around you wherever you are, and whatever is happening nearby. It is called Lifenews. 

M INCLUSION

Then we had another category that I got to see and which was of incredibly high quality. The category of mobile empowerment and inclusion. And how could the jury possibly decide on these incredibly worthy finalists each solving such a different but massive problem. Let me discuss my faves

From Palestine the finalist was Brailleboard. They have programmed the touch screen to behave like a braille keyboard (the kind that has 6 buttons that need to be pressed in a particular way to create any one letter in the alphabet). Millions of blind people know how to read and write braille, but the braille 'typewriter' or PC keyboard is an expensive device. Now any Android touch screen phone can be the braille keyboard.  (the team that created the app were unable to attend the WSA Awards Gala because the Gaza border is closed currently, so I hope to meet this team in the future when the Palestinians are allowed to travel again to outside their little home country)

Meanwhile the Philippines is a nation that gets almost any type of natural disasters except snow avalanches. They get floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons (aka the LARGE hurricanes of the Pacific), volcanoes and of course all sorts of killer animals too. And this in an island nation that poses all sorts of challenges to disaster prevention and recovery. So they created a simple location-based app on Android called Arko that helps locals identify - before the disaster strikes - where are the nearest safe places that are safe from rapidly rising flood-waters that accompany many of the natural disasters that hit the Philippines every year. By using historical flooding maps and patterns, they have identified the areas that are safe, and even have a very simple color-coded guide in the app to show how dangerous is it (water up to knees, so you can still walk, water up to your neck, that you are still alive, or water going over your head...). It works with GPS if you have that on your Android phone but works also with just cellular tower positioning to get approximate location, well enough that all locals recognize the local village details like where is the bridge, etc.

Then from Ghana we got the finalist SnooCode. Did you know much of the world is without formal addresses. Imagine going to Ghana and you need to visit that relative's house and you get this as your instruction: 

"When you get to McCarthy Junction, you take a taxi saying you are going to Morro House. When you get there, you say you are looking for Aisha and at the STC. At the STC you take another taxi saying you go to Azuma. When you get to Azuma you say you are looking for Aisha's mommy (ie mother) but be clear that you do not mean the Maame Drugstore."

That is a real instance not made up. That is TYPICAL for most of Africa and many parts of Latin America, Middle East and Asia. Even some very advanced countries like the UAE and Japan don't have house numbers (or in Japan they do, but the numbers are not in numerical order, so the numbers are in completely random sequence hence their ability to assist in navigation to your destiny is hopeless)

So imagine if you are say attending a wedding of a close relative and its held in Ghana and you are at that fabulous farm house but its in the middle of nowhere and then one of the guests has a heart-attack. You have a mobile phone, you can call the ambulance but what are the instructions to get to the house... No address. The presenter joked that when he grew up he thought the white ambulance was a hearse, ie car that carries coffins and dead people for funerals, because it took so long for ambulances to find the right location in their village, the only times he ever saw the white emergency vehicle was when someone had actually died (but they obviously had been alive when the ambulance was called).

So enter SnooCode. They have created a super-accurate address code generator, precise to a few meters, so that every address globally can be identified uniquely. Even Western 'zip codes' postal codes are not really accurate to individual homes and doors but SnooCode is (its 230x more accurate than the UK postal code system for example). And the address code you get is unique and short, easy to memorize. What is your address? COF-K8D. Now you do have an address that the banks can identify and use. Now you have an address that your mail can find you if you bought something from Amazon for example. Now there is an address that the emergency services can use to find your home if there is a fire or medical emergency etc. I really liked this finalist and feel it will change the Emerging World dramatically in the coming years.

Which brings us to the winner of the m-Inclusion category and the overall crowd favorite of the whole WSA event, from Brazil, Livox. Livox enables people with disabilities like Cerebral Palsy that prevent them from using traditional IT tech to still use touch screens and join the digital revolution. Livox is smart enough to understand what was the attempted gesture, for those who do not have perfect control of their fingers or hands or feet. They estimated that 15 million Brazilians will be helped by this technology who would otherwise be shut out of the digital revolution that we all take for granted. Livox is a gorgeous solution that will help hundreds of millions globally by the time it is ported to more languages and launched in more countries.

The finalists and winners of the World Summit Awards showed true excellence from all around the world. Thank you to Peter Bruck and the team that arranges the WSA Awards every year. If you are a journalist or tech blogger, please share some of these stories. If you are an app developer or mobile service developer from SMS to HTML to Augmented Reality, please consider entering next year's WSA. If you are a big corporation with a social responsibility budget, here are truly worthy candidates for you to consider helping and sponsoring. If you are an investor looking to make a difference in the future of the planet, not only to make some money, here are the best of the class of 2014 in tech and mobile. These are those who survived the vetting of their national selection processes, and then through the WSA evaluation, made it from 469 entries from 101 countries, down to the incredibly worthy 40 finalists from 30 countries from 5 continents. My most heartfelt congratulations to all finalists and wishing you all the best on your journey now ahead into the next stage of your mobile future.

Comments

[Wayne Borean]

That's some imaginative stuff.

Wayne

[AndThisWillBeToo]

Did I just count 8 apps and 6 non-apps?
What do you predict the spread to be in few years now that "peak app" has been passed?

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Wayne, AndThis and LeeBase

About apps vs services. A smartphone app allows using far richer abilities of the mobile phone than a service built on SMS or HTML or voice etc. But smartphone apps reach a TINY slice of the mass market compared to services. Android which now has over 1 Billion users only reaches 1/3 the reach of HTML and 1/4 the reach of MMS and 1/6 the reach of SMS. iOS is one third the size of Android and no other smartphone apps are even worth developing mass market apps for (business apps yes, for Blackberry in some markets).

We are far past peak Apps as most existing apps are now zombies and their update and development has ended and their developers have moved onto more lucrative parts of the tech space.

That being said, if you want to WIN an award for innovation, it is difficult to do that with SMS that has existed commercially for 22 years or HTML that has been on mobile phones for 16 years or MMS thats been around for 14 years. These are very basic platforms that work broadly but are limited in what they can do in terms of radical innovations. You want to do say Augmented Reality or the clever logic of the user interface 'corrections' for the handicapped etc that needs a smartphone and thus many innovations will continue to be done on apps.

Incidentially, as smartphones pass 50% penetration rates in ever more countries and Android has run away with all markets except the USA and Japan, it is perfectly valid to also do apps - on Android - today, in those markets where smartphones exceed 50% of total handset population - all of Western Europe, North America, Advanced Asia, Oceania, and the rich Gulf states of the Middle East. Nothing wrong with doing apps where they are a mass market platform. Only the app developers should be aware that its still a lottery in terms of who makes money, except in gaming where odds are 'hits business' type.

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[AndThisWillBeToo]

I thought Leebase was going to be banned for life if he mentions apps outside the app metrics blog post or smth?

[Lullz]

@LeeBase

Most people seem to have difficulties comparing apps to other industries. With books 1 out of 10 succeeds but that's books that get published. If we include self published books or those that are written and never really printed, we get a very different idea of how things are done with the books industry. Maybe one book out of 1 000 - 10 000 brings the author enough money to so that the writer can live on that. Then again those published books are usually profitable only to the publisher and not to the author. One book out of 10 may be profitable to the publisher but it doesn't mean the author would be able to get a living. Far from it.

This is relevant to this post because to understand apps we must be able to compare them to other industries. To compare apps to other industries we need to have a basic understanding about the other industries.