It looks like the world's largest smartphone maker is trying to play catch-up in the software arena. Samsung Electronics has announced a contest to encourage application development for its latest high-end smartphone in the fray, the Samsung Galaxy S4. The global competition comes with a hefty collective award of $800,000 with the winner taking home $200,000.
"We will continue to encourage mobile developers to develop new and innovative applications with newly-launched features of our Galaxy series," Wall Street Journal quoted Won-Pyo Hong, head of Samsung Electronics' media solution center, as saying.
The applications are to be hosted by Samsung's peer-to-peer software interface the "Group play", a service that allows users share music, photos and games with each other in an interactive manner. Participants in the Smart App Challenge 2013 are required to utilize the Samsung Chord SDK or software development kit. The Java-based application programming interface Chord, facilitates wireless connections between Samsung phones, sans the use of an online server or mobile phone network.
Apart from the one first place winner, the contest awards $100,000 each to three second-place winners and $50,000 each to six developers coming in the third place. These top entries also get to be endorsed by the company and receive investments for further development. Contestants can submit their apps from June 20 to August 31. However, they will have to wait until November end before the judges zero in on the winners.
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