Blog: Mobile Excellence Awards 2010 Announced

Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) and Ericsson announced Ericsson-PTA Mobile Excellence Award winners at a ceremony held today at a local hotel in Islamabad.

The award has been conferred on the winning team for their exemplary efforts in developing an SMS SPAM Interceptor application.

The ceremony was attended by Mrs. Ewa Björling, Minister of Trade of Sweden, a high level Swedish business delegation visiting Pakistan, Dr. Mohammed Yaseen, Chairman PTA, Mr. Mohsen Tavakol, President of Ericsson Pakistan, and senior management of Ericsson.

Speaking on the occasion, Chairman PTA Dr. Mohammed Yaseen said

“We at PTA believe in harmonized efforts for the uplift of ICT industry of Pakistan as we look forward to carrying out significant projects in partnership with the operators and solution providers in the future as well; such as the Mobile Excellence Award 2010 to bridge the gap between industry, academia and the regulator”. Chairman PTA appreciated Ericson’s initiatives for the support of telecom industry of Pakistan.

During the ceremony Mr. Mohsen Tavakol, President Ericsson Pakistan, said

we are proud to award PKR 100,000/- the winners for their innovation and creativity in an application which aims to intercept SMS at the access layer by using an underlying byte-level data coding scheme”. He further announced that the winner of the Mobile Excellence Award will also be given an opportunity to qualified practice through internship at Ericsson for a period of 6 months from the time of graduation. “We work hard to build long-term relationships with universities and student organizations around the world and attracting young talent who eventually contribute to our future success, he added.

Muhammad Bilal Junaid and Talha Shabib Ahmed, final year students of BS (Telecom) at FAST National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences were declared winners of the Award, while runner up award was given to two member team of students, Basit Hameed and Imran Tanveer, from NUST School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (SEECS). The application they developed is an Android based application for the Open EMR (Electronic Medical Records) system. It is intended to empower doctors sitting in rural areas in maintaining patient record through their mobiles.

The panel of judges comprised of Mr. Amir Malik, Ms. Hina Saeed, Mr. Waqas Naeem, Mr. Osama Ahmad and Mr. Naveed Ul Haq.

The short listed candidates presented visual demonstration of projects, applications and services to the panel of judges. All submissions were subject to a pre defined criteria which included innovation (no re-use or adaptation of already existing applications), ease of use and reach, impact of the application or service when used in the Industry, tangible business benefits, ability of the project, application or service to drive change and growth in the mobile marketplace and practical demonstration.

It may be mentioned that The Ericsson – PTA Mobile Excellence Award 2010 was launched in September 2010 to honor students who have developed the most innovative user generated or professionally produced content that engages the mobile user and enhances the traditional mobile content experience. It aimed to reward the best mobile content development in the areas of entertainment (video/music), social networking/online communities and location based service.