Team Websmith ATP Emerges as Winner of the BlackBerry JamHack 2012 (Malaysia)

BlackBerry JamHack 2012 closed its doors today after 40 furious hours, and marked its place in history as BlackBerry’s first simultaneous regional hackathon. The winner from this weekend will be representing Malaysia during  BlackBerry Jam Asia in Bangkok.

Opened to the public, BlackBerry JamHack 2012 in Malaysia kicked off at the University of Management and Technology in Petaling Jaya, Selangor, on Friday (12 October) and saw the participation of twelve teams.

Comprising of professional developers, student teams, and BlackBerry enthusiasts, the teams were given 40 hours to conceptualize and build a working application for the BlackBerry 10 platform using frameworks such as the BlackBerry 10 Adobe AIR SDK, BlackBerry 10 Native SDK or BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK.

When it came to pitching, the team of developers from Websmith ATP Sdn Bhd wowed the crowd with their clever implementation of augmented reality in their winning application called 1BB.

Built with the BlackBerry 10 Native SDK, 1BB is a directory based application which lists out the details of the various Kedai Runcit 1Malaysia (1Malaysia Grocery Stores) and Klinik 1Malaysia (1Malaysia Clinics) around Malaysia.

Besides listing out core details such as the address, opening hours and contact details, the application makes use of GPS and augmented reality, allowing users to find the nearest 1Malaysia outlets through the device’s camera.

“We’re very happy with the win,” said the team’s lead developer, Tan Yin See. “We worked hard to include elements like augmented reality into our application, and now that we have a BlackBerry DevAlpha device to test it on, we’re confident that the app will be on BlackBerry App World soon.”

BlackBerry JamHack also proved that the BlackBerry 10 Native SDK is an easily accessible framework, as proven by the runner up team, Highlight. Comprising of three developers who formed their team on Friday after entering BlackBerry JamHack as individuals, Highlight took advantage of the easily programmable rich graphical interface from Cascades.

“This is the first time that any of us are developing for the BlackBerry 10 platform,” explained team lead Hassan Mohd Basri. “We did our best during the time that was allocated, and we’re very happy with the results!”

Highlight is a social event listing application, and pulls content from the web about local happenings in the surrounding area. Besides receiving information on these events, the application also has built in sharing functionalities which allow the user to push out interesting events to their contacts via BBM.

The winning team from Websmith ATP walked away with an all-expense paid trip to BlackBerry Jam Asia in Bangkok, where they will be pitting against nine other teams from the region for the title of Asia Pacific champion.