UPDATED 11:45 EDT / SEPTEMBER 27 2011

NEWS

Box Announces Mobile Enterprise Development Contest Winners

Box announced the winners of its Mobile Dev Challenge this morning, a contest I helped judge. Participants were tasked with creating a mobile enterprise app that integrates with Box’s service. Bizmo, an accounting application took the top honors, and TouchDraw, a vector drawing app, took second place.

Bizmo is walking away with $25,000 Ccsh, a $5,000 InMobi ad credit, and a pitch meeting with the VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. And TouchDraw won $10,000 cash, a $5,000 InMobi ad credit, and a pitch meeting with Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Here are descriptions of the projects:

Bizmo is the first accounting, time, and billing suite for the iPad and iPhone. The Box integration in Bizmo allows users to associate any item in Bizmo with a folder on Box. For example, Bizmo allows you to maintain a catalog of the products and services your company provides, and you can keep an info sheet for each item associated with its record in Bizmo. Box’s sharing capabilities are built into Bizmo, so those info sheets can be sent straight to customers from the app.

TouchDraw is a vector drawing application for the iPad. Its features make it extremely powerful, and its integration with Box gives it powerful collaborative functionality. Many of the features that you’re used to accessing from the Box interface are available directly from TouchDraw, like sharing files, editing permissions, and adding tags and comments.

The top ten apps won cash prizes and other awards. These were: Bizmo, TouchDraw, Helix Conference, GiggoBox, Gamooga, TheInterviewr, WhatABox, SiloLinks, CallTrunk and Catalyst.

Services Angle

Although the winners were an accounting app and a drawing app, Box Sr. Product Communications Manager Meghan Hughes mentioned that “Of the hundreds of submissions, our team saw that the majority of business apps were focused on improving meetings and interviews.” My personal favorite submission was Helix Conference, a really slick video conferencing app.

Meetings are a major pain point for many workers, especially mobile workers that need to dial-in to conference calls from the road. Watch for some real innovation in this area to come from mobile, cloud based services.


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