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Home > News Extra> Innovate, Design & Operate
Students full of bright ideas
Friday June 20th 2008. Posted: 09:50
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Phil Lennard, Phil Dance and Steve Osborne with two of the students
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A plan to find the owners of credit cards left in supermarket readers was the winning application in a competition organised by BT Design.
The competition was the highlight of the first software development kit (SDK) “mashup” camp which took place at Essex University. The Web21C SDK allows application developers - through BT’s open application programming interfaces - to create services that customers can access over BT’s all-internet protocol 21st century network. Through a simple interface the services are accessible through a number of different programming languages, freeing up the developer to focus on creating their application. A mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool. First, second and third year students competed in teams for the prize of a laptop, with a helping hand from seven BT Design experts. They were: Phil Lennard, director, education outreach; Steve Osborne vice-president global integration; Mike Ashwell, business development director; Edward Pertwee, senior marketing manager; Ranjan Kumar and Vasu Uppuluri, delivery managers; and team member Tony Kim. The competition involved the use of BT’s SDK with simulated information from one of Britain’s top supermarket chains. Teams were told that on an average day, 90 credit cards are left in each of the store’s 749 branches. If they remain uncollected, the current policy of the supermarket is to destroy the cards. Edward said: “The mashup was an outstanding success - we’ve already planned another one for Cardiff University on 8 July.” The winning team was congratulated by Phil Dance, managing director, technology exploitation: "With the help of our SDKs the students came up with some first class highly imaginative solutions that were very implementable even in one day,” he said. “The winners clearly enjoyed the day and are considering applying to BT for a work placement rather than BAe, their current choice. They liked the product and people so much they chose BT." The students clearly enjoyed the day and gave positive feedback about BT people and the day itself. "Really great experience developing apps with a new SDK and learning from it " was the comment from a second year student. “The fact that I could communicate my ideas and way of thinking with BT professionals and receive feedback was fantastic," said another student.
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Last updated:
14:55