SimonB

The wife and I will be traveling to the world famous Kruger National Park from 4-19 January 2010

This trip will be used as a much needed rest from the rat race that was the last few years. My brain is totally fried and I need some time to unplug from the net to refresh for the new year ahead.  I have HUGE plans for 2010, including some very exciting mobile development projects (more info on this in the near future)

The trip to Kruger though isnt all rest, I will actually be doing alot of research and collecting info for one of my next free educational mobile applications.   I will also be doing a few travel blogs over at Tripwolf.com

My first stop will be Pretoriuskop.

“Pretoriuskop restcamp is one of the oldest camps in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. It is the only camp in the park that officially contains exotic non indigenous flowering plants, the reason for this is that these plants were planted here long before the decision to make exclusive use of indigenous when laying out camps in Kruger. The camp is fully rigged out with restaurant, curio shop, fuel and other amenities needed for life in the Africa bush. Pretoriuskop has 45 camping sites, 75 Huts, 52 Bungalows and a few other luxury unite.”

From there it’s on to Skukuza, Maroela, Letaba, Satara and Lower Sabie you can read more about the camps I will be visiting by reading my articles on Ruba.com

If anyone reading this post is in Kruger at he same time as me, feel free to come say hello.

After Kruger the plan is to head to Mozambique and Swaziland for a few days.

I will update more in the next few weeks.

Take care and thank you for reading my blog…

Hehe and here is some news hot of the press:

Nokia today announced the overall winner of its Calling All Innovators contest. 20FourLabs, developers of winning application Afridoctor, walked away with over R600,000 following the announcement in Melrose this evening. The competition, launched in July this year, called for developers to generate applications and solutions relevant to South African and African consumers.

All category winners were recognised at the Calling All Innovators Awards reception and the total cash and prize value of over R1million was awarded to the top ten application developers. In addition, winning application, Afridoctor, is already available on Nokia’s Ovi Store and the response has been very positive so far.

Over 125 submissions were received during the competition period, mainly from Africa, signalling a strong response to Nokia’s challenge to think big and create mobile applications and services to enhance mobile device usage. Although the competition called for applications relevant to the South African environment a large number of entries were received from developers in other countries including Pakistan, Germany, US, India and Bahrain. The second highest number of entries overall, after those received from South African developers,  came for Kenya, showing that Africa is definitely on the map and has a role to play in the future of technology.

“We received a number of top quality entries and the winners have invested a significant amount of time and thought into their applications,” says Helen Jarvis, services marketing manager at Nokia South Africa. “We look forward to working with the South African and African developer community going forward to continue providing the best mobile applications to consumers on the continent and worldwide.”

Over and above the prize money, the owners of the top 10 submissions each received the Judge’s Choice Award, which provides a one-year membership to Forum Nokia Launchpad, valued at 300 Euros.  Each of the winners will receive access to exclusive resources and support designed to accelerate mobile application development and elevate developer’s business visibility in the mobile world.

“The developers are the future of technology advancement and Nokia understands this,” says Jarvis. “It is for this reason that we recently hosted the Nokia Developer Days where over 62 companies were represented by 100 delegates, from eight African countries, US, United Arab Emirates and Finland to talk about the future of mobile technology.”

As part of its drive to encourage developers to continue to build more applications, Nokia is focused on collaborating with operators to ensure that consumers have access to the best applications across multiple platforms. Sharoda Rapeti, MTN general manager for products and services says that the Calling All Innovators competition has highlighted the importance of developing local applications for both manufacturers and for operators. “MTN is committed to working with Nokia to make it easier for developers to drive and build applications,” she says. “Great applications need to be developed not only for manufacturers but for the operators too.”

The competition, has also generated interest from various news organisations including MoneyWeb and News24, which have both created widgets specifically for use on Nokia devices. These widgets are currently hosted on Nokia’s application outlet, Ovi Store at http://store.ovi.com.

The 2009 Calling All Innovators winners are:

First place and winner of USD85,000: Afridoctor by 20fourlabs

Second place and winner of USD 10,000: That Roach Game – South Africa by Breakdesign

Third place and winner for USD 10,000: Sasol e.Birds by Coolideas

Fourth place and winner of USD 10,000: MrSNAKE by Simon Botes

Fifth place and winner of USD 10,000: Thumbtribe widget by Thumtribe

Top ten winners and recipients of the Judge’s Choice Award:

(12 months membership to Forum Nokia Launchpad):

1^st – Afridoctor by 20fourlabs

2^nd – That Roach Game by Breakdesign

3^rd – Sasol e.Birds by Coolideas

4^th – MrSNAKE by Simon Botes

5^th – Thumbtribe widget by Thumbtribe

6^th – LiveMobile by LiveMobile

7^th – Countdown 2010 by Christian Reeve

8^th – Surfing Safari by Aqua Online

9^th – Turn Left at the Barrel by Turn Left at the Giraffe

10^th – Mall-Buddy by Paul Hinrichsen

For more information on the Top 10 applications via pdf click here.