Over the past few weeks, Nokia held the first Apps for Change contest, inviting people from around the world to suggest a mobile application to benefit society — which Nokia has agreed to develop. The winners also get to steer a $10,000 contribution to a nonprofit organization.

Some 302 submissions were fielded from people in 53 countries. I was one of the judges in the contest (along with Jussi Hinkkanen, Peter Hirshberg, John M. Jordan and Juliette Powell), and we’re now announcing the winners.

The winning entry was Red Heart, submitted by Sana Refai and Kamel Seghaeir of Tunisia. The entry put it this way:

This application will help you to generate your blood donor’s networks. In case of emergency, you (or someone else) activates the search of your nearest person in your blood donor’s connection (GPS Localization) and contacts him to come give you help. By installing the application, you precise your blood group. When you add a new entry, the application decides whether your connection can be a donor or not according to her/his blood group. The application can be extends from a private network to a public community by creating a website gathering all blood donors worldwide …

We liked the idea of a mobile app being at the center of a process that brings together hospital or emergency workers and volunteers in the community in a way that benefits accident victims through the use of geolocation services. Such an app could allow a wide range of individuals in desperate need of a blood transfusion to find compatible donors in their geographical area. While Kamel and Sana’s app could be useful in developed countries, perhaps its greatest value could be found in developing economies, where mobile phones are ubiquitous – but advanced blood transfusion services are not.

Honorable mentions: Using the crowd to carpool — & more

The judges also singled out three other entries for special recognition:

• Seamus Maguire from Ireland submitted an idea for an app designed to increase the use of carpools, and thereby reduce an individual’s carbon footprint. Using such a mobile app, the user could view other nearby users in need of a ride.

• Christian Andre from Lyon, France suggested an app that would help people to find an activity that would allow them to take positive action in the world. Users could select how much time they wanted to spend on their activity, as well as when, where and what kind of purpose they wanted to support – and they could even decide how hard the action should be.

• Austin, Texas-based Steve Amos offered an idea that was viewed over 1,200 times, with over 100 “likes.” His app would allow teachers and students to use their mobile phones to collaborate on a variety of activities, from creating projects to publishing the results of their activities. In his entry, Steve said, “mobile phones should not be left at the school doors, but rather embraced as a valuable tool in the process of learning and doing great things for the planet.” His app idea is intended to leverage the work of Green Ribbon Schools, an initiative intended to “promote and engage students, staff and families in healthy living and effective learning.”

I signed off on all of these winning ideas and am jazzed at the quality of the entries in Nokia’s inaugural contest, which drew a wide range of forward-thinking suggestions on how to make the world a better, safer, smarter place. As we transition to the real-time Web, it’s good to know that there’s no shortage of innovative ideas for advancing the social good from every corner of the globe.

Incidentally, all of this comes just a couple of weeks after the Applications for Good gathering in San Francisco that One Economy organized with Socialbrite, San Francisco Goodwill and Code for America.

Cross-posted to Socialmedia.biz.

Image at top by Yuya Tamai on Flickr

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Symbian goes open source from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Probably few people have noticed that Symbian, the operating system that powers nearly half the world’s smartphones (compared with the iPhone’s 1.1% overall market share), is opening up its platform and going open source.

“Being open source has made an incredible difference in how we interact with the community,” says Anatolie Papas of the Symbian Foundation. In this 5-minute video, she talks about recent changes at Symbian, the value of open source, and the large number of software developers around the world writing code for Symbian-powered mobile devices.

The interview was conducted at the Traveling Geeks‘ Tweetup in London — which Symbian helped support — on July 5, 2009, with a Flip Ultra, and you’ll notice a few audio artifacts.

Anatolie charges her Symbian phone once every 2-3 days and uses it for data uploads and downloads constantly (which iPhone users can only dream of). She also talks about her “absolutely fantastic” Samsung Omnia HD i8910 phone (pictured), which sports an 8 megapixel camera, and mentions some of the cool Symbian-powered smartphones coming out this fall, including the new Sony Ericsson Satio with its 12 megapixel camera.

As I understand this, Nokia, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, LG Electronics, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, AT&T and other companies formed the Symbian Foundation a year ago with contributions of software assets from Nokia, NTT DoCoMo and Sony Ericsson. The open-source OS now in development will unite Symbian with Nokia’s Symbian-based S60 platform as well as two other platforms built on it: UIQ and NTT DoCoMo’s MOAP (Mobile Oriented Applications Platform).

It was great meeting Anatolie and I hope to run into her again.

Watch or embed the video on Vimeo

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