Orange Jordan reveals its “Orange Apps Awards” regional mobile application contest

Orange Jordan, the sole integrated telecom operator in the Kingdom, launched in an event held on the 16^th of this month, the “Orange Apps Awards,” a mobile application contest covering the MENA region. This initiative is organized in partnership with Tech-Jordan, MaysAlward, Nokia, Microsoft Innovation Center, Princess Sumaya University for Technology and Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship and the support of Orange Labs, the innovation center of Orange Group

The contest comes in line with the outcomes of the dialogue Orange conducted last year with its stakeholders which called for fostering national economic development and local small businesses in the ICT sector in Jordan.

The event, which was held at Princess Sumaya University for Technology, took the form of a discussion panel hosting figures representing different sectors from entrepreneurs to students and young professionals, who in turn tackled various issues in the ICT field that are of growing importance and significance to the Jordanian youth.

“Supporting entrepreneurial and innovative ideas in the ICT field is a commitment to us,” Orange Jordan’s CEO Nayla Khawam said. “Through this contest, we aim at encouraging youth and IT entrepreneurs to come forward and step into the tech crunch channel, face the challenges in this field and overcome them to excel.”

For this contest, Orange has allocated more than $50,000 which will be distributed across the winners. Moreover, the company with its partners will be providing the winners with business and technical support, in addition to marketing their applications through the Orange Apps store. The winners will also have the opportunity to be Orange Partners, acquiring open passes to publish their apps through the Orange Apps store across Orange worldwide Network.

During the event, which was attended by the media and members of the technology community from university students to young professionals and owners of startups and small and medium companies, Khawam pointed out that the current trend worldwide, including Jordan, is shifting toward mobile content access. “Customers these days,” she explained, “are looking for new and professional mobile applications that facilitate their lives by keeping them updated and connected wherever and whenever.”

Mr. Moath Hamdan from Orange Labs explained the terms and conditions for participating in this contest, adding that the registration will start from May 16^th to June 3rd 2011 and is open to different parties from professional developers and programmers to engineers, researchers, startups, established companies, entrepreneurs and students.

It is noteworthy that the applications’ language must be in Arabic, while English is a plus. According to Orange Jordan, this aims to enhance the availability of Arabic content, which based on statistics forms only 1%.