Students Develop Innovative Applications for Contest by BroadSoft

Dialog Telecom/Netia (News - Alert) Group recently announced the completion of a special contest it had conducted for secondary and high school students. The company is one of the biggest telecommunications service providers in Poland, and launched a contest encouraging students to create voice-enabled communications applications through the BroadSoft (News - Alert) Xtended open source development program from Broadsoft.

BroadSoft joined forces with Dialog Telecom in 2011 to launch the DialNet Masters Internet Knowledge Contest, which drew over 40,000 secondary and high school students looking to prove their technology abilities.

The contest’s popularity inspired DialNet to launch a new contest for secondary and high school students called Masters Xtended. The objective was to get students to come up with innovative concepts for an Xtended application that could advance communications services in Dialog Telecom's consumer or enterprise segments.

“We were truly amazed by the quality and quantity of Xtended applications submitted by secondary and high school students – a testament to their innovation and the fact that BroadSoft Xtended leverages open APIs so the applications can be quickly and easily integrated with BroadWorks-enabled services,” said Marta Pietranik-Pacula, public relations manager at Dialog Telecom. “The contest is an ideal platform to identify and deliver innovative services to our customer base."

The students were extremely creative and developed some unique applications. The first prize was the “Prioritizer App,” enabling users to proactively prioritize the most important calls to be received for different situations, while redirecting the rest of the calls to voicemail based on the parameters defined. The second prize was the “Social Call Center,” a Facebook (News - Alert) plug-in that enables voice access directly from a business's Facebook page. The third prize went to “iKanteen,” an application that works with Facebook to offer a directory of local service companies, black lists and birthday notifications.

"Dialog has fully embraced the intent of our Xtended program, utilizing talented developers who leverage our open source environment to create practical communications applications that can benefit their customers,” said Leslie Ferry, vice president of marketing, BroadSoft. “We are truly amazed by the creativity of these high school students, and we hope to partner with Dialog Telecom and Netia Group on similar initiatives in the future."