Microsoft honours Indian app developers headed for the Windows Store

19th June 2014
Microsoft honours Indian app developers headed for the  Windows Store
Microsoft's Joseph Landes, third from left, with winners of the Code of Honor software contest in Bangalore

Bangalore,  June 19, 2014: Winners have been announced in Microsoft's Code of Honor competition to  encourage innovative apps for the Windows Store.Llaunched last December, Code for Honor garnered a lot of interest amongst the ISVs and tech startups across India, with more than 100 apps and solutions enabling better management of businesses, society and governments eventually slated to find a place in the Windows Store.
Winners in the specified award categories:

Large Enterprise Solution (2 winners)
Medium-sized company: Mystifly Consulting India Pvt. Ltd. (Bangalore) Solution: MyFareBox is an anywhere-to-anywhere airfare aggregation, consolidation and fulfillment platform offering bookable and ticket-able airfare content from 900+ airlines across 70 countries. The platform offers the largest aggregated airfare content in the world by combining Consolidator/Private Fares, Market Published Local Fares across fare types such as Marine Fares, Student Fares, Labour Fares, Military Fares and other fare types from Multi GDS’s and multi Point of Sale Pseudo City Codes (PCC’s).
Small-sized company: Asteor Software Pvt. Ltd. (Thanjavur) Solution: Synergita (HR performance system) is an extensive talent management system for performance. This application allows HR managers and organizations manage workflow and data for employee appraisals in organizations.
MSME SolutionSystsoft Technologies LLP (Mumbai). Solution: SmartSociety.in is a cloud platform for the management of Commercial/Housing societies. Their solution addresses conflicts between housing committee and residents by simplifying administration, managing finances and improving quality of life.

Government-enablement Solution Reverie Language Technologies Pvt. Ltd. (Bangalore) Solution: Language Translation solution helps translate Indian regional languages into English. Particularly useful for enrollment services such as birth certificates where input in a regional language usually results in human errors while translating to English, the solution offers conversion in real-time making it useful for instantaneous services.

Citizen Services Solution Avon Mobility Solutions Pvt. Ltd. (Chennai) Solution: English Dictionary + Gamified dictionary app helps users learn English words through interactive games. Sourcing information from Princeton dictionary, it provides the meaning, pronunciation, etymology among other features and is available free of cost.

Best Solution for Social Good using Open Government Data  Appface Technologies Pvt. Ltd. (Bangalore) Solution: Mandi Trades is an app which aims to achieve direct selling of products between farmers and consumers. The app uses data.gov.in sources to determine government prices. Users receive SMS alerts for positive price changes on interested commodities.

Organizations like NIC, NASSCOM, TiE, Intel, Nokia, etc  as well as  Microsoft Ventures, have supported this contest.
Says Joseph Landes, General Manager - Developer Experience & Evangelism, Microsoft India:  “The Code for Honor initiative addresses the needs of businesses and governments with the creation of commercial apps across multiple form factors that helps them interact with their customers, partners and other stakeholders more conveniently and in a secure manner. During the competition, we have seen electrifying energy and enthusiasm from the participants with capabilities to build solutions that have large-scale impact both for India and the world. I congratulate the winning teams today, as well as all the ISVs and tech start-ups who participated in Code for Honor.”

The winning teams receive cash awards of  Rs 2,00,000  each and will now have the opportunity to connect with potential investors and customers to promote their commercial apps. In the last six months of the competition, there have been 2098 registrations by ISVs and tech start-ups from over 170 cities, 1002 solution concepts from over 80 cities developed for Enterprises, MSMEs, Government, Citizen Services and Social Good and 25 ISVs and tech start-ups were part of the national finals. Out of the 25 finalists, 22 of them are ISVs with 50 employees or less and 40% of the finalists are leveraging the cloud for their solutions. There has been significant participation from Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, NCR, Pune and Mumbai.