Samsung TV App Contest Coming to US and Europe

The Wall St. Journal is reporting that on the wake of a very successful campaign by Samsung Korea in organizing a contest for the best TV application, they are taking the concept to the US later this summer and Europe in September.

Samsung Electronics willing to pay for your ideas - it appears.  Korea’s Samsung Electronics recently launched a national contest looking for developers to create and submit an app for its Web-connected TVs, which they are coining Smart TV. From the Wall St. Journal blog report:

The winner, selected last week, received KRW50 million ($40,850) for a fairy-tale reading application that lets users read and listen to popular fairy tales from various countries from their TV sets in different languages.  For example, viewers can read and listen to a popular Korean fairy tale called Heungbu and Nolbu–a tale about two brothers–in English, Japanese and even Chinese.

“I’ve never dreamed of winning such a contest…it is so awesome. I will use the money for further research and development,” says Patrick Kim, chief executive of South Korea-based SPOKE Systems, which provides technology tools for making electronic books.

What may the most interesting part of the post is the hint, once again, that Samsung is still warm to Android and future Google TV's in their roster. Particularly since the winner stated they were certainly going for all the markets out there, and not exclusive to Samsung.

“I think we will also be able to offer our fairy-tale reader application on Apple’s app store and Google’s Android market as early as next month.”

B.K. Yoon, a Samsung division president, said at the event announcing the winner that Samsung is also reviewing plans to develop a TV set powered by Google’s Android, but its priority will be to run its own operating system and application store for TVs.

No other details were released concerning upcoming US and European TV app competitions.


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