The 1st ever YMDA (Yahoo! Mobile Developer Award 2008) came to it’s conclusion at Zouk Disco in Singapore after a month long competition between teams from six participating tertiary institutions.

The students had to develop Widgets based on product briefs from sponsors DBS Bank, Kelloggs Asia, Malaysia Airlines and UEEEU.com.

One winner was selected for each sponsor and the four winning teams had to present their winning pitches a second time around (within the disco!) for the best of show award.

In the end the Best In Show Award was given to Team Simple from Nanyang Technological University for their DBS Widget. Apart from showcasing credit card promotions, branch information and other useful banking functions - the team also went out of their way to create a content management system (based on PHP) that would allow any anyone to easily edit the content and menus of the DBS Widget. Stunning!

Here are the list of winners!

BEST IN SHOW & DBS CATEGORY WINNER: Team Simple, Nanyang Technological University

KELLOGGS ASIA: The Jinx, Temasek Polytechnic

MALAYSIA AIRLINES: We Mobile, Singapore Polytechnic

UEEEU.COM: Chlorophyll Studios, Nanyang Polytechnic

When we did a Developers’ Survey a couple of weeks ago, we learned that there is a big demand for information about developing Blueprint Mobile Services using PHP. Since the first version of our SDK, we’ve shipped a helper library that makes it easy to generate Blueprint with PHP, but the library lacked documentation.

Today we are publishing a new document called “Application Development with Blueprint and PHP“. An introduction to Blueprint code generation with the PHP language, it describes mobile application development using the “Blueprint Emitter” PHP library supplied by Yahoo! in the SDK. It starts from a simple “Hello World” Widget and takes you through several examples including list population, session management, calling an external API, using the location chooser, and integrating page navigation. Public classes and methods are described in detail and illustrated with Blueprint XML output.

Get the new documentation from the Downloads page or directly from here: Application Development with Blueprint and PHP.

At Yahoo! we love PHP and this is one reason the Blueprint SDK has shipped with a PHP helper class library from the beginning. We know that many developers use other scripting languages to produce dynamic Blueprint Services, and we are happy to see that an ASP.NET Framework for Blueprint has been made public by Mark Thome on his blog.

Mark wrote the ASP.NET Framework to support his own Blueprint development. The Framework, which can be used with Visual Studio 2008, allows you to handle your Blueprint Service as an ASP.NET website. According to Mark, it supports IntelliSense code completion and allows developers to see the Blueprint output at debug time for each Blueprint component. Server-side deployment can be done with just one click from the IDE, and the Framework supports a complete set of Blueprint 1.0 features, even in the current 0.1 version.

You can download the Framework for free at bluuwi.com

Thanks to Mark for making this available to all Blueprint Developers! And please let us know if you want to share your development tools with the community.

We are happy to introduce the first version of Yahoo! Blueprint Analytics. The new online tool provides you with usage information for your Blueprint Services. Yahoo! Blueprint Analytics are available for all live Blueprint Services from the “Manage Widgets” page on the Developer’s Site. You will notice that the site has changed a bit. The “Total Number of Subscriptions” has been removed and we have added a new link after each Blueprint Service called “View Stats”; this link brings you to the new Analytics page.

A word on the “Total Number of Subscriptions”: We removed this count because, with the extension of the Blueprint Platform to support Mobile Sites and stand-alone Mobile Apps, it is no longer meaningful. While the subscription count gave you some indication of the popularity of your service, we believe that actual usage information is more valuable.

The new Yahoo! Blueprint Analytics page uses a Flash module to display the following data:
1.) Unique devices
2.) Page views
3.) Average page views per unique device

Each item is available on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. A date selector in the upper left corner allows you to select two dates to define a range.

The platform we are using to generate this data is new and has been operational for only a few weeks. This means that you may not be able to see usage data from the time you first submitted your service; tracking started sometime from mid-September to early October (depending when your service was connected to the new tool).

Data for Regions Across the World
Analytic data can be broken down by region. If you want to see how many devices have accessed your service during a specific day, week, or month in the US, Germany, or Burkina Faso, the new tool will be able to tell you. Simply select the region you are interested in from the pull-down menu on the upper toolbar. To see data for all regions, select “All” from the same menu.

Don’t Cut & Paste: Export!
You can export data to a CSV file. Just specify the start and end date, wait a few moments for the new view to appear, click “CSV Export”, and save the generated file to your computer.

We will add more features and usage insights (such as most popular device types) very soon. Stay tuned!