AppsForAsia: Creating Sustainable Solutions in Australia

AppsForAsia is a new initiative created by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and Microsoft, and is supported by regional information technology (IT) associations, private sector technology partners and universities. The programme aims to harness the creative power of hundreds of software developers to create sustainable solutions for the economic, commercial and social benefit of governments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), citizens and enterprises throughout Asia.

In this post we are pleased to present the winning AppsForAsia entries from Australia.

The recent AppsForAsia national developer event in Australia provided software developer teams the platform to showcase their expertise and resourcefulness in creating apps that bring both social and economic benefits. The following winning apps from Australia — BlueClover, Idex and X Meaning — are being showcased at the 46th Annual Meeting of the ADB on 2-5 May in New Delhi, India.

An estimated 347 million people around the world have diabetes and are at risk of suffering from other related ailments such as cardiovascular disease, kidney failure and blindness. The BlueClover app, developed by Trinary Logic, is aimed at improving diabetes management by enabling people affected by the disease in Australia to record and keep track of nutritional information for all food and drinks they consume.

The BlueClover app utilises the latest technologies such as augmented reality to help users easily capture and record food-related information by scanning a barcode with their camera phone.

The data is then securely stored onto Microsoft HealthVault^TM, an online health record database approved for medical use in both the US and UK — enabling the user to freely view, retrieve and share the information with their family and doctors, anywhere with an Internet connection.

Grand Domain developed the Idex app to ease how businesses conduct electronic authentication processes. Currently, organisations have to duplicate their entire user directory so that users can be authenticated and identified according to the services they subscribe to.

A better solution is a proven concept called ‘identity federation’, by which only the user’s home organisation is relied upon for authentication by external organisations (other businesses or service providers) — also meaning the home organisation retains control over the user identities.

The Idex app handles the setup and management of federated identities. With Idex, organisations only have to establish a single federation relationship to deliver services to a broader customer base and better secure user information.

Designed as a tool to make language resources more accessible to students, the X Meaning app serves as an aid for translators to produce a document in the source language and annotate it with translation information.

The X Meaning annotations provide both dictionary-level definitions of words and phrases as well as further elucidation with a contextual meaning, intended to convey the full nuances of the original document. Samples of the annotator output are available on www.xmeaning.com. 

Congratulations to these young developer teams from Australia!

For more information, please visit the AppsForAsia website.