Vodafone pays €100,000 for a Flickr widget, App Star winner announced

You can’t blame Vodafone for wanting developers to jump on its mobile platform, and a good old-fashioned developer competition with cold hard cash up for grabs is as good a way as any.

Yet I’m not sure a slideshow widget for Flickr is quite the winner they had in mind when they decided to launch the Vodafone App Star competition and put €1m of prize money behind it.

But that’s exactly how it’s tuned out.

FlickrShow, developed by 26 year-old Pedro Campos, is a photo slideshow app powered by Flickr that enables users to search photos by keyword, username, colour and by location using GPS. It was declared the winner of the European-wide competition after a public vote and as a result, Campos takes home a further €75,000 on top of the €25,000 he already bagged after winning the local heat in Portugal. That’s €100,000 in total for a photo slideshow widget, not bad work if you can get it.

Vodafone, of course, will be hoping the competition as a whole helped spread the Vodafone 360 gospel and that the developers who entered will stay loyal to the platform. We’ll see about that, although Campos seems keen.

According to the press release, he was attracted to the 360 platform “due to its open web standards policy and its cross platform reach, which he felt offers an intelligent and developer-friendly approach to the market.”

Campos plans to use the cash prize to “invest in invest in a local Portuguese web development company, to expand its mobile section.”