Windows Phone Thoughts: 'Rockstar' Award Winner Selected: Beastware

"Back in March 2010, we announced the Windows Phone 7 "Rockstar" Award - an award that would be presented to the student team that developed the most compelling Windows Phone 7 application for the Imagine Cup 2010. Over the past few months, several hundred student teams from around the world were building Windows Phone 7 applications using the Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the developer tools. These teams were building applications using either the Silverlight or the XNA framework, and developed some really outstanding applications. The teams were asked to submit the XAP file, which we then used to judge the applications. The applications were tested both on an emulator as well as on a Windows Phone 7 device. Today I'm pleased to announce that off the 131 teams that submitted their applications, a Windows Phone 7 "Rockstar" has been crowned."

Now this is more like it! There are some really interesting and creative applications created by developers from all over the world - Microsoft handed out $15,000 in cash and a bunch of Windows Phone 7 devices. This is the road they need to keep going down, only ramping it up about 10x to get some of the bigger development houses interested. This is laying the foundation for there being some great apps when Windows Phone 7 ships!