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The last few weeks were both extremely intense and rewarding. Based on feedback from the judges, it was apparent that large number of applications were compelling, innovative and well implemented. The quality of these entries clearly reflects the creativity and hard work that developers have invested in building their apps.

In addition to developers' participation and contributions, over 100 industry judges around the world spent weeks reviewing these submissions. I want to thank all the developers and judges who have worked incredibly hard over the last few months, making the Android Developer Challenge such a success.

Many of the top submissions took advantage of the geo and social networking capabilities of Android. These applications allow friends to share their personal experiences and favorite content such as vacations, photos, shows, music, cooking recipes, restaurants, and much more as they relate to certain locales. I've also seen applications that connect people during emergency situations and others that allow users to share information on how they can reduce their carbon footprint. One developer even turned a real city block into a playing field where gamers can role-play and chase after villains.

Furthermore, some of these applications provide rich interactive experiences by combining web services and mash-ups to bring together data that's on the web with data that's on the mobile device. One application combined weather, pollen and allergy information in the context of a map that is relevant to a user's location.

Though many applications use a traditional "download" model for data, many also enable users to publish content, such as photos or even voice memos, for others to use on other mobile devices or the web.

This is just a brief snapshot of the many impressive applications I've seen. The 50 highest scoring applications will receive $25,000 each and go on to compete in the final round. We plan to publish a list of these applications as soon as we receive the developers' consent. The real winners, however, are the consumers who will benefit from the work of these talented developers.