Marvell Announces Winners of Its '$100K Challenge' Tablet App Competition

SANTA CLARA, Calif. and LAS VEGAS, Jan. 6, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Marvell, a worldwide leader in integrated silicon solutions, is proud to announce the winners of its "$100K Challenge," a competition to inspire and reward innovative new educational apps for tablet computers. The competition invited software developers around the world to create applications with the potential to reinvent the classroom, improving the way students learn and the way educators teach.

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The $100K Challenge is part of Marvell's Mobylize campaign, the company's long-range commitment to improve mobile technology in the areas of education and health. The three winners will share prize money totaling $100,000 and receive access to Marvell's considerable engineering resources to fully develop their tablet apps.

"The era of mobile computing has arrived and one of the biggest beneficiaries can be the classroom," said Tom Hayes, Vice President of Corporate Marketing at Marvell Semiconductor, Inc.  "Marvell's goal is to launch a revolution in the delivery of education, and these prize-winning apps have the potential to do just that.  Congratulations to all our winners, and everyone who participated in the $100K Challenge."

The winner of the $50,000 top prize is the application Battleship Numberline, a multitouch educational game that helps strengthen math skills. "Improving your ability to estimate along a number line correlates with math performance all the way up to 6th grade," said lead developer Derek Lomas, a 29-year-old Ph.D. student at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. "Marvell is doing great things for the future of education by seeding a development community for educational apps."

The winner of the second-place prize of $30,000 is the application Imagine Mathematics, which illuminates math disciplines like algebra, trigonometry and calculus by taking students behind the scenes and showing them how these disciplines are used in the creation of animated movies from studios like Disney and Pixar. The creator of the app is 36-year-old Seth Piezas, a former technical director at Pixar Animation Studios who now runs his own interactive agency, Colabi.

"I want high school students to see the practical applications of math and the cool things they can create," said Piezas. "The tablet computer really is an amazing platform for the classroom. I just wish I had something like it when I was a kid."

The third-place prize of $20,000 goes to Homework Management System, an application that allows students to create quiz questions based on what they have learned in the classroom, which  teachers then can distribute to other students for quiz-show style gaming or for homework assignments.

"I have to give kudos to Marvell for the role they are playing in the intersection of technology and education," said project leader Paul Kim, the chief technology officer at the Stanford University School of Education and founder of education nonprofit Seeds of Empowerment. "We need to revolutionize our education system and it is wonderful that companies like Marvell are taking the lead."

The Mobylize campaign and the $100K Challenge are inspired by Marvell's Moby tablet reference design. The classroom-friendly Moby tablet reference design was developed to show that a high-performance, low-power device could be made affordably for classrooms.  The reference design is based on a Marvell® ARMADA™ application processor and Google's Android™ operating system.  The $100K Challenge applicants were challenged with fully utilizing the reference design's attributes, including 1080p HD, advanced 3D capability and full Adobe Flash.

About Marvell

Marvell (NASDAQ: MRVL) is a world leader in the development of storage, communications and consumer silicon solutions. Marvell's diverse product portfolio includes switching, transceiver, communications controller, wireless and storage solutions that power the entire communications infrastructure, including enterprise, metro, home and storage networking. As used in this release, the term "Marvell" refers to Marvell Technology Group Ltd. and its subsidiaries. For more information, visit Marvell.com.

Marvell and the M logo are registered trademarks of Marvell and/or its affiliates. ARMADA is trademark of Marvell and/or its affiliates. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

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SOURCE Marvell Semiconductor, Inc.