The Samsung Galaxy S4, the Korean giant’s latest flagship smartphone, comes with a unique feature called Group Play that allows users to enable real-time sharing of information between devices. At the product launch, Group Play was demoed to play music between several surrounding Galaxy S4 devices.
However, Group Play isn’t just a social sharing of music app. The SDK behind it, called Samsung Chord, allows for much more. With the Samsung Chord SDK, developers can enable:
- Easy discovery and connection with nearby devices
- Real-time experiences between multiple devices
- Fast peer-to-peer connection, without the need of a server
- Decentralized networks where peers can come and go at any time
(source: Samsung Developer)
These features, in turn, allow for:
- Interaction between devices
- Synchronized content sharing
- Broadcast of messages to nearby devices
- Data transfer between devices
- Multi-player games
(Source: Samsung Developer)
To promote greater developer participation to create apps using the Samsung Chord SDK, the company has announced the Samsung App Challenge 2013, which will run from 20th June to 31st August this year. Interestingly, Samsung will only accept app entries that utilize the Chord SDK – and is offering lucrative incentives for your Chord apps.
Ten winners will receive a total of $800,000 in cash prizes, with the break down as follows:
The judging period will be held over October and November, before the winners are announced sometime in December this year. Find out more about the Samsung App Challenge 2013 via its official page here, or find out more about how the Chord SDK works via the Samsung Developer page here.
