Story of Sittiphol Phanvalai, the MobiTubia Developer

I am huge fan of the work of my friend Sittiphol Phanvalai. He’s the high talented developer of the Youtube client “MobiTubia” which has won Nokia’s Open C Challenge competition and also of other projects like the recently released “Themes Launcher”.

Forum Nokia asked him to write something about his story and I find  it quite interesting. So I decided to post it here to let people who are also interested in how an “ordinary” developer from Thailand made it to win this high contaminated developmental competition.

Hello fellow Forum Nokia Champions. I am so proud to say that! My success with the MobiTubia application in the Open C Challenge got me accepted as a Forum Nokia Champion, and I want to share some of my experience with you.

I am a student studying for my Masters Degree in the Department of Computer Engineering at Chulalongkorn University, http://www.chula.ac.th/chula/en/visitor/brief_en.html Thailand’s first institution of higher learning. I am also a Symbian Application Developer and have developed more than 10 Symbian applications. The one I am most proud of is “ZThai”, a full Thai language localization system for Symbian 6.1 and Symbian 7.0s. It is bundled with Nokia 7610 and Nokia 3230 in Thailand.

This was not first time I tried to develop an application like MobiTubia for Symbian. I had tried to do it before but I failed since it was really hard to port a Linux application to Symbian C++. That time, I used a full month but there was no sign of completeness. I thought that it might take more than 6 months to complete it.

Then came Open C, and in 10 weeks my MobiTubia project was finished and was sent to join the competition an hour before deadline. It was a really tiring period for me, then I waited for judging. I did not expect much but I checked email every day. At last I got an email from the Open C Challenge team “Congratulations, you are the finalist of Open C Challenge”.

I was silent for a big while. I can’t explain how happy I was but I can say that it was the happiest time of my life. Contents in that email also said that I was invited to join “Nokia World 2007” at Amsterdam. http://www.nokia.com/A4423681 Being invited to join Nokia World in Amsterdam was really an honor for me. It was my first time going abroad alone and also my first time in using English in real life.

From that day, I worked on the necessary things for judging such as a PowerPoint Presentation and Video Presentation. I just knew that programming was much easier than these things.( LOL)

The awards evening was the most excited time ever for me. When announcing time came, Lee Epting, Vice President of Forum Nokia, called each finalist on stage one by one. At last, she announced my name and that I was the winner of this competition. I couldn’t stop shaking. It was the happiest moment of my life. I knew at that time why Miss Universe always cries on stage! (LOL) I couldn’t believe that a student like me can win a global competition like the Open C Challenge. I really overwhelmed.

After I won this competition, my life has changed quite much. I was contacted by many guys including operators and journalists. But more than anything else, the great experiences and many good friends I got from Forum Nokia Open C Challenge will keep those great times in my mind forever. Now I need to get back to my studies, but this experience opens some great opportunities for me when I finish my degree.

MobiTubia is distributed as freeware right now in http://www.mobitubia.com.

And if you want another proof of Sittiphol’s great programming skill: He is currently in the final round of the well kown Mobile Rules competition in the category “Multimedia” with he’s newest project I have already tested.