KUCHING – Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak Campus is partnering with the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) to develop mobile apps designed to run on smartphones, tablet computers and other portable devices.
According to Augustus Raymond, Associate Dean of the Faculty of Design, Swinburne Sarawak was approached by MDeC for the venture because of the university’s impressive work on mobile apps.
“We demonstrated some of our multimedia design students’ final year work to MDeC in July and they were excited with what they saw. The rest, as they say, is history,” he said, adding that students from the university had in the past taken on multimedia projects from the local industry including those for CityOne Mall, the Sarawak Museum and the Sarawak Tourism Board.
Collaboration will take place through MDeC’s third iteration of its Integrated Content Development (ICON) program, designed to drive the Malaysian web and mobile application development industry to global standards especially in enterprise app development.
Swinburne Sarawak is the only Australian branch campus to tie up with the organisation, which oversees Malaysia’s national ICT initiative, MSC Malaysia. The other two are Malaysian public universities.
“The partnership will allow our students and staff to engage actively with industry on creative mobile app development. The exposure will also develop in them an entrepreneurial culture,” he said.
As a result of the alliance students from the Australian branch campus will be able to take on projects from companies.
“Many of them have expressed interest to collaborate with us,” Augustus said, adding that industry players who visited the Swinburne Multimedia Design exhibition booth at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre recently were impressed with the work of Swinburne Sarawak students which included Augmented Reality, iBook, Games, Interactive Directory built on iOS and Android platform.
According to MDeC, the app market is expected to grow and cited market intelligence company ABI Research as stating that it will reach an estimated US$46 billion.
The company also cited a Garner Inc study which predicted that 25% of enterprises will have an enterprise app store for managing corporate-sanctioned apps on PCs and mobile devices by 2017.