Two senior students from University of St. La Salle – Bacolod City have won the Google Cloud Developer Challenge 2013 for Southeast Asia.

Franz Sarmiento and Katrina Tan Kit, both taking up Bachelor of Science in Computer Science succeeded in the “Social /Personal Productivity/Games/Fun” Category.

Last September, Google launched the Cloud Developer Challenge by developing new applications built using the company’s cloud platform. Developers submitted their apps to one of two specially-designated competition categories and only to a single category.

MishMash is a Google Cloud Application that turns the people in Google+ circles into three challenges namely the Picture Matching, Word Search and name Scramble that scored 122.25 over 190. Google released the final scores of Google Cloud Developer Challenge 2013 just last week (January 28).

According to the Facebook status of Franz Sarmiento, he and Katrina entered the competition a little bit intimidated since the competition is open to all and some participants are professionals. Their team met up for the first time just 10 days before the deadline. “Being aware of all this, perhaps our survival instincts kicked in as we weren’t ready to give up just yet. We still gave it our very best. We didn’t think about winning or losing, we just made sure to build the best app we could. It might be we just wanted to push ourselves to see how far we could go, or to find out how we ranked against some of the region’s best.” – Sarmiento’s status on his facebook account.

He also added “I am also happy to say that besides all the generous prizes Google is awarding us, on top of that they’re also going to donate $18,000 (around 815,000 Pesos) to the University of Saint La Salle’s Dept. of Computer Studies, since me and Katrina are both students from that department.”

Google has also established two entry categories, Enterprise which covers Small Business Solutions, Education, Not for Profit. The second category FUN includes Social, Personal Productivity, Games, and Entertainment. Twelve others were awarded for the following categories “Enterprise/Small Business Solutions, Education, Not for Profit” and “Social / Personal Productivity/Games / Fun” one from each of the six regions (India, Latin America, Middle East and North Africa, South East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and United States, Europe and the Rest of the World).