A proud day for Koprol. Our very own Rafeequl Rahman aka. vcool won the $20,000 grand prize at the first YMDA in Indonesia, yesterday (May 16th, 2009) at Plaza Senayan.

YMDA is Yahoo!'s effort to promote their mobile application platform. They invited developers to compete in 5 categories by building a Yahoo! mobile application for 5 award sponsors. Winner of each category gets $10,000. Then the judges select one of those 5 winners as 'Best in Show' to receive another $10,000. Rafeequl, who entered alone, won the whole thing over teams of Indonesia's best developers.

The application Rafeeq developed, called Lapangan Hijau, allows people to follow the national soccer league from their mobile phones. It provides schedule, live scores, even SMS reminders and account connection to Facebook.

By his own admission, Rafeeq did not expect to be named as winner at all. He came to the final event just to meet other contestants and to see who would win. He didn't know how he won, but based on what an insider told him, the judges saw the 'passion' in his craft. And yes, Rafeeq did design Lapangan Hijau based on his own needs as an avid soccer fan.

Rafeeq credited his experience working at SkyEight and developing Koprol to be very helpful. He got familiar with Ruby on Rails, JavaScript frameworks, and plugins while developing Koprol. In fact, he built Lapangan Hijau with Ruby on Rails. He also thanks all his Koprol friends for inspiring and supporting him. From us here at Koprol, we can testify that Rafeeq is a very humble genius and we couldn't be prouder. Go vcool!

Related news:

• VIVAnews: 'Lapangan Hijau' Juarai YMDA
• VIVAnews: Ingin Hajikan Orang Tua Setelah Juara YMDA

The first official introduction to Koprol took place at a gathering of Jakarta's creative industry professionals. The press and blogs may have interviewed us, but it is at this FreSh event on March 19, 2009, at fX Lifestyle X'nter that we presented our project for the first time. We also shared some insights to how we got to this point and plans for the future.

Here are the slides used to explain Koprol and share our stories:

We were very glad that about 100 tech & media enthusiasts were willing to wait so late for our turn to present Koprol. They gave lots of questions and suggestions. The host said that it was their biggest attendance yet.

More pictures by Ollie after the jump (the last one shows an upcoming feature!)

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It's our turn to tell stories at FreSh! Come meet the Koprol team as well as see presentations by people from Yahoo! Mobile, Mobile Monday, and M-Star at this month's FreSh themed "Mobile Creativity".

For more information and RSVP, go to their Facebook event page: FreSh! March 2009 "Mobile Creativity"

Now what should the Koprol team talk about. Any ideas?

Koprol at last month's FreSh - photo by Chandra Marsono