A burst of creativity at the FinApps Party

IT experts, computer programmers, web designers, students and unemployed people, all aged 20-40, recently spent 24 hours at a gathering in Barcelona dubbed the FinApps Party, a marathon where participants were tasked with coming up with financial applications for mobile devices.

The event, the first of its kind in Spain, was so successful that six projects were rewarded with a 2,000-euro prize, instead of the five awards that had been advertised.

The brainstorming session produced a total of 40 projects, which were assessed by a panel of experts from La Caixa savings bank and Barcelona Digital Tech Center, the event organizers.

Organizers will now "study their viability in order to offer the applications free of charge to our clients in future," said David Urbano, director of mobile services for La Caixa.

Although the competition gave participants free rein to choose their favorite technology, the vast majority opted for the iOS (Apple) and Android (Google) operating systems.

StockSound, one of the winning apps, blends finance and music, "because managing a portfolio does not have to be boring, and above all, because it should be available to everyone - even the blind," explains Javier Sánchez, 40. The program makes the selected music go up and down in volume in conjunction with the rise and fall of selected shares. "It is useful for brokers, who no longer have to be alert to graphs but to the volume of the music they like," adds Marc Huguet, another team member.

Teams were the norm at this marathon of ideas. Droid.cat, a community of 250 Android developers from Catalonia, sent four members to the competition, and the result was Encaixa't, an application that lets users pay at local stores via their cellphone. "It's more convenient for the establishments, the stores and the restaurants," says Roc Boronat, one of the four representatives. The establishment sends the bill to the client, who accepts the transaction on the phone.

In the case of the Parebank app, "parents become their children's bankers," explains Ignasi Delgado, 29. The program aims to encourage saving habits among the young by letting them play with real money, "so they will know how much things cost and learn the value of finance," adds Iván Fraixedas.

CCeApp is "a collective expense calculator" that can come in handy at restaurants or during trips, "when you have to split up the check among several people and not everyone consumes the same amount," says Oriol Faura, 33, who has worked for 10 years in computer system management. CCeApp shares out the expenses "uniformly and fairly" because if somebody orders an extra portion, "it automatically calculates how much more that person should pay."