android, Mobile, MIT Robert Buderi wrote: Google announced the winners of the first round of its Android Developer Challenge yesterday—and at least two teams with core members from MIT (one also had a Harvard member) were among the 10 teams taking home the $275,000 top prize. The teams were selected from 50 finalists picked last spring. And in addition to the top 10 big winners, Google also announced 10 other teams that each took home $100,000. We couldn’t find any local groups in that list, although not all the winner bios were published, and it has proven difficult to locate the backgrounds of all 20 winners. One of the 275K winners, called Locale, is an offshoot of an experimental course taught by legendary MIT professor Hal Abelson, assisted by Andrew Yu, a manager in the school’s Information Services and Technology office. Eric Carlson, of New England-based ConnectedBits, mentored the team, whose members include junior Clare Bayley and just-graduated seniors Carter Jernigan, Jasper Lin and Christina Wright, along with Jennifer Shu, an MIT graduate already working as a software engineer. Locale allows cell-phone and other mobile-device users to manage settings so that they automatically change depending on their current location. One example might be that your phone automatically goes silent or switches to vibrate when you’re in a class or meeting room. If you’re at home, calls might be automatically forwarded to your landline, where you might have a better connection. According to Locale’s description in the Android Gallery: “Users specify locations, times, and other conditions to trigger on. Location conditions utilize Android’s location API for high precision GPS positioning.” You can read more here. The other big winner was Wertago, described as “the creation of five friends (and mobile-technology enthusiasts) spread out across the country—New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and the San Francisco Bay Area—coordinating their effort almost entirely through Google Mail, Talk, and Docs.” But while they don’t live in Boston, all of those friends have strong local ties. Team members Teresa Ko, now a doctoral student at UCLA, Kelvin Cheung, and Peter Ree, all have undergrad and master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. Meanwhile, Robert Sarvis, now a lawyer in the Washington, D.C., area, studied math at Harvard. No bio was listed for the fifth team member, Douglas Young. According to its Android page description: “Wertago is the mobile application nightlifers have been waiting for—a single application that shows you up-to-the-second information about what venues are hot, helps you coordinate plans with all your friends, lets you share content and influence the social scene, and enables you to connect with socialites all across the city. Nightlife will never be the same!” Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS Less