Samsung’s Developer Day in Singapore was held in style at The Arts House last Friday. To address developers questions about their new OS, Bada, and about developing applications for Samsung Apps, the Korean electronics giant flew in a team from Seoul to shed more light on Samsung’s latest project. Of course, nothing draws more attention from developers than the opportunity to monetize on their creations. Samsung kicked off the day by announcing their Developer Challenge with a total pot of USD$2.7 million, a good start for developers interested in what the Samsung App-store has to offer.

The Bada will be available on the Samsung’s latest phone, the Wave, which will be in Singapore’s market early June. The Wave will support Java, even though the Bada OS does not.

Samsung Apps will be available in over 50 countries by the 2nd Quarter of the year and will provide the standard 70/30 split of profits with participating developers. Samsung also explained the certification process for applications applied to Samsung Apps and the certification period would take up to 7 days with no charges applicable. The Bada SDK is available for downloads on Samsung’s website. However, the SDK only works on windows and uses C++ for development purposes. Bada has the ability to multi-task for native apps but only allows single-tasking for third-party apps.

Samsung ended the day with two discussion panels to provide attendees with a general picture of the mobile industry. Mohan Belani, Director at e27, was the moderator for both panels. The first panel addressed the issue of monetization opportunities for mobile applications. The panelist consists of Hong Ting, Co-founder of 2359 media, Ian Morrison, CIO at I-POP, and Chua Zi Yong from Stream Media. The second panel focused on the features provided by the Bada platform such as Face Recognition, Augmented Reality and Location Based Service. The panelists were Will Tang, creator of SGMahjong, Bernard Leong, Co-Founder of Chlkboard, and Gibson Tang, Co-Founder of Azukisoft.

The event brought about new opportunities for developers as they have another avenue to implement their skills. The Bada platform offers developers the chance to explore a less saturated OS and to be able to apply what knowledge they have learnt while developing for other platforms, such as the iPhone and Android, and use it to successfully build apps for Samsung Apps.