THE hopes of hundreds of geeks are pinned on it: a “code camp” in Florida where developers of games and other quirky applications for mobile phones will pitch their ideas to the big names in the business.

Hundreds of mobile phone application developers from around the world are preparing to gather for the conference, to be held at the Sun ’n’ Fun holiday park at Sarasota.

There they will take part in a kind of Fame Academy of the technology world, pitching their ideas to a group of senior executives from some of the world’s biggest mobile phone companies, in an attempt to get their big break and have their idea sold around the globe.

The companies that will be represented, including Orange, Nokia and Symbian, will consider the applications before choosing the best.

The few lucky ones — many of them one-man bands who have spent years trying to come up with their genius application — are in line to make hundreds of thousands of pounds if their idea is bought.

Ideas to be put forward at the event, which will take place on April 18 to 20, include a mobile phone application that will help users to lose weight and a satellite navigation program. One developer hopes to woo the female third-generation (3G) vote with a mobile “ovulation” application that will tell the user when is the best time to try to get pregnant.

Orange has said that those applications that catch its eye will be put into a catalogue, from which they will have a good chance of being taken up and used by the operator’s 54 million users across the globe.

For the delegates, the event is not all work. They will stay in tents where they will “live and breathe code” for 72 hours with like-minded folk. At night they will enjoy campfire sessions where they can discuss the minutiae of coding, swap stories about their applications, and be entertained by the Sarasota state circus.

For the mobile phone companies, though, the event is serious business. Despite the hype around 3G the technology has failed to take off. Five years after the £22.5-billion licence auction in Britain, some of the operators have yet to see any return on their investment.

Now, in an attempt to raise the level of interest, the operators are racing against each other to find the applications that will appeal to users — and help them to claw back the billions of pounds that they have spent buying their licences and building their networks.

3, the 3G mobile phone company that was the first to introduce the technology to Britain, has had success with its music downloads and sport clips. In the first six months of the download service, ten million users downloaded or streamed its music videos.

However, it is becoming clear that, instead of one “killer application”, the operators will need constantly to introduce new, innovative applications to maintain interest in 3G.

Richard Hanscott, vice- president of business development and partnerships for the Orange group, said: “We intend to spread our net wide at the camp and look for everything from serious business applications to crazy ideas we have not thought about before.

He added: “We have always said that we would not sell the technology to customers, but focus on giving them the benefits of it.”