How to build a competitive developer competition
It’s New Year and engagement initiatives abound at this time of year from every vendor worth their salt as they all try and assert their ‘giving and sharing’ nature with their ecosystem of developers and other interested parties.
Microsoft’s student developer clash the Imagine Cup is scheduled for finals in Poland later this year, so save up your Zlotys and visit the website if you haven’t already. It’s a good event (I have attended several UK meetings) and the best thing about is it the enforced spread that students have to cope with in terms of business disciplines related to supporting a coding project.
You wanted to be a requirements specialist? Tough – you’re on testing. That kind of thing goes on.
What makes a developer competition work well then? Rumours suggest that Intel’s Moblin team has been keen to reach out to developers and ‘engage’ with them more directly. Trying to steal a march on Android development (as they logically must be right now), is this the best way to gain ground or is a rather dumbed down publicity channel – I fear the latter don’t you?
I attended the Yahoo! Open Hack Day in India a couple of years ago (they hold them all over all the time) and the best thing about this competition were the Yahoo! staff who were on hand to deliver tuition.
It wasn’t just, “Hey, here’s our APIs, go show us what you can do.” The company actually used the event to help ‘teach’ the developers who attended how to use the tools in question better. I think this is important so that the individuals can go away with something. Otherwise it looks like the vendor in question might just be using the event as a seeding ground for its technology and a recruitment exercise to spot future whizz-kids.
One more for scrutiny then, the O2 Incubator Project sets out to search for teams of web developers to create a so-called “network for businesses”. Or to put it another way, this is a developer competition where O2 encourages (and financially supports) developers to create small business applications with the best of the bunch qualifying for ended funding in consideration for O2 having an option to buy their business for up to £1 million at the end of 12 months
Developers in this case do get help from the O2 small business team and a solid chance of cash, so you can’t really knock that. O2 launched its Incubator Project in December 2009 and says it is inviting developer applicants to input their creative ideas and skills to produce an attractive proposition for businesses.
Applications are open until 31 January 2010. So get in now if you like the sound of it. Just remember that there is no such thing as a free lunch and none of these companies are doing this for the good of their health or yours (well, not completely anyway) so be careful before you sign away your next Twitter and your valuable intellectual property.