Mobile Development and $10 Million Dollars (USD)
The smartphone battle is heating up. With Nokia tossing ten million dollars into the battle in an effort to pull attention back to Nokia smartphones in North America. While the applications are to target people in North America, anyone from around the world seems able to participate.
With AT&T and the help of the community, Nokia will determine three winners in each of 17 categories. The community will be able to vote for the best applications by downloading applications. Additionally, from the category winners, a grand prize application and a grand prize game winner will be selected.
Being that this is Nokia, they will want you to develop an application that targets the N8 that they can then place in their Ovi Store. You must build an application by using the Nokia Qt SDK, the Nokia Web Runtime Plug-ins, or the Java-Runtime that comes with every Nokia device.
The application submission window is open and goes until January 28th, 2011, so there is a bit of time to think about and build an application. The seventeen categories are:
- Books, Education, and Reference
- Business and Finance
- City Guides and Maps
- Entertainment
- Lifestyles and Leisure
- Music
- News and Weather
- Photo and Video
- Productivity and Tools
- Social Network and Communication
- Sports
- Games: Action and Adventure
- Games: Cards and Casinos
- Games: Classics and Arcade
- Games: Puzzles and Strategy
- Games: Sports and Racing
- Games: Trivia and Education
What will the winner get? Each category winner gets $150,000 US. The grand prize winners (one for applications and one for Games) gets an additional $100,000 as well as about $1.9 million in marketing for their program. The runner up gets an additional $1 million in marketing.
While contests come and go, this one seems interesting for those that are developing for mobile devices and are interested in targeting Nokia devices. With such a wide variety of categories and lots of prizes, it will be interesting to see if this grabs developer's attention and spurs the development of a large number of applications.
The applications available for a device can make or break its acceptance, so it will be interesting to see if this helps position Nokia's phones better than the iPhones, Android devices, and Windows Phone 7 devices that are all fighting for mind presence. It will also be interesting to see if any of these other players try to compete will similar contests.
Maybe CodeGuru will have a contest for contests where we give a CodeGuru mouse pad to the company whose contest manages to get the most applications submitted! In the mean time, if you are interested in more on the Nokia contest, jaunt on over to CallingAllInnovators.com for more details and the specifics on the contest. After all, they have the official word on what they are doing.
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