I'm a marketer and also a developer, so I get both sides of this.
From a marketing perspective, you hope to get a lot of cool stuff written for your API (and blog posts, discussion, etc) around your API. You think you can probably get 10 applicants, so you ask your boss for the ability to give a prize out for a contest to make it happen. Yet, then the only code that is submitted ends up being not far from a "Hello World" program even though 20 people said they wanted to enter. Now you look stupid to your boss that's wondering why no one entered and why they are paying $5000 for a Hello World program. You also look stupid when you post the Hello World program as the winner. Finally you look like an asshole when you close the contest instead.
As a developer you think, "Hey this is cool! I wonder how many other people are entering? My chances are probably pretty good." You get together some code, but hit some documentation issues with the API and you get distracted by your dayjob a bit. You end up being the 'winner' even though you only sketched out a small amount of code, but you feel totally screwed when they just cancel it.
Its easy to blame the product and marketer here, but I happen to know of one media center software company that was running an API contest. When I talked to their CEO I got the sense that they were dying for people to enter. It was well publicized, a good product and had good stuff to win. Yet, I personally got the sense that few were entering. It comes down to the fact that API contests are really hard to run!
Oftentimes as the marketer you're being pushed to do one (or pushing to do one), but don't have the full support of your development team to make it easy for people to enter. Maybe the devs release an API, but its only documented in LISP and its not a RESTful API (maybe for a piece of desktop software). LISP and its variants are awesome, but seriously few people who have spare time and are using your software can write well in it. Regardless of interest, few people enter. If you had gotten them to make a RESTful API, or documented it in Python, C, PHP, Ruby and Perl (with API wrappers), then more people would have entered. Yet you're the marketing guy and telling the dev team what to do is nearly impossible.
I think the key to entering contests is to have no expectations of winning as iamdanw says. Just build it because you want to use it and if you win that's awesome.
If people made some cool stuff for this contest I think they should be awarded, but I can also totally understand if there was a single entry that wasn't good too.
Yes, but the correct thing to do in this situation is to pay the $5,000 for the Hello World program, NOT post it (you never promised to publicize the results), and tell your boss "mea culpa... I tried the programming contest thing and it didn't work out". It wouldn't be the first time that a marketing program spent $5,000 to produce essentially no results... marketing is a very hit-and-miss business at the best of times, so your boss may be annoyed, but should take it in stride.
What you DON'T do is to advertise that you're offering a contest, then fail to pay out the prizes. That's not just sleazy, it's illegal.
>Yes, but the correct thing to do in this situation is to pay the $5,000 for the Hello World program, NOT post it (you never promised to publicize the results)
Just to play the devil's advocate, what's stopping unscrupulous companies from canceling the prize and saying they did the above?
They say, "I'm sorry, you weren't the winner" to any contestant who asked, and without a public announcement of who the winner was, they could get away without paying the prize money to anyone.
I couldn't google up any examples, but if you read the fine print of contests given by large organizations, the fine print always includes a clause to the effect of "If you'd like to know the full list of winners of this contest, send a self-addressed stamped envelope to $ADDRESS and you'll receive it by XXX date." I would imagine that clause is to block exactly this attack.
Contest law is fairly well-hammered out, and surprisingly subtle; a few months back HN had a story about the legal dangers of doing a contest like this. If this story is accurate, it seems very likely GamePro is in violation of the law, if they are a US company. I don't know for sure as I am neither lawyer nor totally aware of the contest in question, but it's very easy to be in violation of these laws.
I think it's inexcusable to cancel a contest, even if you only get a single entry. API providers can require registration to the contest, then monitor the usage metrics based on API keys. This would give an indication of how much development is happening before the contest deadline. If it's not much, extend the deadline, but don't cancel it. As far as quality of the submissions, it's not reasonable to expect polished, production quality work. The goal should be creative or novel prototypes that demonstrate a use case of the API. To me, a good entry would be one that clearly shows how the API is being utilized. Finally, if you've got good prizes(check),
an iteresting API to play with(check), and a site to support the API(check), and you can't attract developers, you're doing something very wrong or not trying very hard.
I'd agree. They definitely screwed up here, but I can imagine exactly what happened is all. They should just bite the bullet- or at least reopen and extend.
So, the thing is that devs put their neck out for your stupid contest, and you screwed them because there wasn't enough interest. The reason there wasn't enough interest is that you failed to create it.
You could have easily made it viral by making it part of the game that at least, say, 1000 people had to enter, and that for everyone you refer to the contest who enters, you get something, or you get a small purse if one of your referrals actually wins or something.
They didn't think it through, they weren't smart about it, and they screwed people over.
true, but still a bit sleazy for a company to back out of a contest. i wouldn't want to use a company's api if i knew they did this type of stuff. who wants to work for a company that treats their developers as marketing opportunities?
I believe the justification was so they could use unified cookies across all their properties -- they set the cookie for "com.com", and then it was available to news.com.com, search.com.com, downloads.com.com, etc., in the same way that yahoo.com cookies are available to news.yahoo.com, sports.yahoo.com, etc.
Plancast needs support for uncertainty. I might be going to this place sometime next week but I'm not sure yet. Perhaps if a friend also says they're going then I'll be more certain.
Similar to upcoming.org's interested vs attending.
I'm sorry but this seems to be one of the many flaws in this benchmarks. Kudos for your efforts but the graphs are almost meaningless, all things considered.
For example the EC2 instance storage is known to be dog slow. I assume that's the main reason for it looking so bad in your graphs - the picture might change with EBS.
As others have pointed out, synthetic benchmarks are a tricky beast generally. For fairness you should have optimized each host to their max potential - because that's what a regular user would do. But still, the variance in cloud-hosting makes it difficult to obtain representative figures. Slicehost might just have looked awesome in a different week...
The iPhone has to be on and the app open for it to work. No way around this limitation without 1) jailbreaking 2) digging around in private apis or 3) applying to be an approved accessory maker.
That $5 pre-order is far too easy to do. I bought one without stopping to research other products like the http://www.fitbit.com/. Brilliantly designed pricing.
It's a lot like Glastonbury ticketing. Deposits in autumn, full payment in January. This is extra profitable because in January many people are short on cash post-christmas and either can not or choose not to pay the full amount. You get to keep the non-refundable deposit and then sell the ticket/product again to another person.
As an aside, any idea on how hackable the Wakemate is? Presumably other devices could talk to it over bluetooth, eg a homemade arduino based alarm clock. Will the bluetooth protocol and data format used be published?
It took me about 15 seconds from the initial onload to typing my PayPal password, and I'm normally just seething with deliberative-yuppie-purchasing-angst. My normal minimum conversion time is at least an hour of research and a week of wall-clock time.
If you can hack my purchasing process so effectively, I'm pretty confident that you'll do well by my sleep cycle. Bravo!
I've been aiming to write a Rayleigh random number generator-driven alarm app for my iTouch (to do random-phasic sleep, e.g., countdown 20+X minutes, X drawn from a Rayleigh(20) distribution). If something like that could integrate with your app, that could be really cool. Crowdsourced sleep research :)
It's so easy to do, in fact, that I had already paid before I realized that the device isn't scheduled to ship until 3 days after my daughter is scheduled to ship.
I bet my graphs are going to be REALLY interesting.
The Fitbit looked very fun, but the site didn't mention an alarm function. I'm already envisioning a long slog toward convergence, because some day I want my phone to do calorie-counting and smart-alarming. After all, I already keep it near me all day and night...
A few months ago I saw a bunch of drunken youths on a train heading to a party. Incredibly they were editing myspace profile layouts on their Sony Ericssons and exchanging CSS and html tips. So coding on handheld devices is possible but we are not the target audience. Perhaps more yahoo pipes/yql style coding.
Generally this happens when the contest is run by marketing people as opposed to those from a developer background.
You've just got to build something you'll enjoy making and using regardless of the chance of winning.