10 Cool Things About The WHERE Developer Contest - Develop... Win... Meet VCs!
Written by Glenn Letham
Wednesday, 05 September 2007
Announced a couple of week's ago, The WHERE Developer Contest will offer
thousands of dollars in cash prizes. Prize winners will also receive an audience
with three top-tier venture capital firms: Venrock, Kodiak Venture Partners, and
GrandBanks Capital. You don't have to be an experienced mobile developer or programmer to
take part, however, you should be knowledgeable about location technology and
you should have a good idea! Develop... Win... Meet VCs!
10 Cool Things About The WHERE Developer Contest and the dev
program:
1. Through the WHERE Developer Program, developers can build their own applications using
any programming environment (PHP, Ruby on Rails, .NET, Perl, etc.) and WHERE
will automatically port their application to J2ME and BREW GPS-capable mobile
handsets.
2. Winners will be chosen by a leading industry panel including individuals
from Frost & Sullivan, IDC, the Yankee Group, O'Reilly Radar, and
ProgrammableWeb.
3. Anyone can enter... you don't have to be a programmer. No phone needed. No
mobile development experience needed. All you need is a good idea
4. Not sure what to do or what kind of application to develop? Where has
offered up some suggestions:
Games: how about a Geo-caching app?
- Geo-caching is a very popular activity which involves hiding objects and
publishing their GPS coordinates so that other people can hunt for the
geo-cached object. The WHERE version of geo-caching would help people look for
geo-cached objects on the spur of the moment, without needing to carry around a
separate GPS unit.
- Capture the Flag: search for virtual flags and maybe
grab some weapons?
- Virtual objects game: Find virtual objects (fishing,
buried treasure, or anything else) that can be collected by traveling to a
physical location
- Commuting: If you commute, there are likely thousands of
other people who share a similar commute. Why not build an app based on your
commute?
- Finders: There's a lot of useful content buried on the Internet.
It needs to be freed for the mobile phone. Some examples are
playgrounds, bathrooms, restaurants with changing tables, historical
information, altitude level, skate parks, etc, water levels, tides,
sunrise/sunset, etc.
- Geo Web Search
- Web location bookmarking: There's
a lot of location content on the web, and it's not easy to move it to your
phone. A WHERE-capable browser toolbar would allow someone to pull a location
off of a web site and make it available to WHERE. Once that location is in
WHERE, you can view it on a map, search for businesses nearby, or get driving
directions.
- Coordinating meetings with friends: Trying to get several
people to meet at the same time and place can be challenging.
- Celebrity
finder: Use your mobile phone to get real-time information about celebrity
sightings in your area.
- Create a story that changes based on where you
are located.
- Art projects: Place a real art object in a physical place (a
sculpture, a sticker, a piece of graffiti), then publish the location virtually.
5. First place: $5,000 cash; Promotion on where.com; Meeting with Venrock,
Kodiak Venture Partners, and GrandBanks Capital
6. Final date for entering contest: October 15th, 2007
9. Even if you don't win you can still win great prizes and hook-up with some
Venture Capitalists as the second of third prize winners. 5 additional
contestants will have theo pportunity to launch app to WHERE mobile GPS
users
10. How to Enter - Register for the WHERE Developer Program. Build your WHERE
mobile GPS application. Send an email to with a link to your
completed WHERE application. This will enter your application into the
contest
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