New Delhi, India, July 3, 2009: The day for which the Indian developer community had been waiting has finally arrived. Facebook, whose mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected, announced today the launch of ‘Facebook India Developer Contest’ – a contest for Indian developers to showcase their web development skills by creating Facebook applications and Facebook Connect Integrations. The contest began on July 2 and ends on September 11, 2009 and is located at www.facebook.com/developercontestindia.
This is the first time Facebook is organizing a developer contest in India. Entries will be judged on originality, business potential, social utility, usefulness, expressive features, intuitiveness and potential of the application. There are three cash prizes; $4000 for the first place, $2000 for the second place and $1000 for the third, in each of the two categories.
To enter the contest, participants are required to create a Facebook platform application for use on the Facebook site or Facebook Connect integrations in English or Hindi and register their application in the contest’s homepage. The contest is open to Indian residents over the age of 16 with a facebook.com account
Ruchi Sangvi, Engineer and Manager of the Facebook platform said, “India ranks second in the number of software developers with 3.9 million software developers; we are very excited to engage with the developer community. Facebook has experienced a tremendous growth in India. Through the contest, we hope to see many rich experiences that leverage the social graph and empower Facebook users to share and connect.â€
Facebook Connect enables people to combine their Facebook experiences with any participating Website, desktop application or mobile device. When websites incorporate Facebook Connect, Facebook’s more than 200 million active users around the globe can automatically import profile information and bypass the need to build a friends’ list from scratch. More than 10000 websites have incorporated Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008.
About the Facebook India Developer Contest – The Facebook Developer Contest rewards the three most popular applications and the three most popular Facebook Connect Integrations in English of Hindi, with a prize of 4,000, 2,000, and 1,000 USD respectively. Winners are chosen on a lot of criteria including originality, social utility and business potential. The contest begins at 12:30:01 pm IST on July 2, 2009 and ends at 12:29:59 pm IST on September 11, 2009 and is located at www.facebook.com/developercontestindia. Winners will be announced in the last week of September.
- Facebook Announces Developer Contest for India - July 4, 2009
Still am not able to understand Bob’s email. I think he may not too sure what he meant there. And definitely it didnt reach people what he was trying to say so Gunashekar just enjoy the contest! lets not expect any answers or response.
Wishing you all the very best for all the participants!
Guna – All the very best for you too
So what’s your point Mr. Bob Smith. I am not a native speaker of English maybe! Let me see if I understand you.
The Facts:
-Facebook announces a Developer contest “exclusively’ for India
– You respond to the announcement
– I am trying to decode your response
Here is what I understand from your response.
– you don’t like an India-exclusive contest and point out that it can’t happen in the US of A (your country?)
After saying this you go on incoherently speaking of some Facebook executive’s hardware complaints- then you go on grinding your axe about facebook original developers or PHP “hackers” not understanding hardware- then you move to some unconnected article about RAM evolution. – You go on to say that you are much older than the early 64K computing devices or the early MS Word applications to ZEOS about which you claim exclusive expert knowledge.
Are you trying to advice the developer contest organizers that the developers must be judged in the contest on their understanding of hardware as well as software including operating system, interpreter, compiler, etc.?
So what’s your point Mr. Bob Smith?
Try doing this in the US and excluding people from other countries and there would be an outcry so loud it would wake the deaf. A Facebook VP recently chastised Intel & AMD regarding real world performance of their new processors. They need look no further than at themselves for the answer. Who developed facebook, what knowledge did they internally have on computer hardware architecture and program execution? There are simply too many hacks out there developing in languages such as PHP that don’t have a clue as to how things really work, and they wonder why their programs aren’t “efficient”. I just read another article recently in which the author complained how computers these days weren’t being produced with sufficient memory. Forgive me, but I can remember when PCs came with 64k. The original IBM PC – 640k. There was a company in the 80’s that blew away all others in benchmarks using a PC with 4 megs of ram – ZEOS. The trick – for the lowest megabyte they used SRAM instead of the more expensive DRAM. THAT was building to the benchmarks, but, it did indeed speed up all applications that played nicely in that lower meg. I doubt that most of the people reading this ever heard of ZEOS, know the difference between SRAM and DRAM (nor care), but the point here is knowledge of the underlying architecture, and I don’t just mean hardware, software too, including operating system, interpreter, compiler, etc – that is all a lost art. It was lost a long time ago while companies gleefully soaked up the megahertz, gigahertz, megabytes, and gigabytes. Answer me this – I first started using Microsoft Word years ago on a 386 running 25 mhz. Does Word today start up 100 times faster than it did in those days? No?! In fact, it starts up quite a bit slower.