Over at Snaptic we just announced our Move Your App! developer challenge.
The Challenge
The idea is simple: write an Android app which inspires people to move around.
3 Reasons to Enter
1. Actually benefit society
Obesity is a huge problem - 64% of adults and 25% of children and teenagers are overweight or obese today in the USA. While there are many contributing factors, the most obvious is simply that we do not move around enough.
Obesity has been cited as a contributing factor to approximately 100,000-400,000 deaths per year in the USA alone.
This is an awesome opportunity to get some attention in this area and contribute something genuinely positive to society.
2. Earn some very good publicity and kudos
We have gotten some very high profile judges and sponsors for the challenge. MÃ¥rten Mickos, former MySQL CEO, Amy Novogratz, TED prize director and Pam Omidyar of HopeLab to name just a few. These are awesome folks to have reviewing your app.
3. Win an all-expenses-paid trip to TED Global 2010 and more
The top prize is a trip to the exclusive TED Global 2010 conference. I'm sure you've watched some TED Talks in the past and know what a fantastic, high-level event TED is. We are also going to be giving away a Mac Book Pro, Android phones, and more.
Get Help with your app
What kind of application can you write to encourage people to move? Imagine a game where you earn points based on activity - say through location checkins or something like that. Or how about a simple "distance traveled" application where you can log and graph your movement each day. There are tons of things you could do.
We are also happy to help any developers working on the challenge - check out our developers page for full details, but you can hop on #snaptic on irc.freenode.org or reach us on Twitter at @snapticdev! And hey if you need help setting up the Android SDK on your machine, maybe my own Android SDK on Ubuntu post could be of assistance.
Register Now!
What are you waiting for :-) If you are at all interested, go ahead and register!
Niall O'Higgins is an author, event organizer and software consultant. He wrote the book MongoDB and Python, published by O'Reilly. Events he organizes include We Have Tablets, the #1 Bay Area Tablet Computing Meet-up and PyWebSF. He also offers consulting services for Mobile, Tablet and Cloud Computing.
