N900 Coding Competition: a grassroots community success
10Aug10
Chronology of a success story (please contribute dates missing):
- Jan 2010 – kojacker joins maemo.org.
- Feb 16th – First Talk post (no firmware update for Vodafone UK).
- May 4th – First Talk thread started: Any interest in a friendly Maemo app development ‘competition’?
-
May 19th – He goes for it: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
- May 20th – Cosimo Kroll (aka zehjotkah) proposes that Nokia could fund prices for the winners (and contacts me).
- May 21st – Prizes agreed: “the winner of each category will be invited to the MeeGo Conference with travel and accommodation covered. If someone can’t make it then we can offer an N900 in exchange.”
- zehjotkah opens a PayPal account to pool donations.
- July 1st – A new category for beginners is created on the fly based on popular demand. 17 projects apply.
- July 22nd – 65 projects registered and ready to be voted in 6 + 1 categories.
- August 8th – The community has raised a bounty collection of €781 ($1019) to reward the 2nd, 3rd and 4th participants in each category.
- August 9th – Winners announced! (see screenshots & more)
1. Queen Beecon Widget by Alessandro Peralma (No!No!No!Yes!) (Desktop category)
2. CloudGPS by Damian Waradzyn (dwaradzyn) (Location & Navigation category)
3. Faster Application Manager by Heikki Holstila (hqh) (System & Utilities category)
4. PSX4M by Tomasz Sterna (smoku) (Games category)
5. PenPen Sketchbook by Ben Lau (benlau) (Graphics & Multimedia category)
6. TweeGo by Mikhail Ramalho (mikhail_ramalho) and Rodrigo Avelino (rodavelino) (‘Other’ category)
7. DropN900 by Jonne Nauha ( jonnenau) (Beginners category)
Congratulations for the winners and everybody involved. *You* are making a difference with initiatives like this. See you in Dublin!
Filed under: maemo | 9 Comments
Tags: competition, development, maemo, N900, open source
otoh
flors 
Success that Nokia make sure exclude certain countries like Canada.
Here is the answer from Nokia USA (because there is no store for Canada) when I enquired about paying *FULL PRICE* for a N900:
[…]
In response to your concern, we would like to inform you that the Nokia N900 has not yet been released in Canada.
[…]
(and I cut all the rest of the BullC that has become irrelevant, including the part that invite me to choose a different phone *sic* – and yes I got a different phone, not from Nokia [1])
There is no “grassroot” when a company deliberately choose to send away potential customers based on the country of residence.
[1] and yes there are actually two mail-order that sell them to Canadian, had I been told by your people to get it from them…
Do another one for meego! I’m learning android but it’s reminding me of what I didn’t like about full fat java.
hi!!! i’d love to have one N900 but i live in Mexico! I have waited since october last year and it hasn’t arrived yet!!! please! I don’t know where to suggest it. I have already contacted Telcel and Nokia México (trough their websites) but they only sais “thanks for your comments”.
What should I do to have one!
Congratulations for the great work! it’s an amazing cellphone!
Here you have a… how can I call it? a seller?? a promoter that will no charge you for talking every one of it! just make it available here!
bye! and go on!
This is a community developer contest and there have been many chances for community developers to get an N900 at a discounted price or basically free, regardless from their country.
I also would like that Nokia ships Maemo/MeeGo devices all over the World but, well, this is something decided by the units in charge of running a profitable business.
we need more contests like this in the near future in order to catch up with other smart phones !
best for me Dropn900 Love it !!!
i would take part at next time.
could anyone inform me, when next competition starts?
What for ? I thought n900 was dead ?
I mean everybody who bought one is trying to find a way to get rid of it because of the lack of future and support. Why should developers work on it ?
It’s a real question, I’m a developer and started developing apps for n900 but stopped the projects in the middle (near completion, but investing more time was appearing to my team as a waste of resources).
Answer to the real question: target Qt / Web Runtime & make your app reach MeeGo & Symbian devices in addition to Maemo/N900.