Smaaz’s Blog

Google’s $10 Million Android Developer Challenge

Google today announced the Android Developer Challenge, which will provide $10 million to developers who build mobile applications for Androidâ„¢, the first complete, open, and free mobile platform. The Challenge is designed to support the developer community and spark innovation on the Android platform by awarding cash prizes ranging from $25,000 to $275,000 to developers whose applications are picked by a panel of judges.

“We’ve built some interesting applications for Android but the best applications are not here yet and that’s because they’re going to be written by developers,” said Sergey Brin, Co-founder and President, Technology, Google. “We’d like to reward these developers and recognize them as much as possible.”

“We believe that the Android platform offers developers a unique opportunity to create truly innovative mobile software,” said Andy Rubin, Google’s director of mobile platforms. “We’re challenging developers to stretch their imaginations and skills to leverage the full capabilities of this new platform and to create something amazing.”

Android was announced on November 5 by the Open Handset Allianceâ„¢, a group of more than 30 technology and mobile industry leaders committed to fostering innovation on mobile phones and offering a better consumer experience. The Alliance will provide developers with a new level of openness that enables them to work more collaboratively. Today, the Alliance released an early look at the Android software developer kit (SDK) that includes the documentation, sample projects, development tools, emulator, and libraries that developers will need to build an Android application. Today’s Android SDK announcement can be found on the Alliance blog: http://android-developers.blogspot.com.

The $10 million total in the Android Developer Challenge will be distributed equally between the Android Developer Challenge I and II. Submissions for Challenge I will be accepted from January 2 through March 3, 2008, and the 50 most promising entries will be recognized by end of March with each receiving $25,000 awards to fund further development. These 50 entries will then be eligible for even greater recognition by applying by May 1, 2008 for ten awards worth $275,000 each and another ten worth $100,000 each. Recognition for the top apps among those entries will be announced by end of May 2008. Challenge II will launch after the first handsets built on the platform become available in the second half of 2008.

A panel of technology and mobile experts selected from the Open Handset Alliance member organizations and the industry in general will judge all qualifying entries. Awards will be given to the developers whose applications leverage all that the Android platform has to offer in order to provide consumers with the most compelling experiences. Developers retain all intellectual property and other rights to their applications. Interested developers should:
1. Download the SDK at http://code.google.com/android/download.html
2. Build a great app.
3. Submit an application between January 2 and March 3, 2008.

Additional information about the Android Developer Challenge can be found at http://code.google.com/android/adc.html

Add comment November 12th, 2007

Yahoo! Launches New Program to Advance Open-Source Software for Internet Computing

Yahoo! today announced that it will be the first in the industry to launch an open source program aimed at advancing the research and development of systems software for distributed computing. Yahoo!’s program is intended to leverage its leadership in Hadoop, an open source distributed computing sub-project of the Apache Software Foundation, to enable researchers to modify and evaluate the systems software running on a 4,000 processor supercomputer provided by Yahoo!. Unlike other companies and traditional supercomputing centers, which focus on providing users with computers for running applications and for coursework, Yahoo!’s program focuses on pushing the boundaries of large-scale systems software research.

Currently, academic researchers lack the hardware and software infrastructure to support Internet-scale systems software research. To date, Yahoo! has been the primary contributor to Hadoop, an open source distributed file system and parallel execution environment that enables its users to process massive amounts of data. Hadoop has been adopted by many groups and is the software of choice for supporting university coursework in Internet-scale computing. Researchers have been eager to collaborate with Yahoo! and tap the company’s technical leadership in Hadoop-related systems software research and development.

As a key part of the program, Yahoo! intends to make Hadoop available in a supercomputing-class data center to the academic community for systems software research. Called the M45, Yahoo!’s supercomputing cluster, named after one of the best known open star clusters, has approximately 4,000 processors, three terabytes of memory, 1.5 petabytes of disks, and a peak performance of more than 27 trillion calculations per second (27 teraflops), placing it among the top 50 fastest supercomputers in the world.

M45 is expected to run the latest version of Hadoop and other state-of-the-art, Yahoo!-supported, open-source distributed computing software such as the Pig parallel programming language developed by Yahoo! Research, the central advanced research organization of Yahoo! Inc.

Carnegie Mellon University will be the first institution to take advantage of Yahoo!’s M45. Leading systems software researchers Garth Gibson and Greg Ganger, both professors at Carnegie Mellon, will instrument the system and evaluate its performance. Simultaneously, Carnegie Mellon computer science professors Jamie Callan and Christos Faloutsos, academic leaders in text and web mining, will solve challenging information retrieval and large-scale graph problems on the cluster. Carnegie Mellon faculty members Alexei Efros, Noah Smith, and Stephan Vogel will also use the cluster to tackle large-scale computer graphics, natural language processing, and machine translation problems, respectively. In the future, Yahoo! plans to make M45 available to researchers from other universities for open, collaborative research.

“Hadoop has become an important computing environment for data-intensive applications and Yahoo! is playing a leading role in its development. We are excited about collaborating with Yahoo! on systems software research, helping to advance the state-of-the-art, and creating new research possibilities in this critical area,” said Randall E. Bryant, dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. “We look forward to working with Yahoo! and jointly contributing back to the open source community.”

“Yahoo! is dedicated to working with leading universities to solve some of the most critical computing challenges facing our industry,” said Ron Brachman, vice president and head of Yahoo! academic relations. “Launching this program and M45 is a significant milestone in creating a global, collaborative research community working to advance the new sciences of the Internet. This milestone is a key element of Yahoo!’s growing Academic Relations effort.”

Add comment November 12th, 2007

New York Daily News Joins Yahoo! in Newspaper Consortium Partnership

Yahoo! today announced that the New York Daily News, the fifth largest newspaper in the United States, has become the largest newspaper to join the Newspaper Consortium.

The Daily News will gain access to Yahoo!’s cutting-edge Web technologies for targeting display advertising, distributing content and connecting employers with job candidates on Yahoo! HotJobs. Additionally, the Daily News will be able to offer its advertisers extended reach and frequency benefits on the Yahoo! network.

“The Daily News is excited to be the latest and largest newspaper to join the Newspaper Consortium. Our partnership with Yahoo! will allow us to provide additional opportunities to our advertisers, to job seekers and to all of our users,” said Marc Kramer, CEO of the Daily News. “We are by far the biggest-selling newspaper in New York, thanks to a great product and a very strong and loyal readership. Being part of the Newspaper Consortium’s continued success story will give NYDailyNews.com a superior online presence and deliver innovative technologies to our advertisers and our audience.”

Yahoo!’s partnership with the Newspaper Consortium was launched just over a year ago and has since tripled in size to now include 21 newspaper companies, representing close to 400 daily newspapers.

“We’re very pleased to welcome the Daily News as a valuable addition to the Newspaper Consortium,” said Lem Lloyd, Yahoo! vice president of the Newspaper Consortium. “By adding the most widely circulated newspaper in New York to our extensive list of newspaper partners, we are expanding our reach and relevance in the nation’s largest metropolitan market. Yahoo! is proud to be the online partner of choice, exemplifying what it takes to offer world-class online advertising solutions.”

Core to the partnership is the ability for the Daily News to expand the distribution of its local help wanted print ads to a national audience. The Daily News will be able to leverage Yahoo! HotJobs’ leading search and job posting technology, as well as sell a suite of online media recruitment products. To date, Yahoo! HotJobs has launched 160 newspaper co-branded job sites that serve 377 newspapers, including major market dailies in Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Houston and San Francisco.

Add comment November 12th, 2007