« Previous post
Next post »

November 12, 2007

Google Gets Android Apps Going With a $10 Million Challenge

Erick Schonfeld

25 comments »

android-challenge.pngAs promised last week, Google today released the software development kit for its Android operating system for mobile phones. In an effort to give developers a little extra incentive to create applications on top of Android, it is also announcing a $10 million challenge. The best 50 apps will get initial grants of $25,000 each, followed by ten $100,000 and ten $275,000 grants.

That comes to $5 million. The second $5 million will be reserved for another challenge after handsets have been built. Google is obviously serious about jump-starting Android and the Open Handset Alliance as viable mobile operating system. You don’t see Google giving away $10 million to developers creating OpenSocial apps. Which project do you think is a higher priority?

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 6:50 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. document.write("Markus Tressl");

    November 12th, 2007 at 3:38 pm

  2. Dzieje się, oj dzieje… | nrafal.pl - o Internecie z pasją

    November 18th, 2007 at 4:40 am

  3. In-Vest Tech News » Blog Archive » UpNext: Wicked 3D Maps of NYC on Facebook

    November 22nd, 2007 at 11:39 pm

  4. The Year In Deals (2007 Edition): tech product reviews, tech news, daily videos, free downloads, and podcasts, tech, products, computer, mp3 players, cell phones, digital cameras

    December 31st, 2007 at 3:24 am

  5. TechCrunch en français » L'action Google en baisse et Android légèrement reporté

    February 4th, 2008 at 9:10 pm

  6. I, For One, Welcome Our Android Overlords

    March 5th, 2008 at 1:26 pm

  7. The iFund Has Competition: $150 Million Blackberry Fund To Be Announced Soon

    May 10th, 2008 at 6:43 pm

  8. TechCrunch en français » La guerre des plateformes mobiles: apres l’iFund, Blackberry lance son propre fonds de $150 millions

    May 10th, 2008 at 9:22 pm

  9. Technology and Gadgets Review » Blog Archive » The iFund Has Competition: $150 Million Blackberry Fund To Be Announced Soon

    May 12th, 2008 at 9:03 am

  10. Fifty Android Developers Get $25,000 Each: The List

    May 13th, 2008 at 9:42 am

  11. www.ubraniaroxy.pl » Blog Archive » Fifty Android Developers Get $25,000 Each: The List

    May 13th, 2008 at 12:20 pm

  12. La guerre des plateformes mobiles: après l’iFund et Android, Blackberry lance son propre fonds de 0 millions

    May 15th, 2008 at 12:00 pm

Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Deals and Coupons

    November 12th, 2007 at 11:41 am

    Android of course!

  2. Dan Schawbel

    November 12th, 2007 at 11:46 am

    Just saw this on read/write web.

  3. Slappenstance

    November 12th, 2007 at 12:14 pm

    Nice. This is exciting stuff.

  4. Chris R.

    November 12th, 2007 at 12:24 pm

    I don’t think these contests work really well. That being said, I would love to make our search engine compatible with Android. Just not to submit the code to Google. It’s like what, do I send the 16Terabytes of indexes on 380 blu-rays?
    Are they going to rebuild the distributed computing platform to make it work?
    So I don’t think their contest is applicable for large scale projects.
    Some lucky person is going to win a lot for a little.

  5. Hustled by NING

    November 12th, 2007 at 12:30 pm

    FANTASTIC

    I feel like just kissing the feet of these guys. At least they do something useful for the developers.

    The symbian development SUCKS. now in symbian 9 if you develop something, you need to get it CERTIFIED. which means paying several THOUSANDS of euro to a company like Cap Gemini just to make a certification for you.

    And after ALL THESE years, Symbian has not released a decent managed language programming interface

    God Bless Google.

  6. Chris R.

    November 12th, 2007 at 12:32 pm

    http://code.google.com/android.....itheclipse

    There’s an eclipse plug in. I’m just going to code up an interface to our engine with it. I bet it doesn’t win a prize though. I’m having flashbacks to developing WAP with the fugly Nokia phone emulator for windowz. wow.

  7. JJ

    November 12th, 2007 at 1:09 pm

    @Chris, we really do not care about your top secret search engine that you always touted about that seemingly exist only in vapor mode + selling your top notch 65K a year programmer.

    So leave the price money to the little app developers like us, it probably too little for your beerco and cheap smart programmers.

  8. Chris R.

    November 12th, 2007 at 1:34 pm

    Um, I was talking about eclipse and the plugin and the software emulator?
    Thanks for the interest though.
    I can’t believe they released this in Java?
    And why no netbeans plugin? I prefer netbeans dammit.
    They could have done the API in C and let everybody create interfaces in whatever language. I guess mobiles usually run jars though and they wanted to make sure people couldn’t run unsigned code.

    Does anybody know if the jars will have to be signed?

    Does anybody know if Android will have /usr/bin/php or perl or python?
    It looks like developing video games for cell phones right now. That’s the closest I can describe it.

  9. Chris R.

    November 12th, 2007 at 1:37 pm

    “So leave the price money to the little app developers like us”
    because I’m evil, like Bill Gates. I want all your price money.

    The more you know * * *

  10. David K.

    November 12th, 2007 at 3:41 pm

    priority one: Get the phone in the hands of the geeks

  11. Adam Benayoun

    November 12th, 2007 at 4:30 pm

    Sounds like a good plan to kickstart things around Android, the more applications released for android, the more appealing the handsets will be for us the end users.

  12. Jon

    November 13th, 2007 at 7:28 am

    Funny… even if Google offered 100M, it’s still free money… considering how well they are doing on the stock market ;-)

    Jon

  13. Ronak Shah

    November 21st, 2007 at 3:57 am

    I just heard MSN is preparing dirty to get its hands on the opportunity the global mobile market holds.. and here goes google launching ‘android’

« Previous post
Next post »