Monetate Announces Open Source Competition for Developers in the Philadelphia Area

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by || 04/21/2011

Monetate, the leading independent provider of testing, targeting, and personalization for websites, today announced the first Monetate Open Source Prize for developers in the Philadelphia area. The contest kicks off in advance of Philly Tech Week, which runs April 25-30. The winning entry will receive “The Ultimate Developer Kick Start Package” worth $5,000 and including a MacBook Pro, an Apple 27 inch LED Cinema Display, an iPad 2, a $300 Amazon gift card good for EC2 and books, plus a month’s supply of pizza and Mountain Dew.

“The goal of the Monetate Open Source Prize is to support development of an existing open source project or to provide a kickstart to a new open source idea,” said David Brussin, Monetate founder and CEO. “We have built our company on top of open source work such as Python, Linux, Nginx, Memcache, HAProxy, MySQL, Django and Google Closure Library, so it is only fitting that we at Monetate do our part to drive open source forward while at the same time supporting the Philly Tech community.”

“With the Monetate Open Source Prize we hope to increase the amount and quality of open source code,” said Tom Janofsky, Monetate’s Director of Engineering. “We also want to help publicize the Philly area’s great open source projects and developers while giving them more opportunities to work on their open source passions.”

Any project producing source code under an Open Source Initiative approved license is eligible to participate (www.opensource.org/licenses). The prize is available only to developers who live or work within 60 miles of Philadelphia (not all the developers on the project need to be in the Philadelphia area). Winners can opt for a cash equivalent prize. For additional prize and competition details see: opensource.monetate.com.

Entries are due May 11 and will be evaluated on usefulness, novelty, and the impact of the prize award on project status. The top 5 submissions, as determined by the following panel of distinguished judges, will be announced on May 19 and placed on the Entries page of the competition website for public voting to determine final winners.

  • Jay Adelson, CEO of SimpleGeo, co-founder and former CEO of Digg.
  • Don Coleman, Director of Consulting with Chariot Solutions.
  • Aaron Feng, Principal Software Engineer at Algorithmics, known for PhillyLambda, PhillyAWS, and Philly Startup Hackathons.
  • Tom Janofsky, Director of Engineering at Monetate, active participant in Philly technology and startup community.
  • Alexey Komissarouk, organizer, PennApps Hackathons, noted Facebook application developer.
  • Alex Payne, co-founder and CTO of BankSimple, former Platform Lead at Twitter.
  • Jeffrey Persch, Director of Architecture at Monetate, engineer for Philadelphia and San Francisco startups.
  • Gabe Weinberg, founder and principal engineer of DuckDuckGo.