Monetate offers up its own award

Monetate Inc. has used open-source software to build its tools for enabling e-commerce website operators to develop and test targeted messages and campaigns.

Now, it’s giving a boost to other open-source developers.

The West Conshohocken, Pa., company will award the Monetate Open Source Prize to the best open-source project submitted by a software developer within a 60-mile radius of Philadelphia.

The winner will receive The Ultimate Developer Kick Start Package, which has a value of $5,000 and includes a MacBook Pro; an Apple 27 inch LED Cinema Display; an iPad 2; a $300 gift card for books or cloud services at Amazon.com Inc. ; and a month’s supply of pizza and Mountain Dew.

Entries are due May 11 and will be evaluated on their usefulness and novelty, as well as how much the prize would help their submitters complete them. A panel of judges will choose the five best selections, which will be announced May 19 and placed on the entries page of the competition website http://monetateopensource.strutta.com/ for public voting.

“With the Monetate Open Source Prize we hope to increase the amount and quality of open source code,” Tom Janofsky, Monetate’s director of engineering, said in Monetate’s release on the competition http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20110421/bs_prweb/prweb8330737. “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.”