Monetate Open Source Prize for Philadelphian Developers Announced
To highlight the importance of open source development and innovation, Monetate announced the first Monetate Open Source (News – Alert) Prize for developers in Philadelphia area. The contest will start in advance of Philly Tech Week to be held from April 25-30 2011.
Monetate is a Philadelphia-based independent provider of testing, targeting, and personalization for websites. Its Software as a Service helps marketers test and target product pitches and site features then convert successful tests into personalized messaging and promotional campaigns, instantly, anywhere on the website, with no additional coding.
The winning entry for Monetate Open Source Prize for developers will receive “The Ultimate Developer Kick Start Package” worth $5,000 and includes a MacBook Pro, an Apple (News – Alert) 27 inch LED Cinema Display, an iPad 2, a $300 Amazon gift card good for EC2 and books, as well as a month’s supply of pizza and Mountain Dew.
According to a press release, projects producing source code under an Open Source Initiative approved license is eligible to participate. And, the contest prize is available only to developers who live or work within 60 miles of Philadelphia.
Entries will be evaluated on usefulness, novelty, and the impact of the prize award on project status. The entries should be sent before May 11th. The top 5 submissions will be announced on May 19 and placed on the Entries page of the competition website for public voting to determine final winners.
The winning entry will be determined by the panel of distinguished judges, including 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, co-founder of a Facebook (News – Alert) Application development shop; 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; and Gabe Weinberg, founder and principal engineer of DuckDuckGo.
“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, founder and CEO of Monetate, in a statement. “We have built our company on top of open source work such as Python, Linux, Nginx, Memcache, HAProxy, MySQL, Django and Google (News – Alert) 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.”