“Compete to build a Gadget” (East Africa)
Monday, December 17th, 2007
I don’t know if I have any readers in East Africa, but just in case:
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Do you dream of developing an application for consumers globally? Do you have software coding and design skills you’d love to put to practical use? Or… are you simply a techie with too much time on your hands?
Google looks forward to hosting a competition for university students in East Africa. Participants from Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi and Ethiopia can design and build gadgets and win prizes. Gadgets are small, simple applications that run on web pages. There are gadgets for easy email access, gadgets for football results, gadgets for fun and gadgets for frivolity. They’re simple to develop, given some knowledge of HTML (and ideally XML and Javascript too). And they’re easy to distribute – through iGoogleTM (Google’s personalised homepage), platforms such as OpenSocial(TM) and third-party websites. There are tens of millions of people who use gadgets globally, generating billions of gadget pageviews per week!
The competition will run between February and June 2008, with more details (including a dedicated competition website and explanation of terms and restrictions) to follow in January. In the mean time, there’s more for the curious and the technically-minded at http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets.
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