This morning I published a note from mobile developer, Simon Maddox. Simon was concerned about certain terms of the o2 Litmus App Showdown.
Proving that o2 Litmus is a very responsive organisation, their top chap, James Parton, sent this answer to publish.
Over to James:
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This week, we launched the O2 Litmus App Showdown, with a prize of £10,000. Whilst we’ve had a very positive response from the community, we’ve also received some constructive feedback on how to make the competition better.
The App Showdown is a test case and if it goes well then we will be doing more of them in the future, which can only be good news for the developer community. We admit that we don’t have all the answers, and that we were bound to make mistakes first time around. That’s why we are keen to listen to the developer community to ensure that competitions such as the App Showdown are valuable to them.
In terms of the specific observations from Simon on the competition;
There was an error in the copy about the need to submit an iTunes url to enter the competition, we fixed this yesterday, fingers crossed! Re the available test slots for developers to use themselves – we were keen to ensure we could involve as many O2 customers in the judging process as possible, any guidance on the optimum number of slots reserved for the developer would be welcome. We did speak to a number of developers in preparing the competition, but I guess everyone has a different opinion at the end of the day!
As for the third problem – bias towards O2 apps – there’s no surprise there: we are after all the exclusive supplier of iPhone in the UK and the aims of the App Showdown fits in with trying to provide the best service possible to our customers. As Simon points out in the closing sentence, the key to making this successful is involving the community, e.g. real O2 customers.
As Simon’s final comments describe, there are other ways that the competition might have run. We’ve started up a forum thread on the O2 Litmus site so that these ideas and any others that people have can be discussed. We’ll then take the best ideas and roll them out, much like Litmus does with mobile apps themselves.
If you want to hear more, see the relevant forum on O2 Litmus or get in touch with me via Twitter – @jamesparton.
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Thank you for taking the time to respond James.
James Parton of o2 Litmus responds to App Showdown developer concerns http://tinyurl.com/kujjdk
@jamesparton I tried posting on your thread about the iPhone dev competition but can’t! Had to do it here instead: http://tinyurl.com/ktngbm
James Parton of o2 Litmus responds to App Showdown developer concerns http://tinyurl.com/kujjdk
I can't get my post to submit on the Litmus forum thread James mentioned (there's an error about a code not being entered correctly – I'm assuming there'sa captcha I can't see somewhere).
The point I wanted to make there was:
Rather than relying on developers to sign binaries and use up their device quota why don't O2 do a deal with Apple (or just sign up to the developer programme a few dozen times) and resign the binaries?
There's no way I could afford to enter this competition – I only have about 30 “spare” device slots at the moment in my developer account (the rest are for beta testers for my existing or future apps). Those 70 or so beta testers are worth more to me than the £10k I might be able to win.
@jamesparton I tried posting on your thread about the iPhone dev competition but can’t! Had to do it here instead: http://tinyurl.com/ktngbm
I never knew there was such a problem with this Ed!
Great to see the Litmus team respond which is all a developer can ask for!
Posted a similar thing on my blog last night http://kgutteridge.co.uk/blog/2009/07/21/02-lit…
Hopefully the Litmus team can give the participants a certificate we can sign with that has the judges uuids allocated
I hope you, Ed and Simon get to participate, Kieran.
Hi All,
We have been thinking this over, and in light of the feedback from the community I'm pleased to let you know that we have revised the number of slots down from the original 95 to 20. We hope this proves popular with you all, and encourages you to enter the competition.
Please let us know your thoughts via http://www.o2litmus.co.uk
James
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