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$10,000 Prize For Connecting Businesses With Government Data

Posted by samzenpus on from the working-for-the-man dept.

First time accepted submitter InsertCleverUsername writes "The Department of Commerce has announced a $10,000 contest for developers making apps to utilize Commerce and other publicly available data and information to support American businesses. Developers must use at least one Department of Commerce dataset to create an application that assists businesses and/or improves the service delivery of Business.USA.gov to the business community. Developers may choose any platform. A list of developer-friendly data sets can be found on the Business Data and Tools page of Data.gov."

10 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. Woohoo $10,000 by GeneralTurgidson · · Score: 3, Insightful

    To do a $50,000 contract job plus on ongoing support hours. This is a pretty shitty IT bailout

    1. Re:Woohoo $10,000 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's even less than that. $5,000 for first prize, $3,000 for second, and $2,000 for third. So the DOC gets three applications on the cheap. $5,000 is a lot of money in India, but it's chump change in the US.

  2. Web services by Nerdfest · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wouldn't they be further ahead to just publish their data as simple web services as a starting point? I see that some already seem to be, but many are just CSV files, zip files, etc . You never know when new data is available, or there's corrections, etc. It's also a little surprising that the number of downloads for the first file I tried was zero.

    1. Re:Web services by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Quick'n'dirty solution :) https://developers.google.com/fusiontables/

  3. Wikileaks? by Alex+Belits · · Score: 4, Funny

    I mean, they do it already.

    --
    Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
  4. how about just doing your jobs? by decora · · Score: 3, Funny

    the way i hear it, thousands of government bureaucrats get a $40,000 "prize" every year, whether they actually accomplish this goal or not.

  5. Shows what PHB's want to pay for software. by fhage · · Score: 3, Insightful

    6. Intellectual Property Rights: All submissions to the DOC Business Apps Challenge remain the intellectual property of the individuals or organizations that developed them. By registering, consenting to the terms of the challenge, and entering a Submission, however, the Participant agrees that DOC reserves an irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free license to use, copy, distribute to the public, create derivative works from, and publicly display and perform a Submission for a period of one year starting on the date of the announcement of contest winners.

    So, for $10k they get bunches of apps which can be distributed royalty-free for a year. If an app is popular, they can change the labels (create derivative works) and continue on. Only 3 developers get any money. Everyone else may have their their app distributed with no compensation.

    If you plan on paying off loans or feeding your family by developing software, you should avoid these contests. Leave the submissions to the 9th grade web design classes.

    1. Re:Shows what PHB's want to pay for software. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      However, If you wish to make a name for yourself and can create a high quality application that is adopted by the federal government...
      I think you'd be showing future employers (or venture(vulture) capitalists) that you have the ability to create stellar applications.

      Sometimes doing something for advertising is more important than for the pure profit. Comments like yours never seem to take that into account

    2. Re:Shows what PHB's want to pay for software. by parkinglot777 · · Score: 2

      So, for $10k they get bunches of apps which can be distributed royalty-free for a year. If an app is popular, they can change the labels (create derivative works) and continue on.

      I agree with you all of it but the part when you talk about "derivative works" because it is not correct. You cannot modify a copyrighted work (derivative work) and claim that the new modified work is yours. The copyright law covers that part as well.

  6. Why link to the blog? by tomhath · · Score: 2

    The article links to a White House blog, which is nothing more than a parroting and link to the real information. Must be an election year.