Netflix Announces $100,000 In Prizes For Netflix Cloud Prize Winners

By: Talha Bhatti  |   March 15th, 2013   |   Business, News

Online video subscription service, Netflix, announced its Netflix Cloud Prize on March 14. The competition has been created to help “make cloud computing better for everyone.” The contest is also giving away $100,000 in prize money and is asking that developers from all over the world “do their very best to improve the features, usability, quality, reliability and security of computing resources delivered as a service over the Internet.” The Netflix Cloud Prize contest will have a panel of judges that will look through the submissions that will be made freely available to any one. Judges will include prominent cloud experts like Amazon’s Werner Vogels and Netflix’s Yury Izrailevsky.

Neil Hunt, Netflix’s chief product officer, says that, “Cloud computing has become a hot topic recently, but the technology is still just emerging. No doubt many of the key ideas that will take it to the next level have yet to be conceived, explored, and developed. The Netflix Cloud Prize is designed to attract and focus the attention of the most innovative minds to create the advances that will take cloud to the next level.”

There will be ten categories for developers and the competition describes the rules in the following way:

“We want you to build something cool using or modifying our open source software. Your submission will be a standalone program or a patch for one of our open source projects. Your submission will be judged in these categories:

Best Example Application Mash-Up

Best New Monkey

Best Contribution to Code Quality

Best New Feature

Best Contribution to Operational Tools, Availability, and Manageability

Best Portability Enhancement

Best Contribution to Performance Improvements

Best Datastore Integration

Best Usability Enhancement

Judges Choice Award

If you win, you’ll get US$10,000 cash, US$5000 AWS credits, a trip to Las Vegas for two, a ticket to Amazon’s user conference, and fame and notoriety (at least within Netflix Engineering).”

 

Netflix has become the “world’s largest subscription service streaming movies and TV episodes over the Internet and sending DVDs by mail” with 15 million members. The company has disrupted the movie rental business and has also been successful in offering workable online movie streaming model to consumers.

Source: TechVibes