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$100K Intuit Developer Hackathon at QuickBooks Connect

We are really excited to announce today that we’ve got $100K in cash prizes for our upcoming Developer Hackathon, scheduled for Mon.-Tues., Oct. 20-21, 2014, just before the QuickBooks Connect 2014 conference in San Jose. 

The lively, intense two days will begin with breakfast on Monday morning and a couple informative tech presentations from Intuit leaders and experts (like Intuit Fellow Joe Wells, David Leary, and Jarred Keneally, just to name a few), including unveiling a new API for you. But we won’t keep you in those seats too long — by 11am we expect you’ll be off and coding, round the clock.

You bring your laptops, power cords, ideas and imagination.  We’ll provide space, fuel (read: food & drink), and support to keep you going.  How is this different from coding on your own at home or in your office? At our Hackathon you’ll not only have dedicated, uninterrupted time to code, brainstorm, and collaborate, you’ll have unique, direct access to Intuit leaders and experts throughout the event — QBO engineers, tech support engineers, product managers, product marketers, dev evangelists, business development managers, and senior leaders, you name it.  We want to enable you to create amazing, innovative new apps / app concepts for QuickBooks Online integration. We hope you’ll be able to be more productive in these two days than you could be in weeks or maybe even months in the office. It’ll be a blast.

So what kind of apps do we want you to create at this Hackathon? Our four prize categories should give you an idea:

  • $15K Prize for a brand new app that integrates with the QuickBooks Online API
  • $15K Prize for excellent use of a new API that we’ll tell you about on Monday morning
  • $15K Prize for creation and addition of a significant new feature for an existing app that integrates with QuickBooks Online API
  • $55K GRAND Prize for the best overall app

We’ve got a great panel of judges lined up to hear your pitches on Tuesday night and select the winners (more on the judges in a coming blog post). Judging criteria includes these four areas:

  • Need for it (25%) – Does your app solve a big problem? Does it fill a gap, meet a need?
  • Quality of solution (50%) – How did you go about solving the problem? How creative, elegant, scalable, etc. is your solution?
  • Uniqueness (20%) – Are there apps in the marketplace that already address this problem? How is your solution better? different?
  • Submitted app is written in code (5%) — You’ll get credit for how far you’ve gotten past the prototype/creative stage by submitting to us real, working code

To qualify for a prize, your app has to be developed during this two-day Hackathon. It’s fine to start thinking now about what you’ll do, and we want to encourage that (watch this blog for a future post to plant some seeds for app ideas). But only “fresh code” is eligible to be awarded a prize. 

One more thing that we think is pretty important. Often, a hackathon will yield a lot of great ideas and energy and prototypes, but it’s not uncommon for those ideas to go unrealized and unfinished once developers are back home in their regular routine. We want you to finish your app. So, to collect the prize money, you’ll need to publish your app on Apps.com.  We’ll give you up to six months to do that, and we’ll give you continued support along the way. We want you to cash that check! And we also want your app on Apps.com so QuickBooks Online customers will benefit from your great solution.

Are you in? Your registration to the QuickBooks Connect 2014 conference gains you free entrance to the Hackathon. Just be sure to choose the Hackathon option when you complete the registration.

We’ve got all the contest details in the official rules. I’m sure you’ll have some questions between now and Oct 20. Post them in the comments below and we’ll do our best to answer them.

Looking forward to seeing you in October!

Best,

Lisa Rathjens and the Intuit Partner Platform team


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