Who wants to win $100,000? In an effort to boost the features, usability, quality, reliability and security of cloud computing, Netflix has announced the Netflix Cloud Prize. The winner of this new competition that challenges developers around the world to do their very best to improve the cloud is $100,000. A panel of experts will judge the contest submissions and all submissions will be made available freely to anyone.
“Cloud computing has become a hot topic recently, but the technology is still just emerging,” said Neil Hunt, chief product officer at Netflix. “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.”
The Netflix Cloud Prize will be divided into ten categories, each one offering a $10,000 prize. Each category will be judged by a panel of independent, technology experts such as: Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, Martin Fowler, chief scientist of Thoughtworks, strategist Simon Wardley, Joe Weinman Senior VP of Telx, Aino Corry, of the University of Aarhus, and Yury Izrailevsky, Cloud VP at Netflix. The entry period will run from March 13 – Sept. 15, 2013 with the winners announced in October. The prizes will be presented at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Re:Invent conference in November and all winners will be invited to attend the conference in Las Vegas as guests of Netflix.
“We’re laying railroad tracks for cloud adoption and usage,” said Hunt. “The Netflix Cloud Prize is designed to improve understanding of what it takes to build native applications for the cloud that take full advantage of the opportunities for scalable computing.”
CLO Inside Track: There’s nothing like a tidy sum of cash to boost buzz and spark innovation. The cloud video subscription provider is betting that by putting its money where its market is that it can get a leg up on its current and future rivals in the video-on-demand space. While the chance to win big money is an intriguing lure, there’s a broader theme at work here: the cloud ultimately will be what we make it and now is the time to ask the “What If…” questions. And those questions are not just video-focused or consumer-centric; innovation drives opportunity in the B2B cloud space as well – because at the end of the day, it’s less about what the technology was built to do than what we can make it do to deliver bottom-line benefits.
(For additional information contact: Netflix, Inc., 408-540-3700, www.netflix.com, www.netflix.github.com.)
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