A talent for creating winning software solutions is turning Seattle programmers and computer analysts into cyber-warriors of a different stripe — contestants on a new stage for software development as sporting competition.
Last week’s Expedition Hackathon awarded $10,000 for a day’s work (plus an all-nighter), in a 24-hour sprint to create a better way of curating and presenting information and news content to government decision-makers (watch Seattle24x7 for more in-depth coverage).
Last month, the Washington Interactive Network awarded prizes in the Seattle Indie Competition to the tune of $2,500, having merged with the Intel Game Developer Showcase.
In case you missed it, Tiny Bubbles by Pine Street Codeworks won the Indie Game Competition as well as Intel’s Best Overall Game Award.
Elsinore by Golden Glitch Studios won Most Unique Game.
Lords of New York by Lunchtime Studios won Best Artwork.
Collidalot by Grunka Munka Games and Unearned Bounty by Extrokold Games won Audience Choice Awards.
The Imagine Cup is an annual global competition sponsored and hosted by Microsoft Corp. which brings together young technologists worldwide to help resolve some of the world’s toughest challenges. It is considered the “Olympics of Technology” by young technologists and one of the top competitions and awards related to software design.
This week, Zillow announced the Zillow Prize, a competition with a one million dollar grand prize that challenges the data science community to help push the accuracy of Zillow’s popular Home “Zestimate” even further. Winning algorithms stand to impact the home values of 110M homes across the U.S.
In Zillow’s million-dollar competition, participants will develop an algorithm that makes predictions about the future sale prices of homes. The contest is structured into two rounds, the qualifying round which opened May 24, 2017 and the private round for the 100 top qualifying teams that opens on Feb 1st, 2018.
In the qualifying round, contestants must build a model to improve the Zestimate residual error. In the final round, they will be asked to build a home valuation algorithm from the ground up, using external data sources to help engineer new features that give their model an edge over the competition.
Because real estate transaction data is public information, there will be a three-month sales tracking period after each competition round closes where your predictions will be evaluated against the actual sale prices of the homes. The final leaderboard won’t be revealed until the close of the sales tracking period.
The First Round prizes range from $25,ooo for first place to $10,000 for third. Second Round prizes will present $1,000,000 ti the first place winner, $100,000 for second place and $50,000 for third place. Learn more about the Zillow contest online. [24×7]
