Above The Cloud

Just a quick post to inform you about a newly released competition around the Azure Services platform. You can find all the information you need at http://www.newcloudapp.com/

There is a first prize of USD$5000 in both .Net and PHP categories, and a USD$2500 prize for the best community voted application. There’s also additional benefits in the form of exposure and recognition, plus a channel 9 interview.

I would love to enter this competition and prove my Azurish+Developmental prowess, however it seems the competition is only available to US residents. Why? Er, not sure yet. I could guess at something, perhaps to do with how difficult it must be to process all the legals around an international competition. But its not like international competitions are new ground for Microsoft – last year there was a TFS competition, won by a friend of mine here in Australia.

So what’s the deal Microsoft?

The cloud is supposed to be region free. Let’s promote it that way!

Virtual Earth is one of those Live Services that most people have probably heard about. It is extremely easy to introduce VE style maps into your application via the controls found in the Live SDK. Just drag and drop a server side VE control onto your ASP.NET application and its done!

In the past I’ve blogged about competitions that I’ve heard about on my other blog. This one comes from Craig Bailey on Twitter.

http://www.craigbailey.net/live/post/2009/03/15/Virtual-Earth-Developer-Contest.aspx

Essentially you don’t even need a completed application to show. Just demo something cool via video that is using Virtual Earth and you’re in the running. Or even just write an article about a new concept that utilises the technology. For example, you might have an idea for a JavaScript game that uses the VE surface as a backdrop.

So get the creative juices flowing. Apparently you get a free T-shirt just for submitting an entry!