iSociety and IBM Open Up System i Innovation Challenge

Published: January 29, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For the past two years, as part of its campaign to reinvigorate the System i5 platform, IBM has been giving out innovation awards to companies and business partners that put the platform to good use. Now, the company and the iSociety community created last year wants to get students into the act, and will this week launch a parallel campaign called the System i Innovation Challenge.

Registration for the competition will be open on February 1, and is open to college and university students in the United States and Canada who have little or no experience. With tongue firmly in cheek and followed by slightly gritted teeth, I would say that the competition will therefore be open to all of the computer science and information technology students in North America--excepting students who have parents who work in some way with AS/400, iSeries, or System i5 servers.

Here is what student in the competition will be required to do:

• Research the System i and its community
• Create a viral video related to what they learn about the System i
• Develop an application to run on the System i

After students do all of this work, the viral videos and the applications will be reviewed by the members of the iSociety. Over the past few months since the iSociety has been launched, community members have been creating graphical marketing campaigns--logos and banner ads--and trading them online, and this competition takes it up to the YouTube level.

The student who wins the prize will get a trip to Nintendo headquarters in Redmond, Washington--just down the road from Microsoft. Nintendo is a big user of the i5/OS and OS/400 platform, and students will get to see the System i in action as the company ramps up Wii sales. Presumably, Nintendo will present the winner with a freebie Wii game console--although this is not officially part of the prize, this would be a good motivator.

The competition will start on February 8 and the winners will be announced sometime in April. To sign up, go to this IBM site.

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