31 July 2008 No Comment

You get this feeling that every body wants to have a contest for software developers. Since Google launched the Android Developer Contest (ADC), several companies - seeing the publicity that the ADC generated for Google and the Android platform - have announced their won contest. The latest to announce is AdMob, the mobile advertising marketplace. Admob’s contest, is for iPhone application developers.

AdMob’s iPhone Developer Program carries a price tag of $1.0 million. But that’s not $1.0 million in cash. Rather, AdMob will select upto “200 iPhone developers to receive $5,000 in AdMob advertising credit to acquire traffic for their web & native apps”.

The requirement:

To be eligible to participate in the program you will need to register as an AdMob user (and opt in to the program) and set up iPhone ads on your web or native application.

In other words, you must have an existing iPhone application. I don’t sense a lot of enthusiasm for Admob’s contest from iPhone application developers, or from anyone mildly interested in the platform. Raw Cash prizes tend to garner a lot more interest, and good applications tend to self-promote. We don’t think “$5,000 in AdMob advertising credit” is enough to inspire a developer to start coding an iPhone application, but that’s just us.