WP7 ineedthisapp Contest Winners Disappoint
So MS held that ineedthisapp contest to try to get all of you to submit your app ideas and they would make the best one free in the market. Well we have the winners and runners up…and I’m not too impressed. First, Grand Prize goes to an app that is designed to do two things. First organize your schedule like an agenda so you can keep track of all of your family events and have reminders. That’s a calendar. If it’s a separate app it will lack multitasking and not be able to call an alarm in the background so it’s useless. The second part is a meal planner with recipes. Seems fine and all but isn’t this portion of the app going to be offered by someone anyway? This earned $5k plus a phone at launch!
Ok so the first runner up is a shopping app with some added functionality. Like you have departments and can map the store out and users can share a stores mapping so you won’t miss the items you want. We’ve already seen shopping cart apps for WP7 so it’s just a question of expanding it. Oh and the next runner up is another shopping app but you add items by barcode scanning and when you’re in the store you remove items by scanning. There’s some coupon stuff too but I think you guys get it – a fancy shopping app
The next one is actually just asking that all of the features of Bing desktop come to the phone. Or just add turn by turn and caching to the current version with some voice features. This falls into the category of ‘after launch’.
And the last runner up is an app to keep track of drugs that a person would take (the person who submits it has terminable cancer). I feel awful for the guy but also have good news. The app is already in the works. Check this out.
Anyone else think fail?
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Yep. Especially because there were some way better apps than those in the contest.
wow…that’s a failed contest…that app is not even close to being worth 5K. Hell, I probably wont even use it even though it’s going to be made free. I think the problem was with the limitations of the contest though. You were not allowed to mention any copyrighted brand or product and thus had to create a new independent app that didn’t rely on anything already in existence. So you couldn’t improve upon anything linked to a current ecosystems like Facebook, Twitter, Flikr or anything else. Good idea to promote new ideas and apps that aren’t out there, but when it fails you’re left with stuff thats not out there already because no one else wants to bother making it.
i am VERY disappointed too.
I think there were three main problems with the competition:
1. it relied mostly on getting people u know to support your entry. It doesn’t matter if u are PhD researcher. U hav no friends u’re screwed. You r a party animal but have no idea about smartphones: U receive votes!
2. participants failed to understand the scope of the contest. Microsoft wanted a killer app to differentiate their platform from others. Something that will come integrated in the OS. Do we really want an OS with integrated shopping-list apps? No way. There are third party apps aplenty in the marketplace for that.
3. the winners were decided by the unfair process i mentioned above (1) and not by microsoft experts
Example of worthy entry that failed to reach the top:
http://www.windowsphone7.com/ineedthisapp/?pbb_qsi=43304340&=PP_EntryDetail_538
Honestly, I was going to submit an app but decided against it because I read that it becomes the IP of Microsoft. That means no profiting from it in the future. Thats a deal breaker.
Yes I am extremely disappointed from the results and wonder what the voting looked like. Apparently we had quite a bit of people who found these apps useful and voted for them. IPlease don’t let the marketplace be filled with hundreds of shopping apps. That would be horrible on so many levels.
As Anastasios mentioned earlier another thing is that people were allowed to vote once and had to be from somewhere different which put an artificial limitation on votes. I see voting once per day but a single vote was critical in framing this contest.
The contest results re-affirm that the target audience for WP7 is not the power-user. Its intended for the soccer moms of the world.
Just checked on the “I need this app” site and found out something interesting. It seems the Grand Prize winner was able to get votes from the other contestants. She’d vote for them and then ask for their vote in return. I wonder how many other contestants actually did that because i’m thinking not many thought of asking other contestants to vote for them. Natural way of thinking would be to get your family, friends and co-workers to vote for you. Check the comments below the supplied link.
http://www.windowsphone7.com/ineedthisapp/?pbbdesturl=x252fPagesx252fBlogsx252fBlogView.aspx78x253Fbidx253D41066x2526scidx253D538x2526#pbbh1541p
Nicely played unbreakablemomof4, nicely played.
@Anastasios-Antonios Toulkeridis:
The main purpose of this contest was promoting WP7 and not finding the best app idea. This contest has created 626,712 engagements which should help promote WP7.
Furthermore Microsoft wanted to find out what apps people would like to see most on their phones and hence what they should include in the OS.
Looks like people like shopping apps and a well done shopping app that is integrated with some sorts of Windows Live Shopping (a yet to be implemented web service that stores shopping lists and offers services around shopping like reminders, reviews, recommendations, warnings, … ) could easily be the killer app Microsoft is looking for.
You’re thinkin fail…I’m spendin my 5gs…oh, and waitin on november 7th. 🙂
Oh…and the voting was only part of the process. A panel of judges from microsoft chose the winners…
@umof: Where’s the app? What phone did they give you?
Wonderful work! This is the type of information that are meant to be shared across the net. Shame on Google for no longer positioning this submit upper! Come on over and discuss with my website . Thanks =)
David k…they gave me a choice…i took the hd7…n the app wasnt released for some months and they completely changed it 🙁