FEATURED NEWS ITEM |
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AOL Open AIM ContestAOL recently teamed up with TopCoder to put their Open AIM APIs in the hands of the best developers in the world. To highlight the launch of Open AIM 2.0, AOL has tapped into the power of the TopCoder community by creating the Open AIM contest – a platform for building mashups, widgets or custom applications that add functionality to personal websites and blogs or even Facebook and MySpace pages. With $100,000 in prizes at stake, community response has been swift. So far over 300 registrants have submitted more than 30 fully working unique and innovative ideas for AIM bots and plugins. Traffic has reached an average of 5,500 visits/day (3,500 unique visitors/day) and over 300,000 site visits since the contest launch (more than 538,000 page views to date) with hundreds of posts in the dedicated contest forums. The AOL Open AIM contest is an open environment requiring minimal guidance while enhancing the internet experience for millions of AIM users. |
OTHER NEWSAMD Launches Advanced Multi-Threading Competition SeriesAMD has partnered with TopCoder to host a series of quarterly coding competitions throughout 2008 focused on advancing multi-threaded application development for multi-core processor architectures. Called the AMD Multicore Threadfest, the competitions provide a forum for the software development community to demonstrate advanced multi-threading principles, techniques and best practices. Competition winners are awarded cash prizes and earn recognition throughout the developer community, with each of four series prize winners having his or her code posted on the AMD Developer Central website, a resource portal for the software developer community. |
Widgets Gain Momentum
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AOL Selects TopCoder Enterprise Software Development PlatformAOL has signed on to TopCoder's Enterprise Software Development Platform and associated services. The platform's "Software Factory" approach is based upon TopCoder's unique competitive component-based methodology, and is designed to deliver strategic software development capabilities with lowered cost, shorter timelines and higher quality applications. Over the course of the next 15 months, AOL will leverage the powerful strategic development capabilities presented by this enterprise-wide license to the TopCoder catalog of over 1,100 reusable software components, access the TopCoder Software Factory suite of tools and processes and increase usage of the TopCoder Competition engine of online and onsite programming contests. |
Bug Races
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SOFTWARE SPECIFICSTopCoder Software Engagement Options for GrowthLeveraging the TopCoder community, component catalog and development methodology leads to high quality software at considerable cost savings. However, it can be a mystifying prospect determining how to engage TopCoder's process at the outset. Many new clients leverage our consulting resources on a T&M basis to help gather requirements, design a component-based architecture, and manage competitions, application testing, certification and deployment. As they become more comfortable with the full TopCoder model, we offer clients an engagement option to help further drive down costs while increasing client control. The TopCoder Enterprise Software Development Platform option transfers the management responsibilities described above to the customer in a direct model which leads to lower costs and increased control. |
TopCoder Component Catalog Updates
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TopCoder vs. COCOMO 2 DurationsTopCoder's development model delivers high quality, fully tested code at a faster rate than COCOMO modeled estimates. |
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One of the hottest trends in development right now is building widgets and gadgets - for everything from messaging/communication, secure enterprise and location-based functions, to gaming and advertising.
TopCoder's software factory approach to mass production combines the rigor of TopCoder development disciplines with a streamlined UI and idea generation from TopCoder Studio's creative community. The power of TopCoder's coding ability and a direct channel to the creativity of the developer community means TopCoder can create quality widgets and gadgets quickly and efficiently.
TopCoder's new Bug Races offering brings speed and competition to critical software QA issues. By allowing members to quickly solve the issues faced by our clients, we continue to look to our member community to lead the way in revolutionizing software development processes. Participants in the Bug Races can review the bugs, choose whether or not to work on the task, submit the fix, review other members' fixes and test fixes.
The current 
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Featured Case Study |
Learn how TopCoder's Credit Analysis tool improved Direct Energy's credit request and analysis process by leveraging a world-class architectural approach - a 3-tier application with a fully XML schema-driven, object-oriented domain model, an SOA-enabled business logic tier and an AJAX-enhanced presentation tier. |
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Transparency and Accessibility Builds Communities |
By Ira Heffan, TopCoder General Counsel In a recent paper two business school professors, Joel West and Siobahn O'Mahony, studied open source projects that were built or sponsored by companies. Similar to the way that the architecture of a building guides the way that its occupants interact, they found that architectural aspects of a company-sponsored, online community affect that community's interactions. In particular, they observed that the "transparency" of the sponsor company (i.e., how much the company shares its plans and direction with the community) and the company's "accessibility" (i.e., how much community input the company takes in) are directly related to the community's growth and success. The principles Professors West and O'Mahony observed also hold true for other online communities, including TopCoder. TopCoder has always strived to be transparent to our development community members and our customers. We constantly discuss our plans and goals in the on-line forums and at live events. At the same time, we work very hard to be accessible, to take input, and to address questions and concerns. This openness is not unique to TopCoder. As I described recently in Redmond Developer News Magazine, these days, there are a lot of good reasons for companies to "open up". The bottom line is that transparency and accessibility form a two-way street, and companies have found that the more they give to their community relationships, the more that they get in return. |
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