The BINC Web Madness Tournament which began as a fun little voting based competition to determine web/software marketplace’s top employment brand of 2009 literally turned into web madness when instead of voting and rallying others to vote for their employment brand it turned into an actual software development competition where the competing players were building software to out vote their competitors.

So we thought let’s give these 8 competitors what they obviously want; A software development competition to determine the employment brand in our web/software marketplace that employs the most driven innovative and passionate professionals in the marketplace.  And to raise the stakes, we’ve decided to put forth an actual real world problem for them to work on so that when solved will actually make our community, society and country a better place to live.  Talk about making a real impact.

So who is the top employment brand of 2009?  Easy, the company that employs the most passionate, innovative and driven team of professionals.    Let’s find out who amongst the amazing minds employed by Facebook, Zynga, EA, Activision, Expedia, Amazon, Slide and Apple will rise to the occasion and help their employer take the crown for top employment brand of 2009 as recognized by askbinc.com.

Quickly before we get started I’d like to thank all of the volunteer judges who have given up their time to review and grade all submitted solutions.  Thank you Mamoon, Alex, David and Jerry.  I’d also like to thank Volunteermatch.org for helping us come up with this real-world compelling problem and for agreeing to provide volunteer credit for all involved participants.  And most importantly, I’d like to thank everybody employed at Facebook, Zynga, Slide, EA, Activision, Apple, Expedia and Amazon for taking time out of your schedules to participate and help tackle the real-world problem detailed below.

So without further ado let’s get ready for the madness.  On your marks competitors, get set, CODE!!!!

 Problem

90% of the people in the world volunteer only when asked.  90% of the people in the world would volunteer more if they had an easier way to identify relevant volunteering opportunities (or more importantly those volunteering opportunities had a better way to identify and connect with those most willing to volunteer).

Develop and launch a fully functional open sourced web application (website, social networking application, widget, etc) that makes it considerably easier for non-profit organizations and volunteers to connect thereby raising the volunteering activity and overall goodness done throughout the world.

Deliverable

Upon completion of your solution, please send an email to webmadness@bincsearch.com with the following information.  We will publish a link to your launched product on Monday, April 13.

1. Link to your launched fully functional and publicly accessible web application.
2. “About Us” statement somewhere in the web solution that mentions the name of your employer, the askbinc.com Web Madness Competition and your vision for your solution.
3. Technical design overview to include languages and technologies used.

Each company represented in this competition can launch as many solutions to this problem as they want as long as each one abides by the deliverable criteria mentioned above.  Solutions can be submitted anytime up until deadline.

Judging Criteria

The judges will grade each of the submitted solutions against the following five criteria.  Each solution can be awarded between 1-10 pts per judge per criteria allowing for a max total of 50 pts to be earned.  We will then aggregate the scores, divide by the total number of judges and assign each solution a final score.  Whereas everybody participating will receive an honorable mention, the team that submits the solution with the highest score total will be crowned the winner.

1. Impact/Reach
2. Functionality & usability
3. Creativity
4. Visual Appeal
5. Technical sophistication (modularity, extensibility)

TimeLine

April 6 – competition begins
April 13, 8am – final deadline for solution submittals
April 13 – all solutions are publicized on AskBINC.com blog and judging period begins
April 20 – winner announced on AskBINC.com blog

Communication Throughout Competition

Email – webmadness@bincsearch.com – send any questions, comments or updates and we will respond asap.  Please also send the names and contact information of all participants so we make sure to update and communicate with them as the week progresses.
Twitter – #webmadess – please include this hashtag for any tweets related to this competition.  Follow the BINC team who will be tweeting actively throughout the competition – @BINC, @TawnyLabrum, @gamingrecruiter, @Seattle_Hdhntr, @georginabinc, @melcondos
Askbinc.com blog – post any comments, updates, thoughts, ideas related to this competition.

Volunteer Hours

Thanks to volunteermatch.org all hours dedicated to this competition will be granted as volunteer credit.  In order to receive credit, please send an email to webmadness@bincsearch.com with your name and number of hours volunteered.  We will get you the proper documentation noting your earned volunteer credit.

Post Competition

The solutions developed for this competition are the property of the developers that built them or their employers (we’ll let you guys work that out).  Because the solutions developed are meant to solve a real world problem and do some actual real world good in the world, we highly encourage that one of the following  two paths be followed upon completion of this competition.

1. Continue to develop, maintain and support your solution so that it can make as great of an impact as possible.
2. Donate your solution to volunteermatch.org, a nationally recognized organization that employs a very capable technology organization and has the infrastructure in place to maintain and support your solution.

Judges

David Weekly Founder & Chairman – PBWiki.com and Co-Founder of SuperHappy[Fun|Dev]House
David has been programming since he was five and has coded for MIT, Harvard, Stanford, There.com, atWeb, and Legato. David wrote the first layman’s description of MP3 in early 1997 and graduated in 2000 with a BS in Computer Science from Stanford, where he was a President Scholar and a finalist in the ACM International Programming Competition. David started the company that became PBwiki in 2003. He likes to throw hacker parties, fly helicopters, ride his motorcycle, and make useful things.

Alex Holderness – Chief Financial Officer at VolunteerMatch.com
Alex Holderness brings to VolunteerMatch over 15 years of professional management experience. A lifelong entrepreneur, Alex founded his first startup, Eleven East Records, during college, to serve needs of startup companies around the world in such diverse industries as technology, ecommerce, financial services, entertainment and consumer marketing. Prior to joining VolunteerMatch, Alex helped build and launch several businesses for eBay Inc., including eBay Motors and eBay Travel. Before eBay, he held positions as a Derivative Securities Analyst with Lehman Brothers in New York City and was a member of a $1 billion portfolio management team with Kemper Mutual Funds in Chicago. Alex grew up in a culture of service. As a child, his family hosted a group of six political refugees from Vietnam, one of whom was adopted by the family and became their older brother, Pham. Alex earned his MBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and his B.A. in Political Theory from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an avid surfer, skier and photographer, and plays music with his band in San Francisco.

Mamoon Hamid – Prinicpal at U.S. Venture Partners
Working at USVP combines Mamoon Hamid’s three passions: technology, people and building businesses. Mamoon joined USVP in 2005 and became a Principal in 2008. He has 11 years of experience building and investing in high growth technology businesses. His investment interests lie in IT and Cleantech areas. Mamoon led USVP’s investments in Box.net, and serves on the company’s Board of Directors. He is actively involved with USVP portfolio companies: Optichron, Supplyframe and Zannel. He is also an advisor to Yelp.
Prior to joining USVP, Mamoon spent seven years at Xilinx (XLNX) in various marketing management and engineering roles. He was responsible for defining and implementing sales and marketing strategies that grew the company’s consumer electronics and automotive market segment revenues five-fold to $100 million in a span of three years. As a System Architect at Xilinx, Mamoon was responsible for evangelizing the role of Xilinx technology in emerging markets and prior to that, as an applications engineer, he designed performance and cost optimized FPGAs which led to key design wins for the company. Previously, Mamoon has also worked for Deutsche Bank.
Mamoon holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University (graduated at age 19), an MS in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

Jerry Kirkheli – Senior Software Engineer/Manager at Google

Jerry Krikheli is currently a senior software engineer and engineering manager in charge of AdSense quality at Google.  He started his engineering career during his last two years of college while working part time at Applied Semantics.  At AS, Jerry participated
in the development and launch of core text processing technology for the flagship products at the Enterprise Solutions division.  He developed software used in word-sense disambiguation, meaning extraction, and content summarization.  In 2003, following the acquisition of AS by Google, Jerry got involved with AdSense engineering and developed the first non text-ad format for Google called “Link Units”.  Link units were an alternative to text ads and offered a list of topics relevant to the content page which when clicked, took a user to a page of related advertisements.  While at Google, Jerry also participated in the development of Google’s next generation contextual targeting system and was involved in the development of AdSense for Domains,  and third party ad serving. Prior to serving as the manager of teams focused on developing software and algorithms aimed at improving AdSense quality, Jerry was responsible for managing products worth nearly one billion dollars of AdSense revenue.  He holds a BS with honors and an MS in Computer Networking from UCLA.

Participants

Slide is the world’s largest publisher of social entertainment applications. They offer people the ability to engage and have fun with one another using the relationships they’ve already developed on social networks like Facebook and MySpace. The social networks benefit from increased activity, advertisers benefit from an exuberant audience, and their users can share favorite videos, send virtual lattes or even throw sheep at each other.

Amazon.com, Inc. operates as an online retailer in North America and internationally. Amazon serves its consumer customers through its retail Websites and focuses on selection, price, and convenience. It also offers programs that enable seller customers to sell their products on its Websites and their own branded Websites. In addition, the company serves developer customers through Amazon Web Services, which provides access to technology infrastructure that developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Further, it offers co-branded credit card programs, fulfillment, and other marketing and promotional services, such as online advertising. Amazon.com, Inc. was founded in 1994 and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington.

Electronic Arts Inc. is the world’s leading interactive entertainment software company. EA develops, publishes, and distributes interactive software worldwide for video game systems, personal computers, cellular handsets and the Internet.

Founded in February 2004, Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people’s real-world social connections. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment.

Expedia, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, operates as an online travel company in the United States and internationally. It provides travel products and services to leisure and corporate travelers, offline retail travel agents, and travel service providers through a portfolio of brands.  The company’s travel offerings consist of airline flights, hotel stays, car rentals, destination services, cruises, and package travel provided by various airlines, lodging properties, car rental companies, destination service providers, cruise lines, and other travel product and service companies on a stand-alone and package basis. It also facilitates the booking of hotel rooms, airline seats, car rentals, and destination services from its travel suppliers; and acts as an agent in the transaction, passing reservations booked by its travelers to the relevant airline, hotel, car rental company, or cruise line. The company is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington.

Zynga is the #1 social gaming company on the web. Zynga was founded specifically to add a social element to casual online games because they love games, and they love them most when they’re playing with friends! Social games provide a more fun, competitive and contagious experience. Zynga delivers on the promise of social networks, making it easy to connect with old friends and make new ones (no download required!). Zynga has something for everyone: casino games, word games, board games, role playing games and party games which can be found on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, and Hi5.

Apple Inc. and its wholly owned subsidiaries design, manufacture, and market personal computers, portable digital music players, and mobile communication devices, and sell various related software, services, peripherals, and networking solutions. The company sells its products worldwide through its online stores, its retail stores, its direct sales force, and third-party wholesalers, resellers, and value-added resellers. The company sells its products to consumer, small and mid-sized business, education, enterprise, government, and creative customers. Apple Inc. was founded in 1976. The company is headquartered in Cupertino, California.

Activision Blizzard, Inc., publishes online, personal computer (PC), console, and hand-held games worldwide. The company develops and publishes video games, as well as maintains its proprietary online-game related service, Battle.net. It also publishes interactive software products and peripherals internationally. The company’s products cover various game categories, including action/adventure, action sports, racing, role-playing, simulation, first-person action, music, and strategy. Its products include Guitar Hero, Call of Duty, Tony Hawk, Spider-Man, X-Men, James Bond, and Transformers, as well as Diablo, StarCraft, Warcraft, and World of Warcraft. The company is based in Santa Monica, California. Activision Blizzard, Inc. is a subsidiary of Vivendi S.A.