Web Madness Tournament Gets a New Twist

The BINC Web Madness tournament which started out as a simple competition to determine the top employment brand within the web/software marketplace just evolved into something much bigger.  Instead of it being about who can gather the most votes or who can tell the most people to vote for them, it became about something that not only drives the entire marketplace, but something that’s at the absolute core of any good software organization.  It became about innovation, passion and drive -- the 3 components that it takes to build and succeed as any great software organization. 

Round 2 began with 8 fiercely competitive brands going head to head with each other -- Amazon, Slide, EA, Expedia, Apple, Activision, Zynga and Facebook -- and just like competition amongst these brands is heated in the real marketplace, the same fire burned in this tournament.  We don’t know how it started or who started it, but at some point in this round an engineer employed by one of these brands became so adamant that they work for the top employment brand that they created a piece of software to push their own employment brand to a win.  But what that did was start a chain reaction that compelled the other brands in the tournament to develop their own piece of slightly improved software to push their brand to the top.  So what initially started out as a voting-based competition eventually became a competition driven by passion and engineering talent that is much more reflective of the real world marketplace.

So somebody may look at this and say rules were broken and systems were rigged; therefore brands should be eliminated or rounds should be replayed.  But it’s too late for that.  The can of worms has been opened.  The competitors themselves insisted that the winner shouldn’t be determined by who can gather the most votes.  They insisted that the winner should be based on who employs the most passionate, driven and innovative professionals and who can build the best piece of software. 

So if that’s what the people want, that’s exactly what we are going to give them.  What we’ve decided to do is raise the stakes of this tournament and make this abut something bigger.  So we know that all these companies can build a piece of software to influence a voting system.  But can these companies use those same skills and attributes to build a piece of software that can make the world a better place to live.  Let’s find out.

So here’s the new plan.  All 8 teams that made it to the second round are still in the game.  In exactly 24 hours at 8am on Friday morning we will pose a societal or charitable problem solvable by building a piece of software and give each of the entrants a specified amount of time to deliver their solution.  It will be the company that comes up with the best solution that will be crowned the winner -- the employer of the most innovative, passionate and driven software professionals in our marketplace. 

In 24 hours we will announce the problem and the criteria and allow these 8 competitors to get to work.