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May 2nd, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda The World at Work is powered by GE. This new series highlights the people, projects and startups that are driving innovation and making the world a better place.
Name: ChallengePost
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Big Idea: ChallengePost powers open development contests for everyone from New York City to The Royal Canadian Mint.
Why It’s Working: Contests attract fresh perspectives, publicity and affordable work. The result is an environment that cultivates innovation and promotes new ideas from up-and-coming developers.
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ChallengePost was an idea hatched by its CEO, Brandon Kessler, after discovering a blog post that promised $100 to anyone who made a program that would run Windows on a Mac (at the time, Apple didn’t make this easy). Other frustrated Mac users added to the prize money until the pool was up to $14,000. After the New York Times had run a story about it, a programmer submitted a successful solution after just three days.
“I said, ‘We need an eBay around collaborative problem solving,’” Kessler told Mashable in an interview last year. He started ChallengePost and hired the aforementioned blog’s author as his chief of product.
The startup, which had just two employees up until February of this year, made deals to run an app developer contest for the City of New York and solicit software suggestions for Michelle Obama’s healthy eating campaign within nine months of its launch. Challengers ask the public for their ideas and typically reward winners with cash — picking up affordable work, publicity and fresh perspectives in the process. To date, more than $50 million has been given away in more than 200 ChallengePost contests.
One of the biggest advantages organizations gain by running a contest is increasing contributions without necessarily increasing expenses.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture and Michelle Obama, for instance, challenged schools to work with students to develop healthy recipes. About 350 teams of students, teachers and chefs entered the competition.
“The amazing thing about it was there was only $9,000 in prizes, but over $10 million in investment created, if you think of how much money it would cost to get consultants to work with schools,” Kessler says.
In its third year, New York City’s ChallengePost-powered Big Apps competition challenges developers to create apps that incorporate the city’s data. This year, it gave away $50,000 in prizes to 11 different apps, including an app that locates an ideal workspace in the city and an app that provides building maintenance reports for apartment hunters.
Hiring a development firm to create one app typically costs at least $30,000. ChallengePost charges organizations a fee to run contests on its platform and tap into its community of 200,000 registered users, helping to dramatically lower the cost of developing an app, while engaging passionate developers.
“Competitions are a real pain to manage and create,” Kessler says. “We’ve built a platform that makes it easy to run one.”
Series presented by GE
The World at Work is powered by GE. GE Works focuses on the people who make the things that move, power, build and help to cure the world.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, morganl
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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