By Narinder Singh
A first birthday is a milestone – it’s a time to celebrate and reflect on the year past, all while knowing that there is a lot to be accomplished in the years ahead. In older times and developing countries the first birthday is celebrated heavily simply because it was a key inflection point in mortality rates and meant the feasibility of life had been confirmed – it was finally time to dream about the future.
It’s been exactly one year since we launched CloudSpokes – the crowdsourcing community that matches companies who need cloud development work with a worldwide community of specialist developers – and what a year it has been.
Last year, we were full of anticipation and nerves – we knew as well as anyone that there is a need for an alternate approach to development for the enterprise cloud development market, but the model had yet to be proven. As a company, Appirio celebrates cloud pioneers, and we pride ourselves on being one, but this was definitely pushing the envelope.
After a year of being live, we’re thrilled at what CloudSpokes has achieved. The community has gone from zero to 32,000+ global developers, produced more than 150 applications and projects and paid out more than U.S. $300,000. Despite knowing how innovative crowdsourcing can be (we had incorporated crowdsourcing into our own work before last year) we were stunned to see what the community began producing in a short amount of time and the amount of interest from other companies to get involved.
During the past year, CloudSpokes turned out some phenomenal applications in a short amount of time. Among our favorites are:
- Dreamforce party app: Helpes conference attendees keep track of social events and organize their calendar.
- Commute calculator: Helps companies determine the best location for new offices.
- Automated home security system: An alarm system that texts the home owner when the system detects an intruder.
We’ve also had the opportunity to meet a ton of cool people. CloudSpokes hosted U.S.-based hackathons for Dreamforce, Docusign E-Sign Hackathon, Angelhack and the Box.net mobile challenge. The CloudSpokes team was excited to see some of our own community members at a few of these events and hear their personal stories of how they’ve used contest winnings. We’re always happy to hear that we’re liked by our developers.
Coming off of a banner year for the community is humbling and exciting at the same time. We’re over the moon with what the community has achieved, but it’s just getting started -more contests, more ways to win money faster, more technologies, more innovation and more surprises! Thank you to everyone that’s been involved with the community’s success this year – here’s to many more birthdays.
