developer challenge contest - what a blast

Remember the eBay Developer Challenge we launched back in mid-November? Well the deadline for submissions was last night, and our developer community was submitting fast and furious right up until the midnight deadline. Judging will begin soon, and then we will announce the winners in early March 2006 at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, CA.

We received a ton of fantastic entries from developers and got great program exposure from the blogosphere during the event. Lessons learned?

1) 50 Benjamins is a strong lead - don't dilute it

2) Don't think that your global developer community won't call you out for hosting a US-only contest on every blog, every discussion board imaginable

3) The concept of a secondary category where open source project teams collaborate in order to compete is either a) a fantastically brilliant idea ahead of its time, or b) irreconcilable

BTW, for all the international developers who emailed, posted and commented about their inability to submit entries for our developer competition, make sure to check out the eBay Integration category of the Skype Developer API Competition, which Lester posted about today.

How cool would it be to celebrate a developer from our community winning the eBay Integration category!