One More Reason to Add S-Pen support $205,000 cash contest!

[thefriendlygeek]

Mike, I just noticed that Samsung is having a contest for applications with S-pen support, with a 'Grand Prize' of $100,000, and the lowest prize amount of $2000 for popular choice.

Even if all you got was popular choice for $2000, or honorable mention for $2000 (plus free Galaxy Note), you will have been essentially paid to add a feature. Hopefully this would help offset to the development costs of the s-pen module such that you can add this feature without too much fear of capital risk.

Also the Galaxy Tab 10 with S-pen support was confirmed to be coming out soon, so that should show that Samsung is not abandoning this market. In addition the Note is now available in the US market, and the LG VU, may have a similar technology with it's stylus implementation.

I for one will, vote for pleco, and get all my friends to vote.

http://galaxynotespenchallenge.com

Today is the first day of the contest and submission, and the last day to submit is this April, the 2nd!

 

[mikelove]

Re: One More Reason to Add S-Pen support $205,000 cash conte

Thanks for posting this, but honestly, the development time required to add extensive enough S-Pen support to have any chance of placing in this contest is worth more than $2000 to us, particularly given that we view it as a dead-end API - as with most features like this, either it'll fail to gain popularity and Samsung will quietly discontinue it, or it'll pick up in popularity and Google will add an official API for it to Android which Samsung will grudgingly adopt.

We went through this same thing with Sony a couple of times in the old Palm OS days - they added features like high-resolution displays, sampled audio, and a scroll wheel on their own, then Palm eventually added their own APIs for the first two (and Sony eventually made the third behave like a standard scroll button). I think they may have even had a developer contest like this at one point.

Manufacturer-specific APIs are the worst kind of device fragmentation, and it's best for both Android users and developers if we don't do anything to encourage them.

 

[mikelove]

Re: One More Reason to Add S-Pen support $205,000 cash conte

Money-wise, there's also the problem that a Galaxy Note currently costs $700 in the US, and we'd pretty much need to get one in order to be able to properly develop / test this S-Pen support. So it's actually only a net profit of $1300 if we win, and a net loss of $700 if we don't

 

[thefriendlygeek]

Re: One More Reason to Add S-Pen support $205,000 cash conte

Well, I was hoping that Google would just implement Samsung's API, after seeing how popular it is, and just add some extensions to it if needed, (Ala AMD 64 bit instruction set, and Intel IA-32e/EM64T) but you can't know the future plans of google, unless you are in a position inside the company to know.

I also, somewhat over enthusiastically, believe that your app could get the 1st or 2nd place prize. Thus giving you quite a boost in operating capital, and act as a show piece to google as to why there is a market to either adopt Samsung's API, or develop one internally.
Then we can have the stylus input many people desire, as evidenced by the note selling 750,000 units in Korea alone. This in a land where it 'shouldn't' be, according to the one hand cell users, as popular as it is due to the populous having a smaller average hand size.

You also wouldn't have to by a Note at the off contract price of $700 if you can give one of your employees on ATT an incentive to get one as a renewal/upgrade for $299 from ATT, or $249 on amazon.

http://wireless.amazon.com/Samsung-Gala ... B0077DEYBE

Perhaps the incentive could be a percentage of the prize money. If done well, I see Pleco having no problem getting 3rd place at $25,000. If the percentage the employee got was around 50% or more, that would be well worth, his or her effort

I'm not one to tell you how to run your business, and am very conservative in my own business, but if one of your programmers, or a contracted programmer is willing to take the majority of the responsibility, it seems like very little risk on your part. If the app won nothing, then they programmer would still have a great phone, we would have stylus support, and Pleco would have a more visible presence in the android world.
If it won anything, even the popular choice award, which I could remind everyone to vote for your app in this thread, you would have lots more advertising, essentially paid for by Samsung, who is on a tear to eclipse Sony as the number one electronics brand in the world.

That could also catapult Pleco into a position to get customers in the Korean market with 750,000 Notes and counting already in hand, and a huge amount of business done between Korea and China by Samsung and LG alone. You would of course then need to look into getting a Korean-Chinese, Chinese-Korean dictionary, and add Korean input into the UI.

I have an acquaintance who works at Motorola in the android phone division, (now google owned) that I could ask for contact info as to who would be in the know, about what type of stylus support google has in ICS or will in Jelly Bean. Perhaps you already know this info though

Thanks again for such a useful product these last 10+ years.

 

[thefriendlygeek]

Re: One More Reason to Add S-Pen support $205,000 cash conte

Money-wise, there's also the problem that a Galaxy Note currently costs $700 in the US, and we'd pretty much need to get one in order to be able to properly develop / test this S-Pen support. So it's actually only a net profit of $1300 if we win, and a net loss of $700 if we don't

If getting an employee, or contractor to get a Note is not an option, I bet more than a few of us here would glady pony up the cash to go towards a Note for development purposes. I don't even have a Note yet, (I'm on Verizon), but would put $20 in the pot right now to get it started. If you want to start a thread with a tally of how much has been collected, just link me to it, and I'll send in the money.
If you cannot accept donations due to legal reasons, then call it an investment, gift, loan with no payback conditions, or whatever works for your lawyers.

 

[mikelove]

Re: One More Reason to Add S-Pen support $205,000 cash conte

Well, I was hoping that Google would just implement Samsung's API, after seeing how popular it is, and just add some extensions to it if needed, (Ala AMD 64 bit instruction set, and Intel IA-32e/EM64T) but you can't know the future plans of google, unless you are in a position inside the company to know.

I also, somewhat over enthusiastically, believe that your app could get the 1st or 2nd place prize. Thus giving you quite a boost in operating capital, and act as a show piece to google as to why there is a market to either adopt Samsung's API, or develop one internally.
(snip)
Perhaps the incentive could be a percentage of the prize money. If done well, I see Pleco having no problem getting 3rd place at $25,000. If the percentage the employee got was around 50% or more, that would be well worth, his or her effort

I really think that winning anything more than $2000 is doubtful given the nature of our app - the apps they're looking for are apps that really make heavy use of pen input, drawing programs and such. There isn't all that much we could do with an S-Pen right now outside of our handwriting input screen, and launching totally new features / modules for the sake of possibly winning a contest just doesn't seem like a very effective use of our time.

I'm not one to tell you how to run your business, and am very conservative in my own business, but if one of your programmers, or a contracted programmer is willing to take the majority of the responsibility, it seems like very little risk on your part. If the app won nothing, then they programmer would still have a great phone, we would have stylus support, and Pleco would have a more visible presence in the android world.

I'm not quite seeing that - it's not like we have a ton of programmers here, and if anyone had the free time to spend on a major project like this I'd rather pay him/her extra money myself to work on core Pleco functionality upgrades. A "more visible presence in the Android world" seems unlikely to come for anybody who doesn't actually win one of the top prizes in this, which as I said I'm highly skeptical about, and even that probably wouldn't give us any more of a PR boost than (say) being featured on a popular blog or in a newspaper article.

If it won anything, even the popular choice award, which I could remind everyone to vote for your app in this thread, you would have lots more advertising, essentially paid for by Samsung, who is on a tear to eclipse Sony as the number one electronics brand in the world.

We don't have enough users on Android to ballot-stuff like that - maybe in a year or two, but not yet.

That could also catapult Pleco into a position to get customers in the Korean market with 750,000 Notes and counting already in hand, and a huge amount of business done between Korea and China by Samsung and LG alone. You would of course then need to look into getting a Korean-Chinese, Chinese-Korean dictionary, and add Korean input into the UI.

That's also not a direction we see ourselves going - the Korean and Japanese to Chinese dictionary markets are already pretty well saturated, and most of the best dictionaries are tied up in exclusive licenses with the existing players. We've got our hands full with Chinese to English / German / French at the moment.

Thanks again for such a useful product these last 10+ years.

And thank you for the feedback - appreciate your bringing this to my attention even if I don't think it makes sense for us.

If getting an employee, or contractor to get a Note is not an option, I bet more than a few of us here would glady pony up the cash to go towards a Note for development purposes. I don't even have a Note yet, (I'm on Verizon), but would put $20 in the pot right now to get it started. If you want to start a thread with a tally of how much has been collected, just link me to it, and I'll send in the money.
If you cannot accept donations due to legal reasons, then call it an investment, gift, loan with no payback conditions, or whatever works for your lawyers.

The main reasons we'd want a Note would be non-stylus-related - it's a popular phone and as with any popular phone it's nice to have a test unit to deal with compatibility issues. But since we haven't had many Note-related complaints so far I wouldn't consider it a priority like the S2 (which had major OCR problems in our first few betas) or the Galaxy Nexus (audio / keyboard ones) were when we bought those. Anyway it's not something I think we ought to be hitting up our users for - if we wanted to do something like that we'd do it for a new dictionary license or something else where there was a more tangible result to their contributions.