Samsung has been experimenting out a lot of things to promote its ARTIK development board and ARTIK Cloud. The ARTIK boards were originally announced last year but they took quite a lot of time to hit retail stores in surplus stocks (and even at the time of writing this post, ARTIK boards aren’t yet available in all of Samsung’s markets). This time delay might have cost Samsung a large chunk of interested developers who couldn’t just keep waiting and went away with other boards readily available out everywhere. Samsung has now taken up the responsibility to fix this right from their home country South Korea, where the company has announced a major IT competition called ‘IoT Innovation Challenge’ along with KEA (Korea Electronics Association. This event also happens to be the biggest IT competition ever in the history of South Korea. The event kickstarted on the 16th of this month and Samsung have announced a total prize worth $91,253 (100 million KRW) up for grabs.
With this event, Samsung is banking its hopes highly on developers to migrate to its ARTIK’s ecosystem and build products and services with it. As the event title suggests, the major focus of the event will be in the area of Internet of Things with respect to industries like Smart Home, healthcare, environment and energy, public and safety, finance and industry, and Smart Cars. The Participant teams will be comprising of all sorts of domains like college and grad students, employees from small, medium and even startup companies.
The first phase of the competition evaluation will take place after the deadline date of 25th of this month. Those selected here will be trained by ARTIK researchers and KEA technical committee members in order to teach the participants to make the best use of ARTIK. Participants selected in the second phase will be given booths to showcase their products at the Korea Electronics Show which takes place on the 26th of October.
The two winning teams will be awarded with $18,250 each. Samsung is also looking on expanding this competition to other countries as well in the recent future.
After education is finished, participants need to submit their products and services after going through a month of development period. Second evaluation will be carried out on submitted results and will select final candidates. Products and services that are in final stage will be displayed at booths that are set up at KES (Korea Electronics Show), which opens on the 26th of October. Winners will be selected after going through evaluations from spectators on presented products and services and final presentations. 2 winning teams will be awarded $18,250 (20 million KRW) each and in total of $91,253 (100 million KRW) of prize.
Starting with this event this year, Samsung Electronics is looking for a way to expand this competition as a global competition. Samsung Electronics will include other Asian countries starting from next year and is looking to expand towards North America, Europe and other countries afterwards.
Global electronics and IT businesses are carrying out global events to expand their products, technical marketing, and partnerships. Microsoft is carrying out SW technology competition called ‘Imagine Cup’ by touring different countries since 2003. Google and Apple are carrying out I/O and WWDC respectively. Samsung Electronics is also looking to grow this event as a global event with Samsung Electronics’ own characteristics.
“Effect of letting developers know about ARTIK through IoT Innovation Challenge will be huge.” said a representative for Samsung Electronics with expectation.
Staff Reporter Kwon, Keonho | [email protected]
