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robert_horne
Employee
Employee
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The game is officially on, and the time is short. On Thursday March 5th we officially launched our Polestar OnDemand Ideation challenge on Innocentive.  Innocentive, a partner of the SAP Community Network is hosting this SAP sponsored challenge which will reward $20,000 to the developers of the best Polestar Ondemand mashups. We had originally budgeted 10K but at the last second we decided to go big and donate an extra 10K. This challenge will only last for 30 days, so don't delay register today.

For more about the contest and Polestar OnDemand, see my two previous posts.

Now in the grand scheme of things 20K isn't really a lot of money, but in today's world it's nothing to laugh at either. I think every developer who is considering entering the challenge first wants to know what kind of effort it is going to take to create a Polestar mashup. Well, it all really depends on your level of skill, but I believe we have made it as easy as we possibly could. With the resources that we have provided even a novice developer should be able to create a proof-of-concept within an hour.

The Polestar REST API focuses on two things:  adding datasets, and viewing the datasets.  There are a few more calls, but most apps will be concerned with sending data to Polestar to be viewed in the Polestar interface. To make it as easy as possible Ted Ueda from our Developer support team has Polestar in the cloud Web Services API - Sample Codes. These sample apps should get you up and going very quickly. The documentation is also provided as a Wiki on SDN.

You have the samples and the documentation, now all you have to do is come up with an interesting idea. Here are some questions you might want to ask while brainstorming a possible solution. How can Polestar add value to particularly interesting dataset? How can adding Polestar to a current business workflow change the way we do business? You know I would really love to see a mashup with data from http://recovery.org, or http://recovery.gov, but allas they don't have API datasets yet, I think that would be really interesting personally. The world is not lacking for interesting datasets.

Really the hardest part about this challenge will be converting the external data into the http://create.ondemand.com data XML specification. It is no small thing but it should be solvable fairly simply.

We really want your feedback. Let us know what APIs you would like to see? What are we missing? How could we make this better?

Here's a list of resources that should prove useful to anyone investigating the challenge and the Polestar APIs

Helpful blog posts:

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