Googe cultivating Android development community with $10 million petri-dish

Petri-dishes are great for cultivating bacterial communities- they provide all nutrients that appeal to growing colonies of (usually) bacteria. And, now Google (NSDQ: GOOG)’s using their own petri-dish of sorts to cultivate the Android development community – except Google’s petri-dish is filled with $10 million of cold, hard, cash. Google’s calling this petri-dish the “Android Developer Challenge.”

Google is putting up $10 million to encourage developers to embrace Android and submit their own Android-software to the newly minted dev community. Anyone is eligible to take a piece of Google’s $10 million pie (or petri-dish, to continue with our analogy), so amateur and professional coders alike are welcome to mess around with the fresh Android SDK.

Here’s how the $10 million prize pool will be divvied up:

• Cash prizes range from $25,000 to $275,000
• $10 million will be split up between two competitions – Challenge I and II
• Challenge I will be open from Jan. 2 through March 3, 2008
• 50 Challenge I winners will be picked at the end of March and will receive $25,000
• The 50 winners will compete for 10 prizes worth $100,000 each and 10 prizes worth $275,000 each
• Challenge II will launch after the first batch of Android handsets launches in mid-2008

So, if you’ve been thinking of tinkering with Android (for profit or fun), here’s even more incentive to see what you can do with the Linux-based platform. Questions? Drop us a line.

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