Announcing the CreateNow Developer contests in Paris, Frankfurt and London

[SimonMorris]

I have two exciting pieces of news to share with you.

Firstly I celebrated my 2nd anniversary with the ServiceNow this week.

From my first blog post in September 2011 to today — I've had an amazing experience working in the Application Development team in London.

Working for an American company I celebrated by buying the team doughnuts. Being based in the beautiful English countryside we also bought scones, jam and cream. It was a very civilized celebration.

What do I love most about working in ServiceNow and in the Development organization in particular?

I get to work with people that are passionate about building and creating.

We're incredibly lucky to have both an unlimited supply of ideas and an incredibly easy platform to work on.

As a product ServiceNow has transformed into a Cloud-based development environment where it's quick and easy to build new applications.

Tools such as the App Creator released in Calgary and the Javascript debugger in Dublin shown by Fred Luddy at Knowledge 13 give our customers everything they need to build applications that have real value in their organizations.

I love that our customers are transforming IT

Our customers are smashing down the silos of information and corporate data held captive in spreadsheets, project plan documents and email. They're transforming their organizations by building applications that have data storage, workflows and access control.

Most amazingly they are doing this in their web browsers — connecting to a development platform delivered using SaaS.

Our customers made us incredibly proud this year at Knowledge13. During the CreateNow Custom Application Hackathon in Las Vegas. teams worked for around 12 hours to build amazing applications from scratch just for the prestige of being declared winners. Check out the results — we were hugely impressed.

Onwards and upwards: Our wider development community

The culture of creativity and the burning desire to build cool, interesting products is still alive and well in our development teams. We believe it is the key to getting great people working in the company and why we're ahead of our competition.

More importantly our customers share our enthusiasm for developing on our platform for their own organizations. They are truly part of our wider development community.

This is why I'm really excited to be involved in the CreateNow Custom Application Hackathon events happening in October.

Join us for CreateNOW and the EMEA NowForums

On Tuesday 8th October in Paris, Wednesday 9th October in Frankfurt and Thursday 10th October in London we are holding a competition to allow our extended ServiceNow development community — our awesome customers and partners — to showcase their skills.

Teams of up to 5 people will build and create applications on the ServiceNow platform and compete to be crowned winners in their home country.

There will be a few rules though.

1. We want to see what teams can build on the platform in a short amount of time — you'll only have 5 hours between getting an instance of ServiceNow and the judging time.
   

   
   So, you won't be allowed to bring update sets or elaborate code libraries pre-written.

2. To make the competition as fair and transparent as possible the entries will be judged by ServiceNow employees — they'll be judging from a scorecard that I'll post on this blog in the following days.
3. This will be based on attributes such as creativity, usability and how the application leverages the ServiceNow platform. More details to follow on this.

It's simple. You turn up with a team of great developers, some great ideas and you create something amazing. That's it.

Lets not forget the prizes

We also want to make the CreateNow Custom Application Hackathon event something that everyone competing would remember and be proud to say they were a part of. So each competitor will get a t-shirt commemorating the contest — hopefully wearing it to your next local ServiceNow User Group or Knowledge 14 will identify you as one amongst the crowd.

An overall winner will be chosen from the French, German and British winning teams. We have something special lined up for the overall winners that we're looking forward to announcing on this blog in our next post.

So what should you do today to get involved?

1. Get a team of up to 5 creative, uber-developers together that can build an amazing, compelling application on the ServiceNow platform in just 5 hours. Register your team here as soon as possible. Register for London here or Paris here or Frankfurt here
   

   
   Make sure you check the box labelled "Yes, I want to participate in the CreateNow AppDev Contest" on the registration form. 5 additional form fields will pop up for you to add your team name in members in
   

2. Keep an eye on this blog leading up to the NOWForum events where we will be posting updates and more information about the rules
3. Follow the event on twitter. We'll be tweeting lots of updates, videos and photos from the @ServiceNow_EMEA account and the #nowforum hashtag. @NicoleDemiray and I (@Simo_Morris) will be at the event and updating the world regularly.
4. Join the CreateNow Google+ community where there will be lots of the same plus we'll run a few Hangouts from the event to share the fun.

We look forward to your registrations and to an excellent day of custom application development on the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform!

This is going to be a lot of fun, I can't wait!

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