Channel your inner geek for fun and prizes by commanding your own pet developer
Ever wonder what happens behind the cubicle walls of a software developer? QNX Software Systems strips away the mystery and gives you the chance to be both master and tormentor of its virtual online software developer.
The Pocket Geek (www.thepocketgeek.com) is a Flash-based game in which you play manager to a pocket-sized coder with five days to finish the big project. To ensure that your geek successfully finishes the project, you need to keep him energized and productive with combinations of entertainment, food, drinks, and toys. Keep an eye on your Pocket Geek’s status though – if you redline too often, you’ll prematurely “expire” your Geek.
The game reflects the company’s commitment to designing software “out in the open” on its developer-only portal, called Foundry27. There, developers focusing on embedded software can share code, support each other through their development process, and gain access to QNX source code. Upon completion of the game, players are invited to visit the Foundry27 site and learn more about transparent development and the QNX community.
Now through July, the player with the best score at the end of the month is eligible to win a $1000 prize package of the toys featured in the game, including a PS3, 8 GB iPod touch, Harman Kardon SoundSticks, a $50 gift certificate from ThinkGeek.com, and various QNX swag.
Quotes
“With The Pocket Geek, we wanted to complement our technical marketing with something fun and interactive, and to use the power of entertainment to help people find Foundry27. You can’t build community through a print ad.”
-Trisha Cooke, Director of Marketing Communications, QNX
“The site is actually quite simple, which is a difficult thing to accomplish with something that, for the non-developer, is extremely complicated. It was one of our developers who came up with this idea, which just goes to show that ideas can come from anywhere. Lucky for us there’s no shortage of geeks here.”
– Warren Tomlin, Chief Creative Officer, Fuel Industries
Multimedia
URL: http://www.thepocketgeek.com