CCC Blog

Catalyzing the computing research community and enabling the pursuit of innovative, high-impact research.

Computing Community Consortium Blog

The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.

Mozilla and NSF Teaming Up to Build Apps for the Future;
Idea, App Challenges Offering $500K in Prizes; Deadline Soon

August 18th, 2012 / in Research News, resources / by Erwin Gianchandani

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Will Barkis, Gigabit Developer Evangelist at Mozilla Foundation.

As the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) noted back in June, Mozilla and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have teamed up to run an app development challenge to build killer apps on ultra high speed, deeply programmable networks. In particular, this challenge is seeking apps and services that are impossible on today’s networks.

The first phase, running through next Thursday, Aug. 23rd, is focused on ideation — and includes $15,000 in prizes for the best ideas. Imagine what you could do in a world where bandwidth, computing capacity, and access to large data sets are unlimited. Imagine if physical location did not determine your access to healthcare or education or workforce training. Imagine if you could interact with people and data and knowledge anywhere in rich, realistic real-time. Go to MozillaIgnite.org today to submit your ideas, and to comment upon what others have already suggested.

This is the stuff of dreams and science fiction. We challenge you to imagine it — and we also challenge you to build it.

On that note, on Sept. 14-16, Mozilla and the “Gig City” of Chattanooga, TN, will host a gigabit hackfest called “Hackanooga.” Meet talented hackers from all over, eat good food and make good friends, and most importantly — have fun hacking on a citywide gigabit network. Travel grants are available; click here to apply for one.

Finally, the app development phase of the challenge kicks off in September with proposals from teams due by Sept. 20. There will be three rounds of app development over six months with $485,000 to be awarded.

To learn more, check out MozillaIgnite.org. We look forward to seeing your ideas and what emerges from this challenge. And if you have questions, comments, feedback, or want to discuss ideas, please drop us a line at ignite@mozillafoundation.org — we’d be happy to discuss them with you.