In MLB.com Challenge, College Students Pitch Tech Ideas

From ACM TechNews:
In MLB.com Challenge, College Students Pitch Tech Ideas
InformationWeek
(12/06/12) Michael Endler

The MLB.com College Challenge, a competition cosponsored by the Syracuse University's School of Information Studies and Major League Baseball Advanced Media, offers participants a chance to solve some of MLB.com's real-world tech challenges, and an opportunity to pitch solutions to MLB representatives. The challenge encourages students from varied backgrounds to participate, serving as a model for helping students find jobs, as well as encouraging technological innovation to flourish in more places. In a previous competition, the winning project presented a way to merge all of the social media documents that a single game might produce, including smartphone photos, tweets, and Facebook status updates, into a single interface. This year's competition, which recently completed its third edition, focused on how MLB.com could harness the trend of "gamification" to engage fans. The winning project was a novel approach to fantasy baseball with gamification elements and competitive social challenges to share the experience with friends. Syracuse professor Jeffery Rubin, one of the competition's organizers, notes the hackathon is an interdisciplinary challenge. "It's not the most technical project that wins--but the best idea," Rubin says.

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