Anyone born in 1978, and now in their early thirties, never knew a time when there weren’t mainstream personal computers. For the most part, those who entered this world in the late 1980’s (and are in their twenties like my daughter), haven’t lived in a time when PC’s weren’t in their school or at home, and this thing called the ‘internet’ was in place before they were out of grade school.
Best Buy clearly recognizes that these digital natives are voracious users and purchasers of the technology they sell, but they also seem to truly understand that there is an entire ecosystem of these digital natives who have become web developers. These folks are adept and using new faster and more efficient tools (e.g., Ruby on Rails), a “web stack” (i.e., Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP or LAMP) — along with leveraging the accelerating number of exposed application programming interfaces (API’s) available digital data that’s exposed — and are building and delivering a dizzying array of new web applications, mashups and remixes.
Curiously, the latter term “remix” is usually used in the context of someone taking an original song and mixing in other elements to create a new one, but in my opinion Best Buy has extended that term to include what they’re offering, an open API called “Best Buy Remix.” This API opens up Best Buy’s product catalog, featuring full product information including pricing, availability, specifications, descriptions and images for nearly a million current and historical products and thinking of using all of this to create a ‘remix’ vs. a ‘mashup’ seems to me to be positioning it as being used for an elegant and lyrical web application vs. what many people think of when the term mashup is used: connecting a database to a Google Map and delivering something of interesting but inherently low value.
Yesterday, April 24th, Best Buy announced their Remix Challenge:
Think you can build a better Best Buy? We do, and we’re launching the Remix Challenge to prove it!
TopCoder and Best Buy are proud to announce this exciting new series of contests. Over the coming months, we’ll be building applications in a variety of categories, using the Remix open API for BestBuy.com’s product catalog to help find solutions to specific challenges.
Each challenge will begin with an Idea Generation contest, where you will be presented with a problem or issue pertaining to customer experience in a particular category. How would you help a customer through the many decisions they need to make when purchasing a flat panel television? How would you better present the wide array of accessories that are so important when buying a laptop PC or mp3 player? How would you improve the shopping experience for Best Buy’s wide selection of movie & video game titles, or build awareness about Best Buy Rewards Points , or sell more ink & toner for printers?
We’ll be looking for your ideas for the perfect small application to address these challenges in the form of a web app for BestBuy.com, or a widget, a Facebook or mobile app, or whatever else you can come up with.
These guys smartly chose TopCoder to run this challenge since they are, “…the world’s largest competitive software development community with 191,587 developers representing over 200 countries” and have a critical mass of the global developer community. TopCoder will also run this Remix Challenge well and be viewed as a trusted, independent third party making it something developers will undoubtedly flock to and participate in.
This is brilliant on so many levels and really taps in to the best parts of innovating with the collective wisdom of an ecosystem. From creating an incentive to get great ideas for improving their business, to finding amazing and top talent who might work with Best Buy going forward, to creating and developing ways of using all of this data in innovative and creative ways which, most likely, the internal Best Buy folks could never have thought up by themselves.