Be Sure to Confirm your Certification with Contest

Fellow devs,

I traded emails with one of the first rounders who was a lot more even-tempered than I would have predicted after his experience. He demo'd his submission at a big conference and even gave away 10 Samsung Gears before none of his 12 apps made round two.

Below is the note I got back. It's long and pretty revealing, and most of it mirrors the experience that many of us had in Round 1 submission. The WARNING MOMENT comes almost at the end -- he essentially revealed that any of the apps in the challenge that didn't win may have been incorrectly identified as "failed certification" and not even considered, even if they were appropriately certified (with no challenger notification). I marked it with *********.

Good luck in Round 2 and please be sure that all of your CERTIFICATIONS are correctly passed from SAMSUNG to the Challenge Managers.

devThriller

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Rich,

Great to hear from you. I thought I would see you at the Allscripts conference last week. As you might guess it was 10% fascinating, 90% mind-numbingly dull. "devThriller"? Do you even still code? I didn't know there was that big a call for FORTRAN.

I assume that post on the challenge site is Rob from Cleveland Clinic. He was the beneficiary of our Gear 2 giveaway – we handed out 15 of the smart watches in Chicago. He came to our demo of a watch app in the community clinic setting. We were giving out the watches to community docs and I told him he couldn't have one, so he came to big general session and won in a room of 3,000 folks. That was a terrifying live demo where we had a guy record a glucose reading on his watch, and then saw the results show up in a live EHR installation 1,500 miles away. It took about 12 seconds (usually it takes 5) and those last 7 seconds I sweat out about 15 pounds.

Yes, the Samsung Challenge did not work out as expected.

Some days you get the bear, some days the bear gets you.

I think we must have wildly misjudged what they were looking for. We submitted 12 apps – 5 for chronic disease management, 5 to enable supporters of people on our chronic programs and 2 related to our Affordable Care Act projects and preventive health (you and I should talk more about that one). None of our apps made the first cut. Like I said, we must have just missed what the intent of the challenge was:
- Our pre-diabetes program based on the 15 year patient study got beat out by a third "remember to drink water" app
- Our smoking cessation program tied to the CDC's quitnow content got beat out by an "unlock your car" app that couldn't possibly exist
- Our community doc app tied to the US Preventive Health Task Force recommendation set got beat out by a 2048 game – a game people have stopped playing on the phone
- Our COPD program which integrates to a major EHR was beat out by a non-outcome-oriented app that connects to an EHR with no installations

A contest is a contest, so we're not really holding onto any angst. It was a great opportunity for a big group of devs who did some cool work and for whom the $2K probably represents more than the max revenue potential of their software.

We had the usual hiccups a lot of teams did, and then a gigantic one:
- Problem with their platform initially playing our videos
- The wrong url put in for our video
- Inexplicably long certification process

**********
The big hubbub came soon after we got an email saying "your apps have been added to the submission gallery". We followed up with the challenge team and asked for confirmation of each of the individual entries and got back a "sorry, these four did not get certified in time". We sent in screen shots of the certifications (well before deadline) and the super efficient challenge people cleared it up quickly. The punch line being that if we hadn't asked, four of our apps would not have even been considered and we didn't get any notification until we very specifically asked.

Overall, I would say the experience was "unsatisfying".

I don't know why you can't click on my submissions (I tried that link you sent http://challengepost.com/software/windward-for-gear-2 and got the same error as you). You can see our apps at
https://vimeo.com/channels/samsungchallenge

So as to your second question, yes, I do have a couple extra Gear 2's sitting around. I'll send two your way. As you might guess we've halted dev on them and are limiting our integration to Healthkit and the new Google health repository.

Should I send them to your office?

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