Publish an App, Get a Phone

Currently, Nokia is having a promotion that allows first-time Windows Phone
App publishers the chance to receive a free Nokia Lumia 800 (Windows 7 phone)
for their efforts (applicable in Canada and US).  It’s simple, if you publish your first Windows Phone app,
you get a free phone.  To keep up to date with the different promotions, you can
find the information for Bill Reiss, the Southeast Nokia Ambassador, here. 

So, what better way to encourage people to develop apps than to give them a
free phone??  Thanks to this inspiring promotion,  I teamed up with the South
Florida Windows 8 Developers meetup group (organizers Frank Haggar and Colt
Taylor) to host a Windows Phone App hackathon.  The premise behind the event was
not to focus as much on development, but more how to get an app in the phone
store.  The development aspect is obviously an important one, but I think the
actual publishing process is easily overlooked and sometimes underestimated. 
Therefore, we wanted to encourage developers by showing them how easy it is to
publish to Windows Phone store, therefore, setting the path for developers to
bring their existing apps and games over to our platform.  We had numerous great
responses including the following quote from Gonzalo Figueroa of CNG Studios who said, “It was awesome!
I learned a lot and the environment was great. Can't wait until the next one.” 
The following day, Gonzalo actually told me that he was impressed on how easy
the whole process was compared to others he had dealt with, which is what we
love to hear!

Now, here’s the amazing part.  We had about 15 people join us including 2
participating remotely through live meeting.  Out of these, FIVE published their
first Windows Phone App that night in a little over four hours!  In addition, we
have several more that are working on publishing their app and hope to get in
the store by the end of the month.  Even had one guy come in late, use a Mac,
and publish an app through App Studio (which I highly
recommend everyone take a look at) in three hours.

Thanks to the success that we had, I will be trying to organize another one
of these workshops in the next couple of weeks, so keep up to date with my blog
and my twitter @jquickwit for details!