Hoover’s Declares “Ideas” Winners and Opens Contest to All

Romin Irani, June 24th, 2011

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Hoover’s, one of the largest providers of company, people and industry research, has just announced the winners of the Ideas phase of its Ideas and Apps contest. The Ideas stage has seen such an overwhelming response that the company has opened the Implementation phase of the contest, which invites developers to build on the Hoovers API, to the general public.

The ideas could be in any of the 3 categories : Most Innovative Use of API, Mobile and Social Media Integration. Hoovers has just announced the winners of the “Ideation” phase.

• Most Innovative User of Hoovers API prize went to Vimal Kumar, who proposed a natural language search interface to perform expressive search of the Hoovers database.
• Best tool for Mobile Users prize went to Indran Naick and David Carew whose application is a mobile quick logo lookup idea, which allows sales folks to look up company information by simply scanning the logo.
• Best tool/integration with Social Media went to Soe Thiha for her social information dashboard that feeds Hoover’s data into Sales Force Chatter and Yammer.

The winners in each of the above categories won $2,000. The results of the Ideation stage were to be declared by May 25 but due to the large number of submissions, it took some time. To harness the huge response, Hoovers has thrown open the next and final stage of the contest, the Submissions Phase open to all. Originally, it was open only to the 3 winners of the Ideation stage in addition to seven other ideas.

So if you have an idea for an app that utilizes the Hoover’s API, start hacking today. The last date to submit a working application is August 25.

For full contest rules, refer to the contest homepage.