Verizon Foundation is Giving Future Application Developers an Opportunity to Show their Stuff.

                                         prweb.com



If you know any middle and high school students that just love web app technology then this is will be a great challenge for them to participate.


The Verizon Foundation, in partnership with the Technology Student Association, has opened the 2013-2014 Innovative App Challenge, giving middle and high school students across the country a chance to develop a concept for a mobile app and bring it to market.

The mobile app design competition aims to engage students in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) subjects and empower them to create STEM-related app concepts that solve real-world problems in their community or school. Students have a chance to win Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 tablets courtesy of Samsung Telecommunications America, cash grants of up to $20,000 for their school, and the opportunity to team up with app development experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab to build and bring their apps to life. Verizon will help winning teams bring their app to the Google Play store, available for download.


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The fastest-growing careers in the United States are STEM-related, yet the country is not graduating enough young professionals in these fields to meet this need. As a result, as many as 3 million STEM jobs have gone unfilled, according to STEMconnector’s “2013 EdTech – Revolution in Education” report.

To address this issue, the Verizon Foundation and TSA launched the inaugural Innovative App Challenge last October. More than 1,000 schools from every state and Washington, D.C., registered for the competition, and 471 teams submitted app concepts. The competition engaged more than 3,000 boys and girls from major cities to rural areas including many underserved communities. Nearly 60 percent of the winning team members were girls.

Justina Nixon-Saintil, director of education and technology programs for the Verizon Foundation, said: “We created the Verizon Innovative App Challenge to encourage students to collaborate, get creative and use their STEM knowledge to come up with powerful answers to local, everyday problems. The inaugural challenge provided all that and more, as we saw some amazing app concepts and heard inspirational stories from students and teachers. We’re eagerly awaiting the fresh, innovative ideas that the student teams will bring to the second challenge.”

What’s New in 2013 – More Ways to Win

This year, the Verizon Innovative App Challenge offers more chances to win for teams of five students in grades 6-12 with a faculty advisor. The winning teams, which will be chosen by an expert panel of judges, will include:

• Twenty-four Best in Region winners from the West, Midwest, South and East. Each Best in Region school will receive a $5,000 cash grant plus virtual training on coding and support from the MIT Media Lab’s app development experts to help it build its app concept.
• Eight Best in Nation winners, selected from the pool of Best in Region teams. Best in Nation schools will receive an additional $15,000 cash grant, and each winning team member will receive a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet. Additionally, the MIT Media Lab will provide onsite and virtual training on coding and support to the Best in Nation teams as they develop their apps, and Verizon will help bring their apps to the Google Play store. The Best in Nation winners will present their apps in person – on their new tablets – at the 2014 Technology Student Association National Conference in Washington, D.C., next June.

• Three special Best in Category winners, which will be recognized for their app concepts to help solve problems in education, healthcare or energy management – focus areas for the Verizon Foundation.

Submissions will be accepted now through Dec. 3. Teams can submit their app ideas, access tips and instructional videos on app design, and learn more about the Verizon Innovative App Challenge atwww.verizonfoundation.org/appchallenge.

http://www.yourhoustonnews.com/eastex/living/verizon-foundation-launches-app-challenge-for-middle-and-high-school/article_2922238a-2afb-5c8a-b2f5-c5f07ae9e801.html

Project6 Recognized for Three Award Winning Website Designs in the WebAwards Competition

 The three awards given to Project6 Design were for Education, High-Tech, and Sports Responsive Website Design .                                   

The following article by PRWEB gives the details of the competition.



San Francisco Bay Area website design and development firm Project6 Design is proud to announce three honors from the Web Marketing Association’s 17th international WebAward competition. The redesign of the complex Leisure Sports, Inc. website garnered Project6 Design the Standard of Excellence award in the contest’s Sports category, and the Musicians Institute and Nok Nok Labs earned Outstanding Website awards.

Websites are judged on seven criteria, including design, innovation, content, technology, interactivity, copy writing and ease of use and receive a numeric score. Each WebAward entry is judged against other entries in its industry category and then against an overall standard of excellence. With 12 years of design and development expertise, Project6 Design has a proven record as one of the best web design companies in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Leisure Sports, an active lifestyle business, designs, develops, owns and manages distinctive, high-end fitness resorts and hotels that offer world-class service, contemporary facilities, and innovative sports and fitness programs. Project6 Design refined the Leisure Sports sites’ outdated navigation and branding, developed multiple content editor roles, updated an outdated and complex custom fitness scheduling tool, added internal promotions, and more. The result is a single Drupal-driven website that serves all seven location websites and allows easy access to multiple editors to quickly make changes.


Nok Nok Labs is a B2B security startup in Palo Alto that was looking to come out of stealth mode. Targeting a conference as their grand unveiling, they had just a few months to create their website and establish their presence. Project6 Design created a simple information architecture to enable site visitors to learn about their revolutionary vision quickly. GoTo Webinar, Jobvite, YouTube Video Channel, and the Marketo CRM were integrated into the website as part of Nok Nok Labs' drive to attract top talent and captures leads.

Musicians Institute provides an innovative education that prepares graduates for professional, creative careers in the contemporary music industry, but they were saddled with an outdated, unintuitive website that was not at all user-friendly on desktop, and didn't work on mobile devices. Project6 Design reviewed site analytics, created detailed user personas, and developed an information architecture that appealed to each of the target audiences, resulting in a new website design is clean, refreshing and easy to read—after years of struggling with white text on a black background. The Musicians Institute marketing department is now empowered with a responsive, sharable, search-optimized, easy-to-maintain design that allows their brand to shine.

All three websites were designed and built using the latest award-winning Responsive Web Design (RWD)methodologies—so images are scaled and navigation is intuitive on all devices, from large desktop monitors to the smallest phones. All are built with the Drupal content management system (CMS). Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world. It is used by some of the biggest sites on the Web, like The Economist, Examiner.com and The White House. Drupal is a cutting-edge platform that supports the latest technologies that the Web has to offer. The Drupal project's principles encourage modularity, standards, collaboration, ease-of-use, and more.

About the WebAwards
The Web Marketing Association was founded in 1997 to help define the standard of excellence for online marketing. Its internationally known award programs, such as WebAward Competition for Website Development, Internet Advertising Competition and the MobileWebAwards, recognize the people and organizations responsible for developing the most effective online marketing programs on the Internet today.

About Project6 Design, Inc.
Project6 Design is an award-winning San Francisco Bay Area web design firm working with high-tech, retail, education, and nonprofit organizations. Our strategic process helps elevate their brand, engage their target audience, and drive business results. Our services include branding, print collateral design, and web design and development. Clients include eBay, Gap, Stanford, CA Technologies, Old Navy, The Siebel Foundation, UCSF, and many others. For more information, call (510) 540-8005, email: info(at)project6(dot)com or visit our website athttp://www.project6.com.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/9/prweb11120453.htm