Just came across this yesterday.

The Google India Product Engineering Competition

Rules & details of the competition are here:

http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/productprodigy/competition.html

It’s only for students of Computer Engineering students [Computer Science] of select Engineering Colleges in India. They should have provided a list of these eligible colleges. Now all students will be contacting their respective Head of Departments of their college to find out, whether their college is on Google’s list of included colleges for this Product Prodigy competition.

You can download the Registration form from here:

http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/productprodigy/Registration.doc.zip

It says that the shortlisted candidates will receive a funding of Rs. 50,000/-

Shortlisted teams will be given 3 months to complete their project.

Prize money of around Rs. 20,00,000/- It’s not clear whether this 20 Lakhs prize is an individual prize for the winning team or whether it would be distributed among all the top winners. Also, it says, the winners ‘COULD’ get to present their product @ Googleplex, California.

My Take: Great to see industry sponsorship for motivating engineering college students develop new & innovative products.

I hope college students do take this up as a challenge. I remember in my time for final year engineering projects, many students resorted to getting their projects built by existing companies in their respective industry sector [mine was Mechanical engineering]. If that’s applied to this day, would it mean that a few web development companies would see these students approaching them for ‘ideas’? Remains to be seen…..