World's Largest On-Demand Digital Community for Challenges and Competition Services Now Available Resource for All US Government Agencies

GLASTONBURY, Conn., Jan. 10, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- TopCoder®, Inc., the leader in online programming competition, skills assessment and competitive software development, today announced the company has been awarded a contract under General Services Administration (GSA) Schedule 541 4G, Challenges and Competitions Services. Under the contract number GS-07F-0097Y, federal public sector organizations can access TopCoder's best of breed innovation platform and 380,000+ member Community of digital creatives to address the collaboration and innovation needs and challenges of the United States Government by implementing new solutions  that affect every aspect of Government processes—from funding to acquisition, contracts, and reporting.

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The appointment of TopCoder to a list of approved vendors is envisioned as part of a new Government-led emphasis to unify the efforts of multiple U.S. Agencies working to implement new distributed innovation acquisition models with the prime objectives of educating and evangelizing U.S. Government agencies on the power of open innovation, providing program implementation guidance to those agencies and showing measurable impact of the program success. The TopCoder platform and Community is now accessible to provide the same high level of software expertise to all federal agencies and departments that is being experienced by NASA and DARPA.

"The federal government has repeatedly called for greater transparency and efficiency in the procurement of products and services for all agencies. We believe challenges and competition services are a key element in shining a light on how to engage the public in an open environment," said Rob Hughes, President and COO of TopCoder, Inc. "This will provide agencies direct access to solutions through output-driven contests and tournaments using TopCoder's stringent and proven platform for promotion, evaluation and delivery."

TopCoder, NASA and Harvard Business School have created a virtual platform environment in which government clients can use communities to conceptualize, build and manage real digital solutions and realize faster turnaround, higher quality and greater ROI. The groundbreaking TopCoder process adopts a highly "adaptive" approach to product development that allows continual evolvement through process in the entire software development life cycle.

Notable Successes

The NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) program has already shown significant returns in its 24 month pilot trial including:

• An optimization competition to develop a software algorithm to recommend the ideal components of a space medical kit for manned space missions. The ten day competition involved more than 400 participants and garnered nearly 6,000 code submissions. The winning solution performs kit optimization in 30 seconds compared to NASA's previous best known solution, a 360X performance improvement at a total cost of $25,000.
• A planetary data ideation challenge to generate ideas for visualizations, analysis tools, educational applications and mash-ups from the agency's rich and deep Planetary Data System databases produced 35 unique idea submissions from 212 participants over the course of two weeks. NASA paid $3,250 for 5 valuable ideas with the winning concept "just the outside of the box thinking" that NASA was hoping to achieve.

About TopCoder, Inc.

TopCoder is the world's largest competitive software development community with more than 380,000 developers representing over 200 countries. The TopCoder community builds software for a wide-ranging client base through a competitive, rigorous, standards based methodology. This methodology results in a highly consistent set of software components allowing a software-as-parts approach to application development. For more information about sponsoring TopCoder events and utilizing TopCoder's software services and platforms, visit www.topcoder.com.

TopCoder is a registered trademark of TopCoder, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Available Topic Expert(s): For information on the listed expert(s), click appropriate link.
Jack Hughes
https://profnet.prnewswire.com/Subscriber/ExpertProfile.aspx?ei=85416

Jim McKeown
TopCoder, Inc.
860.633.5540
jmckeown@topcoder.com

SOURCE TopCoder, Inc.

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