Update2: Here’s the full list of [WINNERS].
Update: List of winners will be available today in the afternoon.
The draw for the BeTheMinister.com competition took place two days ago and Mohammad Chahrour won the big prize and will be Minister of Telecom for one day. Added to that, 200 participants won a free 4G dongle to try out before the official launch. I don’t have the final list of winners yet as it wasn’t published online.
I should be receiving the 4G dongle hopefully soon to try it out.
In addition to ending the BeTheMinister.com competition, two contests were launched:
– The Second National Mobile Application Programming Contest (NMPCII) for Students in Lebanon.
– A new Blogging Competition created by the Ministry of Telecoms to encourage Blogging in Lebanon.
That’s the first time I hear about a blogging competition sponsored by a Ministry which is great, but I have a small issue with the terms and conditions of this [contest].
As you can see below, the idea of the competition is to encourage Lebanese bloggers to post about their invention/idea and have a chance to visit the Silicon Valley with Minister Sehnaoui. That’s great but we will probably end up with hundreds of new Lebanese blogs with just one blog post enabling them to enter the competition. In fact, you don’t become a blogger by just starting a blog, as you need to post regularly, interact with readers, have interesting material and do that for a few weeks or months time.
This being said and in order to truly encourage blogging, I think participants should be required to post at least 5 to 10 posts throughout the month tackling various aspects of their invention that are defined in the competition and other aspects if they like. For example, a post on how they came up with the idea, another on the difficulties they faced, come up with a video, a meme, post a picture every two days etc.
This way, new bloggers will have to make an extra effort and post regularly and then maybe get hooked to their blog and keep it alive. Either way, I hope we will get some nice ideas out of this competition.
Whether it’s a flying car, a humanoid Nano-Robot that manipulates our DNA or an environmental country sized biosphere that reduces pollution we all have that one crazy creative invention that might change humanity.
Compose and submit a blog post about this topic under the main title “Lebanese Bloggers Reinvent the World”, accompanied with a subtitle reflecting your own Invention.
Blog posts will be judged by a jury of prominent Lebanese in the Silicon Valley working in the ICT sector based on the writing style and the creativity of the Invention.
The winner will get the chance to visit the Silicon Valley with Minister Sehnaoui end of March.
The jury that will judge the blog posts consists of:
Georges Akiki
Senior Director Strategic Planning Corporate Affairs Dept. – Cisco
George Chammas
Co-Founder & Vice Chairman – NavLink Inc.
Georges Harik
Angel Investor/Entrepreneur
Jessica Semaan
Operations Manager – Airbnb
You can read more about it [Here].