September 17, 2013 CloudSpokes and TopCoder, Together – Two of the World’s Largest Dev Communities are Now One

@spartovi – Sal Partovi

Yes – you read that correctly. Today, CloudSpokes’ parent company, Appirio, has announced the acquisition of TopCoder with the intention of combining two of the best developer communities in the world.

CloudSpokes – as you all know – is the leader in crowdsourced cloud development, and is a crowdsourcing marketplace that matches companies who need development work with a worldwide community of more than 75,000 cloud experts. TopCoder is the world’s largest Open Innovation Community of digital creators with over half a million members from nearly every country in the world.

So what does this mean for you?

For The Community

First and foremost, our top priority has been and will continue to be the growth and maintenance of a healthy, innovation-focused, community. By that, we specifically mean a growing community of the best cloud experts, algorithmists, software developers, and designers across the globe. Doing so requires a dedication to continually feeding that hungry group the world’s toughest problems, and compensating them for their skills and talent. This is the same mantra we’ve stuck with since our second blog post, and we don’t plan on changing it now. This new acquisition is an acceleration of those core values:

“The goals for CloudSpokes are simple and easy:

• Reward Members for great work
• Recognize Members for contributions
• Collaborate and educate ourselves and our members through working together.
• Provide problems and work for the community”

One of the immediate new opportunities we are excited to share focuses on the 2013 TopCoder Open and the addition of a brand new track, Cloud Development. In addition, we’ll be celebrating this news with other special bonuses and prizes for competing on Cloudspokes.

For Our Customers and Spokes Partners

By combining the respective strengths of CloudSpokes and TopCoder, we’ve enabled a single place for organizations to instantly tap into and reward nearly 600,000 of the best technical experts in the world. As a marketplace for businesses who need innovation and development, there really is no substitute for the breadth of skills and real-world innovation this new combined powerhouse of community experts provides:

• Access to nearly 600,000 of the world’s best technical experts
• Multiple competing submissions to drive innovative solutions
• Expanded range of problems that can be attacked
• Performance-based pricing

In Summary

All the things you love about both communities will not change. Everything we’re pushing to accomplish has merely been accelerated and expanded. The opportunities for what this community can now accomplish are limitless, and we hope all our community members, customers, and partners are as excited as we are about this new chapter.

Here’s to the future of the greatest development community in the world – thank you for being a part of it with us.