@Jimis
Need I paste the relevant part of the rules? I guess I do. Here we go:
"...a URL for a video on YouTube, Vimeo or Youku, which demonstrates the main functionality of the Application; "
At your submission time (whenever that was) and also at 17:00:01 EDT your Video URL did not show anything, because your video was not yet published/uploaded. Maybe your app does "nothing" because your video showed "nothing" at the time of your submission and at 17:00:01. However you might justify it, strictly speaking, you did not comply with the rules.
@jadeim
Don't play along with the weak. Why don't you ask your buddy skorupski to join the discussion and along with all other Samsung employees tell what their job title is. No other addressing of issues would be productive. Some people already have explained some of my questions and they had valid reasons. Silence on the other hand is often an indicator of guilt, so... speak up Samsung employees!
@HereWeGoAgain, regarding one of your previous posts
>The question then arises - how can any challenge participant be sure his app is not being certified by a competitor.
Well you can only have trust that organizers have proper verification process. Noone is really obliged to reveal his work position (I think you asked for that etc.)
Trying to give unbiased and fair commentary here I have to admit that it is let's say very unusual situation that you may have Samsung employees competing and earning awards in Samsung challenge (I also think it might be more difficult for 'outsiders' to compete with them). I have never seen such case, as it's kind of the professional standard everywhere that all employees are excluded from company public contests (and it does not matter if some individual works as a cook in a company restaurant. Position are irrelevant in that case - he works at the company and knows people there and has some kind of inside perspective. And that's enough. Privately he or she can start in dozens of challenges organized by other organizations but not in his own company challenge).
But here Samsung obviously decided to go different way (or much more probably someone made a unfortunate mistake preparing T&C document, as I don't believe it was intentional*). Since that was allowed from the beginning (as T&C does not forbid it) than I guess there are no grounds to make any complain about it. Terms were published, have not changed and noone was forced to take part in the challenge if he don't like them (btw. there are also quite a lot of complaints that organizers are not doing things they were never formally obliged to do - like writing justifications why some work was selected and other not etc.)
* ... it wasn't rather intentional from Samsung side. Putting formal things aside please note that it's putting their company in problematic position from PR point of view. If the company employee won any of the main prizes than that might put them in a really difficult position and look pretty bad for brand in general. But at the same time looking from the perspective of alleged Samsung employees participating in the contest - they probably did everything well. They saw opportunity so they participated and you can't blame them for this. They put their effort, time and did the same kind of work we all did. And the have full right to do it. Now ofcourse Samsung cannot tell them: "Don't submit you works to the 2nd phase because if any of those won it would be terrible for our image". And you don't have to be PR expert to know that press releases with that information will not look great, especially for a company putting dozens of millions of $ in other channels to build their professional and trusted image. That's interesting PR case :)
Anyway I hope those issues will be solved and not destroy positive spirit of the contest (as I think that works and participants raising 'controversies' represent marginal part of all entries) !
@EngAhmedFawzy,
I think it is always good idea to put emotions aside here and do not draw any conclusions prematurely. While you may not personally like the language style of @hereWeGoAgain, he (or she) has full right to observe facts, note things that raise his doubt (like youtube dates here) and get proper formal explanation (like the one you served).
I cannot recall he openly named anyone a cheater so let's maybe don't assume bad intentions, try to "over-interpret" or read between the lines but stick to what was exactly written only. And good luck with Rescue app in the 2nd round !
@hereWeGoAgain
On one side you seem to be doing a lot of solid analytical work here, finding a lot of facts etc. -that's absolutely fine. But if next to very logical statements you will write something like "Silence on the other hand is often an indicator of guilt," it might make you look less serious. You have to admit it wasn't your best point in a discussion!
@TomaszF1
You're correct and if I didn't convey my thoughts good enough for everyone you seem to have understood my concerns. Samsung is a big company and I just can't explain how they can allow such situation to be possible.
I'm trying to raise awareness and expose facts and not blame or accuse anyone personally. I'm not even trying to complain, although I sometimes find it difficult to keep control because of the lack of any official comment which leads to me saying stuff like 'silence = fault'.
Like you note, I'm not blaming or accusing anyone personally. I realize how people can take it personally when it's not meant personally. Beyond facts there can be much speculation as to why we have Samsung employees winning round 1 or about other challenge inconsistencies, but speculation are no good for anyone.
@EngAhmedFawzy
I was just asking question, I'm not trying to make you or anyone look bad. But if you look at the things from the side you see things that at the time being looked interesting, to say the least. So it's natural to ask questions to get rid of any doubts.
Other people like you have explained things about their submissions and everything looks right. Now after you've explained how your video's upload date is July 19 everything looks right.
I pretty much think your explanation applies to all or most other video cases I've mentioned.
I understand how I might be getting under the skin of others, but everyone should understand that I mean nothing personally. However, I am very happy to confess I was 'wrong' if I'm given an explanation or proper facts, like in your case, even tho it's not about being wrong, because I have never accused or blamed anyone.
@TomaszF1
Like I said further up in the post I agree with you. This was just me losing my temper for a second and I apologize to anyone who found my 'silence-equals-fault' remark offensive.
@EngAhmedFawzy
I saw you posted a new comment while I was finishing writing this. I would like you to go back in the thread and see how I've mentioned your app. I'd like to spare you some clicks, so here we go:
==============
- Video controversy (All these apps' videos were uploaded after the submission deadline, but there are no original videos publicly available, what's going on... who knows, maybe they've deleted them or whatever... still the fact remains):
-- Bike Computer, July 21/22
-- Rescue Gear, July 19
...
=============
YouTube provides public APIs to query the video publication/upload date. The public YouTube APIs about your video say it was uploaded/published on July 19. This is a fact. It's not an assumption. Now that you have explained how this happened I checked up on it on Google and it turns out that YouTube would irritatingly claim your video publication/upload date is the date the video was made public (for example after being unlisted/private). So they report false information.
You can see how this can lead to confusion. This is something the challenge organizers should be aware of for future rounds/challenges. In challenges with such great public interest they should leave no doubt in contestants about anything, be it their own employees participating or not being transparent enough about the judging process. I don't think, for example, that it would be too much of an effort to expose their judging notes or ratings for the winning apps or for every app. It will only make all participants have a better overall opinion of the challenge.
@TomaszF1
From what I recall at least 5% of the winning apps were done by Samsung employees. I think this is not a fraction to be neglected and this is just scratching the surface. The number might be higher or not, but giving contestants reasons to doubt your challenge is never a good thing. As we can see people are very sensitive about their apps/submissions and even if de jure all Samsung employees can take part in the challenge, de facto Samsung is allowing participants to rightfully or not have doubts about their challenge.
@EngAhmedFawzy
May I suggest you try to be more rational and less emotional? I will repeat this once again, I have only provided true information. I provided facts.
Does the 'Eng' part of your nickname come from 'engineer'? Every good software engineer can use a simple API. In your case, since you apparently refuse to do it yourself, because you seem to be overwhelmed with emotion, I'd gladly show you how to use the YouTube API :)
As you can see both the "published" and "uploaded" ehm.. 'events' are listed to have happened at:
2014-07-19T20:48:34.000Z
For those who have difficulties reading ISO 8601 date formats I would like to say that the above date-time translates to:
July 19th, 2014... 8:48:34 pm UTC
The time part in EDT would translate to 4:48:34 pm EDT (because UTC is 4 hours ahead of EDT)
I think this is sufficiently simply explained for everyone to understand. EngAhmedFawzy, is it also good enough for you, sir? Are you convinced I am listing facts only now? ;)
@All_that_facts_apply_to, why are you confused about these facts? explain (as many did) or just let it go more formal.
I Can see many apps that worth to be a winner that are not in the list, 40% of winners are from Poland! this is strange, no one tells that there are many creative devs there! this is not a reasonable solution to that fact.
Also @Samsung & @Chanllengepost : Clearance detailed should be provided by both of you on this, how can developers from one country and many of them works on samsung can enter and win up to 4 prizes!!
I am a winner by myself, and this is not accepted by be or any clear winner that uploaded on or before deadline.
When i asked ssac2014 support about an app with ONLY ONE VERSION that appears on 18th ,they told me that there are many apps like this just because there were problems with store!! WHAT THE @#$% this is a million dollars contest, and this is Samsung! whats up??? The app from poland!!
@EngAhmedFawzy
Your video uploaded at 19 and updated (might be goes public as you mentioned) at 21, you never to catch the deadline EDT time. Also an explanation required from Samsung about this and all situations like this.
@EngAhmedFawzy
Google is never to put an expired or unstable api on their services, so the api is correct.
Now, i did what you did with your video, edited my video and publish date still remains, updated tag is changes but publish tag still remains.
How did you submit your app here even after the deadline?!
@EngAhmedFawzy
Mr. Engineer, I'm beginning to think you're unable to think abstractly, because you seem to fail to understand what a fact is. A fact is a fact is a fact. The fact is that YouTube's API lists your video's upload/published date as July 19. Now we know WHY this is so, you have given an explanation, but the fact *remains*, it cannot be changed by an explanation. The act of quoting facts is not wrong, you cannot be wrong for quoting facts, the facts can be "wrong", the quoter cannot :) You're free to complain to Google/YouTube.
It wasn't wrong to quote the facts. It would have been wrong to not acknowledge Youtube's way of providing publishing/upload date information. But I have acknowledged that yours and most likely all other videos that seem to have been uploaded after the deadline have been probably uploaded in time, but Youtube is reporting the date incorrectly.
I can't do much more than acknowledge this explanation. I am not wrong for listing facts, let alone for asking questions. It would seem to me that it is you who continue to be emotional and perceive this too personally. If anything you should praise people who ask questions. And most importantly you shouldn't be worried or irritated by people asking valid questions.
The other facts still remain - about Samsung employees winning etc.
I hope you take your time to realize that I have never blamed or accused anyone or provided information that is not a fact and is not publicly accessible.
I think the main thing people fail to realize is that asking questions can only be for good. Any doubts developers/participants have should be removed. Answering questions can provide the means for removing doubts.
The organizers were not wise enough to make the challenge completely transparent. Regarding videos, for example, they might have requested that all youtube/etc videos are made public at the submission deadline. There's a lot of usefulness that can arise from our little discussion here.
So... keep calm and keep coding or keep doing whatever it is that makes you happy :)
62 comments
HereWeGoAgain • almost 12 years ago
@Jimis
Need I paste the relevant part of the rules? I guess I do. Here we go:
"...a URL for a video on YouTube, Vimeo or Youku, which demonstrates the main functionality of the Application; "
At your submission time (whenever that was) and also at 17:00:01 EDT your Video URL did not show anything, because your video was not yet published/uploaded. Maybe your app does "nothing" because your video showed "nothing" at the time of your submission and at 17:00:01. However you might justify it, strictly speaking, you did not comply with the rules.
@jadeim
Don't play along with the weak. Why don't you ask your buddy skorupski to join the discussion and along with all other Samsung employees tell what their job title is. No other addressing of issues would be productive. Some people already have explained some of my questions and they had valid reasons. Silence on the other hand is often an indicator of guilt, so... speak up Samsung employees!
Tomasz Florczak • almost 12 years ago
@HereWeGoAgain, regarding one of your previous posts
>The question then arises - how can any challenge participant be sure his app is not being certified by a competitor.
Well you can only have trust that organizers have proper verification process. Noone is really obliged to reveal his work position (I think you asked for that etc.)
Trying to give unbiased and fair commentary here I have to admit that it is let's say very unusual situation that you may have Samsung employees competing and earning awards in Samsung challenge (I also think it might be more difficult for 'outsiders' to compete with them). I have never seen such case, as it's kind of the professional standard everywhere that all employees are excluded from company public contests (and it does not matter if some individual works as a cook in a company restaurant. Position are irrelevant in that case - he works at the company and knows people there and has some kind of inside perspective. And that's enough. Privately he or she can start in dozens of challenges organized by other organizations but not in his own company challenge).
But here Samsung obviously decided to go different way (or much more probably someone made a unfortunate mistake preparing T&C document, as I don't believe it was intentional*). Since that was allowed from the beginning (as T&C does not forbid it) than I guess there are no grounds to make any complain about it. Terms were published, have not changed and noone was forced to take part in the challenge if he don't like them (btw. there are also quite a lot of complaints that organizers are not doing things they were never formally obliged to do - like writing justifications why some work was selected and other not etc.)
* ... it wasn't rather intentional from Samsung side. Putting formal things aside please note that it's putting their company in problematic position from PR point of view. If the company employee won any of the main prizes than that might put them in a really difficult position and look pretty bad for brand in general. But at the same time looking from the perspective of alleged Samsung employees participating in the contest - they probably did everything well. They saw opportunity so they participated and you can't blame them for this. They put their effort, time and did the same kind of work we all did. And the have full right to do it. Now ofcourse Samsung cannot tell them: "Don't submit you works to the 2nd phase because if any of those won it would be terrible for our image". And you don't have to be PR expert to know that press releases with that information will not look great, especially for a company putting dozens of millions of $ in other channels to build their professional and trusted image. That's interesting PR case :)
Anyway I hope those issues will be solved and not destroy positive spirit of the contest (as I think that works and participants raising 'controversies' represent marginal part of all entries) !
Tomasz Florczak • almost 12 years ago
@EngAhmedFawzy,
I think it is always good idea to put emotions aside here and do not draw any conclusions prematurely. While you may not personally like the language style of @hereWeGoAgain, he (or she) has full right to observe facts, note things that raise his doubt (like youtube dates here) and get proper formal explanation (like the one you served).
I cannot recall he openly named anyone a cheater so let's maybe don't assume bad intentions, try to "over-interpret" or read between the lines but stick to what was exactly written only. And good luck with Rescue app in the 2nd round !
@hereWeGoAgain
On one side you seem to be doing a lot of solid analytical work here, finding a lot of facts etc. -that's absolutely fine. But if next to very logical statements you will write something like "Silence on the other hand is often an indicator of guilt," it might make you look less serious. You have to admit it wasn't your best point in a discussion!
HereWeGoAgain • almost 12 years ago
@TomaszF1
You're correct and if I didn't convey my thoughts good enough for everyone you seem to have understood my concerns. Samsung is a big company and I just can't explain how they can allow such situation to be possible.
I'm trying to raise awareness and expose facts and not blame or accuse anyone personally. I'm not even trying to complain, although I sometimes find it difficult to keep control because of the lack of any official comment which leads to me saying stuff like 'silence = fault'.
Like you note, I'm not blaming or accusing anyone personally. I realize how people can take it personally when it's not meant personally. Beyond facts there can be much speculation as to why we have Samsung employees winning round 1 or about other challenge inconsistencies, but speculation are no good for anyone.
@EngAhmedFawzy
I was just asking question, I'm not trying to make you or anyone look bad. But if you look at the things from the side you see things that at the time being looked interesting, to say the least. So it's natural to ask questions to get rid of any doubts.
Other people like you have explained things about their submissions and everything looks right. Now after you've explained how your video's upload date is July 19 everything looks right.
I pretty much think your explanation applies to all or most other video cases I've mentioned.
I understand how I might be getting under the skin of others, but everyone should understand that I mean nothing personally. However, I am very happy to confess I was 'wrong' if I'm given an explanation or proper facts, like in your case, even tho it's not about being wrong, because I have never accused or blamed anyone.
@TomaszF1
Like I said further up in the post I agree with you. This was just me losing my temper for a second and I apologize to anyone who found my 'silence-equals-fault' remark offensive.
@EngAhmedFawzy
I saw you posted a new comment while I was finishing writing this. I would like you to go back in the thread and see how I've mentioned your app. I'd like to spare you some clicks, so here we go:
==============
- Video controversy (All these apps' videos were uploaded after the submission deadline, but there are no original videos publicly available, what's going on... who knows, maybe they've deleted them or whatever... still the fact remains):
-- Bike Computer, July 21/22
-- Rescue Gear, July 19
...
=============
YouTube provides public APIs to query the video publication/upload date. The public YouTube APIs about your video say it was uploaded/published on July 19. This is a fact. It's not an assumption. Now that you have explained how this happened I checked up on it on Google and it turns out that YouTube would irritatingly claim your video publication/upload date is the date the video was made public (for example after being unlisted/private). So they report false information.
You can see how this can lead to confusion. This is something the challenge organizers should be aware of for future rounds/challenges. In challenges with such great public interest they should leave no doubt in contestants about anything, be it their own employees participating or not being transparent enough about the judging process. I don't think, for example, that it would be too much of an effort to expose their judging notes or ratings for the winning apps or for every app. It will only make all participants have a better overall opinion of the challenge.
@TomaszF1
From what I recall at least 5% of the winning apps were done by Samsung employees. I think this is not a fraction to be neglected and this is just scratching the surface. The number might be higher or not, but giving contestants reasons to doubt your challenge is never a good thing. As we can see people are very sensitive about their apps/submissions and even if de jure all Samsung employees can take part in the challenge, de facto Samsung is allowing participants to rightfully or not have doubts about their challenge.
HereWeGoAgain • almost 12 years ago
@EngAhmedFawzy
May I suggest you try to be more rational and less emotional? I will repeat this once again, I have only provided true information. I provided facts.
Does the 'Eng' part of your nickname come from 'engineer'? Every good software engineer can use a simple API. In your case, since you apparently refuse to do it yourself, because you seem to be overwhelmed with emotion, I'd gladly show you how to use the YouTube API :)
First we get your video id, which is:
_OLEdY_czAc
In the following URL:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/[video_id]v=2&prettyprint=true
we do replace [video_id] with any YouTube id. When we replace it using your own id we get:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/_OLEdY_czAc?v=2&prettyprint=true
Now, the verbosity aside there are two fields of interest:
<published>2014-07-19T20:48:34.000Z</published>
and
<yt:uploaded>2014-07-19T20:48:34.000Z</yt:uploaded>
As you can see both the "published" and "uploaded" ehm.. 'events' are listed to have happened at:
2014-07-19T20:48:34.000Z
For those who have difficulties reading ISO 8601 date formats I would like to say that the above date-time translates to:
July 19th, 2014... 8:48:34 pm UTC
The time part in EDT would translate to 4:48:34 pm EDT (because UTC is 4 hours ahead of EDT)
I think this is sufficiently simply explained for everyone to understand. EngAhmedFawzy, is it also good enough for you, sir? Are you convinced I am listing facts only now? ;)
thesilent • almost 12 years ago
@HereWeGoAgain +1 for your comments and facts.
@All_that_facts_apply_to, why are you confused about these facts? explain (as many did) or just let it go more formal.
I Can see many apps that worth to be a winner that are not in the list, 40% of winners are from Poland! this is strange, no one tells that there are many creative devs there! this is not a reasonable solution to that fact.
Also @Samsung & @Chanllengepost : Clearance detailed should be provided by both of you on this, how can developers from one country and many of them works on samsung can enter and win up to 4 prizes!!
I am a winner by myself, and this is not accepted by be or any clear winner that uploaded on or before deadline.
When i asked ssac2014 support about an app with ONLY ONE VERSION that appears on 18th ,they told me that there are many apps like this just because there were problems with store!! WHAT THE @#$% this is a million dollars contest, and this is Samsung! whats up??? The app from poland!!
@EngAhmedFawzy
Your video uploaded at 19 and updated (might be goes public as you mentioned) at 21, you never to catch the deadline EDT time. Also an explanation required from Samsung about this and all situations like this.
Please everyone sees I & HereWeGoAgain are right, email to support@ssac2014.com
thesilent • almost 12 years ago
@EngAhmedFawzy
Google is never to put an expired or unstable api on their services, so the api is correct.
Now, i did what you did with your video, edited my video and publish date still remains, updated tag is changes but publish tag still remains.
How did you submit your app here even after the deadline?!
thesilent • almost 12 years ago
haha, apply the same rule to videos that dated after 17th, you will find the same as EngAhmedFawzy case, for many of them!!
thesilent • almost 12 years ago
@EngAhmedFawzy
That's what i did :) also i didn't ask you to talk, i am talking to the organizers:).
thesilent • almost 12 years ago
Again, please send to support@ssac2014.com in order to notify such cases, so organizers can take action or even clear the case.
again also i am not talking to you :)
don't bother your value time reply to me either.
HereWeGoAgain • almost 12 years ago
@EngAhmedFawzy
Mr. Engineer, I'm beginning to think you're unable to think abstractly, because you seem to fail to understand what a fact is. A fact is a fact is a fact. The fact is that YouTube's API lists your video's upload/published date as July 19. Now we know WHY this is so, you have given an explanation, but the fact *remains*, it cannot be changed by an explanation. The act of quoting facts is not wrong, you cannot be wrong for quoting facts, the facts can be "wrong", the quoter cannot :) You're free to complain to Google/YouTube.
It wasn't wrong to quote the facts. It would have been wrong to not acknowledge Youtube's way of providing publishing/upload date information. But I have acknowledged that yours and most likely all other videos that seem to have been uploaded after the deadline have been probably uploaded in time, but Youtube is reporting the date incorrectly.
I can't do much more than acknowledge this explanation. I am not wrong for listing facts, let alone for asking questions. It would seem to me that it is you who continue to be emotional and perceive this too personally. If anything you should praise people who ask questions. And most importantly you shouldn't be worried or irritated by people asking valid questions.
The other facts still remain - about Samsung employees winning etc.
I hope you take your time to realize that I have never blamed or accused anyone or provided information that is not a fact and is not publicly accessible.
HereWeGoAgain • almost 12 years ago
p.s.
I think the main thing people fail to realize is that asking questions can only be for good. Any doubts developers/participants have should be removed. Answering questions can provide the means for removing doubts.
The organizers were not wise enough to make the challenge completely transparent. Regarding videos, for example, they might have requested that all youtube/etc videos are made public at the submission deadline. There's a lot of usefulness that can arise from our little discussion here.
So... keep calm and keep coding or keep doing whatever it is that makes you happy :)