The contest is officially less than a month away, and things are looking good. Here at Rumble HQ we’re working on filling out the list of expert panelists and coordinating with sponsors, as well as updating the competition codebase a bit.

Speaking of sponsors, if you’ve been keeping an eye on the site, you’ve noticed that we’ve added a number of new companies – and there are more to come. Many thanks to Chargify, Speedyrails, Zencoder, oneforty, PostageApp, WebSolr, Blue Box Group, and Railslove, all of whom have recently signed up to help us out with infrastructure, operations, and of course prizes (the prizes list will receive an update very soon!)

Some of our sponsors are even running Exhibition Matches this year, which is a new thing we’re doing. Basically, they say “build an app that has an innovative _______ component or feature” and you say:

• sweet we were going to do that anyway!, or
• awesome, this is a great excuse to try out something new, or
• but with the blast shield down I can’t see a thing!

Have faith, young Skywalker.

These special categories aren’t meant to limit your creativity but rather give you an excuse to play with a cool new API or vertical. And there will be special prizes for building an app that qualifies for these matches, too (one example might be “best use of audio / video”).

So if you don’t already have an idea for the Rumble, don’t worry. We’ll be announcing full details for each of these matches in a couple of days.