How Wizkid spent 1 Lakh
By Suneetha B

Kerala based award winning media and entertainment company MobMe had launched a programming contest for students where the first prize was Rs. 1 lakh. The results were announced in July, 2011, and the prize of Rs. 1 Lakh has been won by NIT Calicut student and wizkid Mr. Karthick R.

Techgoss spoke to R. Karthick, a Computer Science B.Tech student, on his winning experience.

Techgoss: Karthick, how did you prepare for the contest?
Karthick: I didn't 'prepare' for Codejam. It was vacations for me and I wanted to brush up my coding skills. I used to work out problems from SPOJ (Sphere Online Judge www.spoj.pl), one question per day. I came to know about Codejam through Facebook, KochiGallan etc. The practice question itself was interesting, and it was different from the ones I found in SPOJ. That intrigued me into participating at Codejam.

Techgoss: So what will you do with the prize money?
Karthick:  I have already spent a good portion of it with my friends. I don’t intend to buy anything for myself with it. I might buy something for my parents, then a gift for my brother Deepak, and I'll invest whatever is left on some asset.

Renju, spokesperson for Mobme, told Techgoss that the parameters of judging they used in the competition were compactness of logic and readability of codes. “We did an internal filtering process in which we identified 3 best codes every day. On a scale of 1 to 10 .they would have rated 8+, out of these the best code won the daily cash prize.” There were about 1000 registrations of which there were about 10% active submissions daily.

Kudos, Karthick, this was not an easy win!

(Pictured: Mr. Karthick R. (B.Tech., Computer Science - NIT Calicut) receiving 1 Lakh cash prize from CEO Sony Joy. CTO Vishnu Gopal is the third person in the picture)