PDK Hot Apps competition ends tonight 21

Palm’s PDK Hot Apps competition for one million smackaroos ends today, and the winners are starting to shape up. To remind you, there’s $1,000,000 to be split among the top free apps and the highest revenue paid apps, with the number one claiming $100,000, two through five getting $50,000, six to twenty netting $10,000, and the remaining twenty-first through seventieth apps getting their choice of $1,000 HP store credit or an HP Envy 17 laptop ($1300 value).

The top spots in both the free and paid app categories are pretty much locked down, and it’s no surprise to see Glow Hockey Free atop free apps and Angry Birds (shocker) reigning supreme over the paid apps. In fact, the top five free apps haven’t changed in at least a week, movement through the top five paid apps has been fairly static as well. That said, we’re happy to see the WebOS Internals-benefitting VisualBoyAdvance having moved all the way up to the #3 rank in paid apps, all but guaranteeing the developers a $50,000 check. Update: Rod Whitby of WebOS Internals has informed us that developer Will Dietz will be sharing 10% of his winnings with the open source group, retaining the rest to pay off student loans.

That said, there’s still some room for movers and shakers to jump up a prize level. Angry Birds Lite, the free version with nine extra levels not found in the paid version of the top-selling app, has rocketed up the charts to #8. Sitting at eighth place would net developer Rovio a $10,000 prize, but the game has a weekly jump rate of +21 (meaning this time last week it was 21 spots lower on the Hot Apps totem pole). With that kind of momentum, Angry Birds Lite could find itself up in the $50,000 app category by the time all is said and done.

The same can be said for NesEm on the paid side, sitting at #7 (two spots from $50,000) with a weekly rate of +4. Ground Effect, back on the free side, stands an outside chance at $50,000 as well, sitting at number ten with an impressive weekly rate of +18.

Rednecks Vs. Aliens looks to be threatened, with a weekly slide rate of -3 and sitting at the very bottom of the $10,000 bracket. The only saving grace there for developer Tower Defense Mashups could be that immediately trailing apps SongWave Drum Machine and Mech Invasion have worse weekly rates. TileStorm stands to take advantage of the apps’ waning fortunes, ready to jump out of the $1,000 bracket to ten times the prize.

Lastly, on the paid side of things, there’s one all but garaunteed app jump, and that’s Astraware Casino. Sitting at #22 in the paid line, just one app - NFL 2010 - stands between Astraware and a $10,000 prize. At their back is a very strong wind, to the tune of +3 daily movement and a very impressive weekly rate of +41. There also stands to be significant changes at the base of the brackets, with some of the fastest movers coming in from the bottom (like Whack-A-Mole, with its +131 weekly rate).

Have a favorite app not on the list - today's the day to try to get that last minute push for more downloads. Check out the bottom of the leaderboard and the fast movers to see who's on the bubble.

All said, it’s been fun to watch the Hot Apps competition and we’d like to think it did a lot of good for getting developers interested in Palm. It does sometimes feel like the app pace has picked up since the public release of the PDK, webOS 1.4.5, and the continuing Hot Apps competition.

Via: Palm Developer Center Blog; Source: Palm Hot Apps