When we announced the Apptivate.MS competition two months ago, we were hoping that a few members of this community would create and submit a few solid Windows 8 apps - forty or fifty, maybe. A hundred if it really went well. So when we saw all of the high-quality and innovative app submissions that poured in, we were quite frankly blown away. The Stack Overflow community submitted almost 400 apps. See for yourself!
![](https://cdn.stackoverflow.co/images/jo7n4k8s/production/098b81d23e92081802ef9627dabadd21dda5d18d-460x276.png?auto=format)
Yet again, the Stack Overflow community has crushed it. The quality and size of the submission pool made our next job really, really difficult: narrowing them down to just 50 apps for the semi-finals, ten for each of the following category groups: Knowledge, Games, Interest, Work, and Social. A panel of Stack Exchange judges (appointed by Microsoft) ranked all the submissions based on the following rubric:
- Innovativeness/Creativity (30%)
- Quality of Submission (30%)
- Use of Windows 8 features, such as the live tile display (30%)
- Public Appeal (voting) (10%)
With these criteria in mind, we put together a killer semi-finalist slate. You can vote for your three favorite apps in each category group between now and December 16th (23:59 UTC). The three highest-voted apps in each category group will win prizes no matter what. They'll also be eligible for a $5000 cash grand prize, so cast your votes to ensure that the best app wins the day. Not an altruist? Voting in the semi-finals also makes you eligible for the reviewer contest.
![](https://cdn.stackoverflow.co/images/jo7n4k8s/production/97fb8f1b9f97eb1d34c530b2e84dee4d9f017572-720x168.png?auto=format)
The three top-voted semi-finalists in each category group will win great prizes! You can also continue to leave comments on any app, which also gets you entry into the reviewer contest - as well as providing valuable feedback to Windows 8 developers. The semi-finals voting phase ends December 16th, 2012, so get your votes in now!