I was just reading the blog post entitled $40,000 Is a Lot of Dollars on the Windows Live Messenger team's blog and saw that we've announced the Invasion of the Robots contest. From the website
Microsoft is challenging developers worldwide to create conversational robots, or BOTs, for MSN® Messenger and Windows Live™ Messenger. The most original, useful robots collect $40,000 in total prizes.
Too bad, I'm not eligible to enter the contest. $40,000 sounds like a nice chunk of change for a summer's worth of coding.