Tech giants Facebook and Google are in competition to
attract the talents of a 15-year-old app developer. Australian teenager
Ben Pasternak sparked the interest of the companies after he designed an
app for a game called Impossible Rush. The app has been downloaded more
than 500,000 times since its launch in October. The addictive game
managed to climb higher than Vine and Twitter on the App Store charts.
Pasternak has been invited by Facebook's internship department for a
tour of the company's headquarters in California. He is also being wooed
by Google, whose vice president has asked him to come to visit its
campus. Both companies hope Ben could be one of their future developers.
Mr Pasternak is one of 450
high-school-aged entrepreneurs accepted on a Google and MIT sponsored
event called Hack Generation Y. The high-schoolers have been invited
from ten countries across the world. They will collaborate on a 36-hour
project to create a sellable product. They will also listen to featured
speakers from the technology and hacking world. Michael Matias, the
organiser of the event, said: "Pasternak is a young entrepreneur and
clearly ambitious. He has shown the world that age is just a number." He
added that: "[Pasternak's] iPhone app was extremely impressive and if
we were to guess, we would never imagine it was run by a 15-year-old."
