Apple's 1 Billion App Contest

To celebrate hitting the incredible milestone of 1 billion apps downloaded via its Apps Store Apple is holding a 1,000,000,000 contest.

To enter, all you have to do is visit the dedicated Apple 1 Billion contest page, download an app and you’ll automatically get the chance to win a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card, an iPod touch, a Time Capsule, and a MacBook Pro. The contest will officially end when the counter hits "1,000,000,000", which according to PCMag should be around 9 AM PDT on Saturday morning. Depending of course on the rate of downloads and entries.

For those of you that don't want to download and App, or like me don't have any Apple products, you can use the alternative entry form.

Here's the legal mumbo jumbo:

• The Billion App Countdown Promotion (the “Promotion”) is open only to entrants who are 13 years of age or older at time of entry, and a legal resident of the fifty (50) United States or the District of Columbia, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada (excluding the Province of Quebec), Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, or the United Kingdom, if available. See the iTunes Store front page in your country for details.
• Limit 25 entries per person per day. No purchase necessary. Must be 13+ and reside in the participating country. This contest ends after download of the billionth app. To enter and play or read official rules, visit www.apple.com/itunes/billion-app-countdown/rules.html.

Update 4/11 12:30pm - Well obviously PC Mags' estimates where way off, as of yesterday when I wrote this they had roughly 929,100,000 (pc mag said 929,080,000). PC Mag calculated that they were receiving 900 downloads every second which would put them over 1 billion some time today. As of right now the counter reads nearly 935,550,000. At that rate it would appear as though they won't reach the 1 billion mark for another 10 days.

Update - 4/21 - According to Mobile Squared, a U.K. research company, the countdown should be over sometime Thursday morning. Late last week the researchers estimated that Apple was experiencing average daily downloads of 5.1 million apps. According to their estimates the countdown would be over 7 days from their post dated 4/16.

At this point in time the clock is just shy of 990,000,000 downloads. So assuming Apple stays on track with 5mil/day Thursday afternoon would be about right. Although I think it would be more likely that it would be Thursday evening possible Friday morning