The short answer: there is no protection. We won’t have the crowd or judges sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) or anything – it’s just not possible…and even if it were they probably wouldn’t hold up if it really came down to it. With that being said, we of course want you to pitch – so please apply, just don’t give away your “secret sauce”. For example – you can give a pitch about an iPhone app that turns your iPhone into a hovercraft…without telling us how you’re going to do it. You can still get all the points across and at the same time protect whatever parts of the idea that might actually be patentable.

Finally, we didn’t come up with the idea of doing a pitch contest – we are just emulating what we’ve seen at other mobile conferences out west like GigaOM’s Mobilize or Mobile2.0. As far as I’m aware, the startups that pitch there haven’t had problems with idea protection due to pitching…I’m guessing if this was an issue the conferences would have stopped doing them by now.

Hope this helps and I look forward to seeing your application if you feel comfortable enough submitting one!

-luke
mobileX

Looking forward to the event.