It has become a good tradition to take part in Seedhack hackatons. This is our 3rd one as API partner and we can’t be more happy to support and learn from events like that.
This time the theme was lifelogging (previous themes were hacks for fashion and remixing content) and gathered around 100 eager hackers on Friday night. The lifelogging topic is still under-explored but there’s a lot of promise, especially with giants like Apple and Samsung investing heavily in not just software but hardware to advance this trend.
#seedhack presentations from the panelists.. Gearing up for the main ones coming soon! https://t.co/75My1vO5BN
— Carlos Espinal (@cee) July 6, 2014
Friday night is exciting for the partners of the event – they get their 5 min on stage to present what they have in store for the event. Facebook did present their back-end platform Parse, PayPal – integration options including BrainTree, and Georgi from Imagga our new and hot API for automated image tagging along with the powerful image categorization API.
Now we have @imagga discussing how you can monetise images using an auto-categorisation API #Seedhack pic.twitter.com/SQnyF9yMd2 — seedcamp (@seedcamp) July 4, 2014
The rest of the event by tradition belongs to the hackers itself. 17 teams have been formed and got their hands dirty on solving world problems. It’s alway awesome to meet and talk with minds so bright. About 15 people came to talk about our APIs and different ideas they have either for the hackathon, or about something else they do in their jobs or projects.
“Think first. Move fast. Remember the demo” 3 #hackathon survival tips after our 5th #Seedhack http://t.co/kyQuTtDLBN pic.twitter.com/yvPIhjsVcu
— seedcamp (@seedcamp) July 24, 2014
It’s amazing how much people are able to achieve in 48 hours when they work focused on a problem and collaborate in a team. So much you need to consider – get the right people on the team, with good moral and excellent skills, quickly pass through the technology stack, feature list discussions and start hacking, then validate your ideas, pivot and validate again, talk to people, incorporate their feedback, ignore some, hack more, prepare a deck, rehearse it, get pumped for the public presentation, win. The team that used our auto-tagging was Snipik – social review blogging platform. The winner of the hackathon is Calrity – “a smart calendar client that understands your context, gives you insight into how you spend your time and seamlessly organizes your future” – amazing progress implementing a complete prototype in just two days. They’ve also wrote an amazing blog post for Seedhack unveiling the whole experience during the event.
#seedhack presentations kicking off now!!! #seedcamp https://t.co/7zsa3GdKjQ — Carlos Espinal (@cee) July 6, 2014
One of our favorite teams, Dev Stats won the special prize. Dev Stats is a keystroke counter plug-in for Sublime (Nike+ like tracker for programmers, geeks and nerds 😉 They also won the “most likely to catch you slacking at work” award.
Live demo from DevStats, created to track how many hours you code a day, how fast, and how effective #Seedhack pic.twitter.com/L1yangEYej
— seedcamp (@seedcamp) July 6, 2014
Some funny awards followed. The “dirty dancing” award went to Motion perfect – Kinect-based software to detect your fitness moves and help you control the quality of your workout. The “Tony Stark award” for highest achievements of a one-man army went to Popular – logging your offline social life. The “most likely to wake up a sleeping baby” presentation award went to Mr. Zen – advice from voice based mood logging.
Hackathons are one of the best type of startup events to attend and also partner. You meet with awesome people, movers and doers, get inspired and go home with hope and urged to move things faster in your own company. Definitely will be attending some more hackathons. See you there!