As we announced last week – we were preparing to participate as an API partner in the 3rd edition of Seedhack druing the upcoming weekend. And we did! 🙂 That was a really awesome experience for Imagga. The event started in Friday evening with a lot of hackers and fashionists. Surprisingly or not, most probably becaue of the topic, this was the first hackathon I’ve participtated with over 40% female attendance.
Passionate opening by the Seedcamp’s team, followed by several keynote speeches from Nick Perrett from HarperCollins Publishers, Nick Cust from NET-A-PORTER.COM and Devin Hunt from Lyst, who provided a lot of inspiration to the participants.
They were followed by API speakers from HarperCollins, ASOS, Google, Net-A-Porter, Imagga (us) and Paypal. In our 5 min API presentation I tried to clearly communicate what Imagga and our APIs are about. It went quite well and a lot of excited people come nearby to talk after :). The word about the event and Imagga even managed to reach New York – in about half an hour after the presentation I got my first email from there, and another one two hours later, regarding the fashion week held in NY at the same time.
The serious hacking started Friday night and continued heavily through the next two days:
Now, let me share a few numbers that made us feel quite inspired to drill more deeply in the fashion vertical as an appropraite application field for what we do:
- During the three days of Seedhack we received 11 trial API requests from the “seedhackers”: two right away during the API presentation in Friday, two more later in the evening, four more in Saturday, and three more in Sunday. Quite good coverage given that the participating teams were 21 in total;
- Three of the teams came several times to talk to me for more details about integration ideas, technical details, and pricing;
- One of the teams – INDELIBLE STYLE (project Colourtag.me) – actually managed to integrate the API during the first day of the weekend! Great job for this team about their passion to levarege on colors, and special “hacker applauses” to Mart Karu who implemented, debugged, and integrated a Ruby client for our color API in no time! He promised to publish it on GutHub in a few days, so you’ll be able to enjoy a Ruby blue-print quite soon 🙂
Mark Karu and team after a few hours of happy hacking 🙂
Happily enough, exactly this project was one of the five recognized at the award ceremony in Sunday! They win the “Fit & Finish” award, most probably because of their fast execution, including the implementation of a prototype and shooting a promotional video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPuPKRAV2Sc featuring the brain behind the project – Jessica Healy.
Now back on Imagga – in addition to the lots of trial requests and the succesfull API integration, from the numerous people that we talked to we got several very creative ideas for potential applications of our cropping and color search, and also some reasonable feature and tweak requests for the APIs. Thank you all, guys!
In conlusion – the event had very very positive atmosphere and was quite well organizated – no tension, everything went smoothly. It also turned out that it’s great to have a particular vertical/topic/theme for an event like this – it brings like-minded hackers, mentors and partners and also allows for more objective judging. Well done Seedcamp! Carlos, Kirsten, Ricardo, and Vincent were very supportive through the whole event 🙂 It was a pleasure for me to present imagga and to try to help to the eager hackers there, in your company. Good luck with the future Seedhacks!
Another job well done, so part of the Colourtag.me team and I decided to go for a beer. Luckily there were a few tables for tennis there, so we did our best to beat the locals :):
Awesome Seedhack weekend, really!!! 🙂
P.S.: I think that we managed to improve the public oppinion about Bulgaria at least a little bit this weekend. It should be more clear now that not all Bulgarians are low-qualified labor craving for UK social benefits 😉
P.S.2: You can take a look at the Seedcamp’s team perspective of the event, including more details on all particapating and winning teams, here.