HackVAN 2012 Winners

We spent a great day in the A Thinking Ape offices this past Saturday. We had 25 teams work on a wide variety of different projects.

At the end of the day, all the teams stood up and demo’d what they had built during the day to our 3 judges – Kenshi Arasaki from A Thinking Ape, Carl Schmidt from Unbounce, and Thomas Lewis from Microsoft.

The top 6 teams won prizes, and there were three “special mentions”. Without further ado, here are the teams:

  • Negochi: the team put together 5 6 of the 8 different APIs to build a hotel deals social media small business sales promotion tool.
  • ChitChatDate: online speed dating, that connected a PhoneGap mobile web or desktop experience with Facebook and Twilio SMS chatting.
  • AngryMum: a PhoneGap mobile web experience and Twilio SMS and voice integration that was built to help chronic over-sleepers by calling their mom if they keep missing alarms.
  • Dropbooks: the team connected FreshBooks with Dropbox so that invoices in FreshBooks automatically had PDF versions appear in your Dropbox account.
  • Textual Pursuit: a local Twilio SMS powered trivia application. Enter a code and join a multiplayer trivia SMS game.
  • Rock Soft: the team called their app an “SMS version of Chatroulette” powered by Twilio. Connect into a chat stream, get connected privately / anonymously with a chat partner, and exchange text messages until you hit “NEXT” to move to another partner.

Team “Hardware Guy” brought an Arduino and hooked it up to Twilio, and won a $100 NCIX gift certificate.

Team “Monkey Storm” built a Shopify clothing colour picker and notifier, and was awarded Microsoft’s special Windows Phone 7 prize.

Team Negochi doubled-down and also won the best use of the YellowAPI prize.

We’ve focused on the winners in this post, but we saw everyone spending the day learning about APIs, connecting as brand new teams, and figuring out how to produce code in just a day. Thank you to all of the participants, you should all be proud of yourself for the work that you produced!

It was very interesting to hear from some of the teams that wrote tests for all of their code. The Placeling + Brent team actually stood up a full Continuous Integration (CI) server!

It was also great to have the majority of our API sponsors have someone onsite. They were loaded down with t-shirts, stickers, and other swag, and spent the day supporting teams. In the case of PhoneGap, Adobe/Nitobi even produced a unicorn / rainbow Shopify-powered fashion sales app as an example hack. Thank you to all the API sponsors that traveled and spent the day with us!

Teams: if anyone has a blog post or comment about their experience, leave a comment! We’ll also be sending out a survey to get more feedback directly, so we can improve the next event.

Thanks to EvanWillms for the photos. See http://www.flickr.com/photos/evanwillms/sets/72157629677880309/ for his full Flickr set.

28 Mar 2012, 7:35pm
HackVAN
1 comment
 
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