HackTO welcomes GoBooks as an Awesome Sponsor
We all know that without our fantastic sponsors we would never be able to bring you hacking events across Canada. Seriously. The hardest part of organizing a hackathon is securing sponsorships. Our goal is to throw the best possible event for hackers, developers and our entire community and we believe that setting up an environment where we can all work towards building, sharing and learning from each other only contributes to creating magic. But magic can’t happen without our sponsors!
At HackDays we have been incredibly lucky to be joined by YellowAPI which is our headline sponsor. YellowAPI has been supporting HackDays from day one and that’s been awesome. But today I would like to introduce GoBooks for FreshBooks who have become our latest Awesome sponsor!
GoBooks for FreshBooks, scheduled for release to beta testers at the end of April, is set to be the first full-featured FreshBooks mobile application for the Android platform. The initial release will give users access to all of their key FreshBooks data including clients, invoices, estimates, project timers and expenses.
GooBooks for FreshBooks has been developed by EOS Software Development a small startup located in Oklahoma City. EOS was co-founded by Dan Gentry, the company’s CEO and David Freeland. David who is currently serving as head of product development will be joining us from Oklahoma on Saturday and we are super excited to be hosting him.
You can follow these fine folks on facebook and twitter of course, but I am sure that what would be most helpful is to download their app when it launches and provide them with some feedback!
Thanks GoBooks for sponsoring HackTO!
HackTO Second Edition!
Presented by HackDays in partnership with YellowAPI
We just wrapped up HackVan and HackRegina in March and are now a short 12 days away from HackTO. I still remember our first HackTO. It was the first hackathon Corey and I organized in Toronto. It was awesome and we learned some great lessons about organizing hackathons (who organizes a hackathon in mere days?). Despite everything, our first hackathon was fantastic because it brought together some of the brightest developers in Toronto and our start up and tech community. In less than 8 hours 50 developers put together an impressive 13 applications with APIs provided and supported by our local startups and the tech community at large. We were blown away by the support from our community and sponsors and decided that we were going to hack our way around Canada. That was the beginning of our hacking adventures and since then we have held hackathons in Ottawa, Regina, Vancouver and Waterloo. And we are planning to continue connecting Canada’s tech communities.
So now, we are back with the second edition of HackTO and this one promises to be bigger than our first HackTO and of course we are looking forward to an awesome line up of APIs, developers, sponsors and support from our tech and startup community – again!
First the event details:
- Who: everyone! old friends, new friends, old hackers, new hackers. You are all welcome
- What: HackTO #2. An all day hackathon
- When: Saturday April 14, 2012 from 9 AM to 8 PM
- Where: The new Freshbooks HQ: 35 Golden Avenue, Suite 105
- Registration is now open. So grab a ticket and start plotting your world domination!
This time around we are opening up tickets as well for the evening presentations, so if you are not interested in building an app and hacking away with us, you can still drop by and check out the awesome applications built and meet your community and the hard working developers!
We will be keeping the same crazy schedule of our previous hackathon and pretty much the same set up. There will be:
- Awesome APIs and developers who will be supporting the APIs you will be working with
- API introductions, presentations and workshops for you get up to speed on the APIs you will be working with
- Food and drink all day long – you won’t have to worry about a thing!
- Fantastic prizes from our sponsors
- Cash prizes from API providers and startups
- And a fantastic opportunity for you to meet your startup community and other talented developers. And let’s not forget a great opportunity to flex your coding muscles
SCHEDULE
- 9:00 – Breakfast and introductions: Meet your HackDays organizers & all the developers, get acquainted with the space + final schedule + grab a breakfast of champions!
- 9:30 – API presentation: learn about the APIs available. Each API provider will have 5 minutes to introduce their API, discuss its salient features and get you excited about using it.
- 10:15 – Open Planning: come up with hacking idea and build a team. This is a white board exercise: if you have an idea that you would like to work on, just put its name down on the white board; if you are looking to build a team, identify yourself to other developers with the skill sets that you need. If you are looking for ideas, identify yourself to other developers as well.
- 10:30 – Hacking setup and start. You claim a little spot of the office with your team or by yourself and start working on your project. All the API providers will be available the entire day to provide support.
- Noon – Lunch
- 1:00 – Continue hacking – help yourself to all the energy snacks you need!
- 5:30 – Application presentation – 3 minutes for each presenter! Beers!
- 7:00 – Judging and prizes
- 7:30 – After party celebration at a nearby pub!
Would you like to help us make this hackathon the best Toronto hackathon ever? Get involved!
We are looking for:
- APIs: does your company have an awesome API? Tell us about it, and let’s get you on board
- Sponsorships: nothing would be possible without the awesome support of our community and our sponsors. You can help us by becoming a sponsor for the hackathon or the pre or post hackathon party. We would love to speak with you about sponsorships, so please get in touch!
Getting in touch: Got an idea you would like to discuss with us, got a suggestion? Would like to see a particular API included? Drop us a note!
PRIZES
There will be tons of prizes for HackTO#2. Official prizes and company sponsored prizes.
Official HackTO#2 Prizes:
- First place: $2,000
- Second place: $1,500
- Third place: $500
For HackTO#2, we will be introducing company sponsored prizes. These will be prizes for the best use of a company API. Stay tuned for our announcement in the coming days!
We would like to thank our first (and repeat) sponsors without whom nothing is possible: Thank you YellowAPI, Klick Health, Freshbooks, TinEye, ContextIO, SoundCloud, AtomicReach.
Follow HackDays on Twitter: @HackDaysCAN
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
56 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.
HackVAN Itinerary
With only two days left until HackVAN, here’s a summary of the next couple of days.
Friday, March 23rd – Friday Mixer at Electric Owl, 928 Main Street
6:30 – Brought to you by the team at Unbounce. Join us to meet the competition, find a team, and meet the sponsors and organizers. We’ve got a free drink ticket for you – we’ll be checking people in via Eventbrite, you just need your name that you registered with.
Don’t stay too late – you’ve got a full day of hacking ahead of you the next day!
Directions to the Electric Owl »
Saturday, March 24th – A Thinking Ape offices, 3rd floor, 322 Water Street
Directions to A Thinking Ape offices »
9:00 – Breakfast and introductions: we’ve got Save on Meats catering breakfast sandwiches and coffee – bring your own coffee mug, please! Scout out the office to figure out where you’ll sit.
9:30 – API presentation: Each API provider will have <5 minutes to introduce their API, discuss its salient features and get you excited about using it. See all 8 HackVAN API sponsors »
10:15 – Open Planning: come up with hacking idea and build a team. This is a white board exercise: if you have an idea that you would like to work on, just put its name down on the white board; if you are looking to build a team, identify yourself to other developers with the skill sets that you need. If you are looking for ideas, identify yourself to other developers as well.
10:30 – Hacking setup and start. You claim a little spot of the office with your team or by yourself and start working on your project. All the API providers will be available the entire day to provide support.
12 Noon – Lunch: Save on Meats has sandwiches and other good stuff to keep you going. Grab what you need, head back to the keyboard.
5:30 – Application presentation – keep this crisp and minimal, with everyone ready to connect to the projector and do a short, under 3 minute presentation. We’ll do this in the order that teams have filled out the team list.
7:30 – Judging and prizes – Final announcement of top teams and extra prize awards.
We’re ordering a couple of kegs of beer from Howe Sound brewing to keep everyone occupied while we go through presentations and judging. Remember – everybody wins, because you’ve just spent the day learning about code and APIs!
HackVAN API Sponsors
Now that we’ve unveiled all the API sponsors, here are details and quick links on all of the participating APIs. The goal of the day is to build an application from scratch that you can demo to our panel of judges at the end of the day. You must include at least one of the APIs listed below – yes, bonus points for including more of them. You can, of course, use additional APIs, frameworks, or what have you.
Some things to think about and setup ahead of time include a code repo (e.g. Bitbucket, Github), server space (localhost demos are fine, too), design (maybe just use Bootstrap), and even domain names (the winning team at HackREGINA also found a great domain for their project, MoveTo.me.
Yellow Pages
YellowAPI is providing their Places API, including their new interactive I/O Docs so you can interact with and test live calls in your browser.
HackDays YellowAPI Blog post »
Freshbooks
The starting point for all FreshBooks API info is http://developers.freshbooks.com/. FreshBooks has a lot of different objects such as invoices, billing, time tracking CRM info around people, and more.
HackDays FreshBooks Blog post »
Idée / TinEye
TinEye/Idée is providing 2 APIs to HackRegina: MobileEngine and MulticolorEngine (formally know as PixMatch and Piximilar).
Check out the following client-side javascript based UI that developers using the multicolorengine may find handy. They show a simple but nice UI for exploring an image collection using color:
- http://multicolorengine.tineye.com/hackdays/_static/multicolor.html
- http://multicolorengine.tineye.com/hackdays_flickr/_static/multicolor.html
iQmetrix XQ
This is the launch event for iQmetrix’s XQ Interactive Retail API. The iQ team sells client apps for wireless retail that run on top of this API. The main focus of the API is dealing with Products, making it easy to create Playlists and store image & video assets.
The XQ API has a new developer portal that has all the documentation.
iQmetrix will also be bringing a Kinect and a touch screen for those that want to incorporate some live hardware into their apps.
HootSuite
HootSuite is providing two APIs plus their SDK for the HackVAN event. The HootSuite SDK is for building apps that plugin to HootSuite and the Engagement API allows for the drafting, scheduling, and posting of messages across social networks. The Geo Analytics API will have more details at the event, and head over to the main HootSuite Developers site to get started.
HackDays HootSuite Blog post »
Shopify
Shopify’s ecommerce platform actually has a full app store for selling Shopify API powered solutions. You can get started on their developer wiki and then refer to the API docs for full method details. The Shopify Partners page even has a video showing how to build and deploy a Shopify App in 8 minutes!
Twilio
Twilio provides a telephony infrastructure web service in the cloud, allowing web developers to integrate phone calls, text messages, and IP voice communications into their web, mobile, and traditional phone applications.
Get going on the Twilio API quickstart page.
PhoneGap
PhoneGap makes it easy to use web-based technologies to build and deploy mobile apps.
PhoneGap also gives access to device APIs that your standard browser does not have: accelerometer, contacts, device file system, camera and compass. Complement your HackVAN project by using PhoneGap and take it to the next level with additional device APIs.
See http://docs.phonegap.com/ for everything you need to get started with PhoneGap
We also want to thank all of our non-API sponsors as well:
- Party Sponsor: Unbounce is picking up drinks at The Electric Owl on Friday. They power a fantastic landing page platform and they’re hiring.
- Venue Sponsor: A Thinking Ape are letting us use their awesome offices in Gastown. Special thanks to Sonia for all her help in pulling things together.
- Community Sponsor: Microsoft is a great community sponsor for both Vancouver & Regina, and are also including an extra prize of a Samsung Focus Windows Phone.
YellowAPI deserves special mention as the HackDays champion sponsor. They usually have some extra swag for teams at the events as well – API Fan Boy / Girl t-shirts and gift certificates for best usage of the YellowAPI.
TinEye sponsoring HackVAN with their APIs
The original mastermind behind HackDays is Leila Boujnane, CEO of Idée. Their main product is the TinEye reverse image search engine.
TinEye is providing 2 APIs to HackVAN: MobileEngine and MulticolorEngine (formally know as PixMatch and Piximilar). These two APIs are image recognition based APIs which allow searching by images.
MobileEngine
MobileEngine uses mobile variants of the same algorithms that power TinEye. MobileEngine is designed to find a match for mobile phone picture in a collection of original/target images. It can find duplicate and altered versions of images using fingerprint based searching algorithms. It can find images that have been cropped, resized, rotated, flipped, obscured, blurred etc.
Some examples of use are to match a book cover to a collection of covers. Same with CDs & DVDs, stamps, currency etc. It works with rigid flat objects but not 3D soft objects like clothing, fruit or family pets!
The MobileEngine API can be integrated with any mobile application. For HackVan this API image collections is not pre-populated which means that if you want to develop and launch an a mobile image search application integrated with this API, you will need to create a database of images for your search. The TinEye team and their documentation can assist you with that prior to the start of HackVa
MobileEngine is delivered over HTTP as a REST API with responses delivered in JSON format. Each operation is completely atomic, meaning that given a request, other requests will wait for the first request to complete before they are processed.
All responses from the API will have these keys:
- status: indicates the status of the request, can be one of ok, warn, fail
- method: the method that was called
- result: list of results for the method
- error: list of errors from the API
The main methods for MobileEngine are:
- add: Used to populate your collection. There is one collection for everyone so please use a prefix with your images if you want to make sure that they will not be overwritten.
- search: Used to search against your collection and returns matches. Optional search parameters are min score, max number of matches and horizontal flip.
- delete: Delete images from your collection by passing a filename.
- list: Lists the images in your collection
Here is a sample call you can make from a browser: http://mobileengine.tineye.com/hackdays/rest/count/?pretty=true
Questions or problems? Email us! support@tineye.com
MulticolorEngine
MulticolorEngine searches an image collection using one or more colors. TinEye will be providing a two APIs for the MulticolorEngine:
- A read-only API (http://multicolorengine.tineye.com/hackdays_flickr/) pre-populated and loaded with 3 million Creative Commons Flickr images. You will not be able to add or delete images from this collection.
- A blank r/w API (http://multicolorengine.tineye.com/hackdays/) that you can load up with any images you like
To get a feel for the capabilities of the MulticolorEngine, visit the Idée lab: http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr/
MulticolorEngine is also delivered over HTTP as a REST API with responses delivered in JSON format.
The main methods are:
- color_search: Used to perform a color searches against the collection and return any matches with scores. You can specify up to 5 colours with weights in RGB or hex format.
- extract_colors: Given an image, extract up to 10 colours and their dominance.
MulticolorEngine also supports full meta-data searching but we’re recommending you not to get into this unless you really need to – it is still in beta!
Here is a sample call:
http://multicolorengine.tineye.com/hackdays_flickr/rest/color_search/?colors[0]=255,112,223
You can view and display your collection and query images using URLs listed in the API. E.g. http://multicolorengine.tineye.com/hackdays_flickr/collection/?filepath=100227747.jpg
Looking forward to what you guys will be building with the MulticolorEngine!
Questions or problems? Email us! support@tineye.com
PhoneGap is an API Sponsor for HackVAN
I’m so happy to have Adobe supporting us by having the PhoneGap team participate in this year’s HackVAN. I also found Brian Leroux’s recent post on PhoneGap vs. Apache Cordova to be a great explanation.
With PhoneGap as one of the API sponsors, I expect to see a ton of cross-platform mobile applications show up at the hackathon on Saturday. Here’s a bunch more from PhoneGap in their own words:
PhoneGap is happy to support the Vancouver developer community, especially since Vancouver is where we got our start!
For those who don’t already know, here’s the lowdown on PhoneGap:
PhoneGap is an open source platform for quickly building cross-platform mobile apps with HTML, CSS and JS. Think of PhoneGap as a framework that takes your web application, wraps it up in a native shell and enables it to be deployed to application stores across different mobile platforms. We support 7 operating systems: iOS, Android, BlackBerry, webOS, Symbian, Bada and Windows Phone.
In addition to modern Web standards, PhoneGap also gives access to device APIs that your standard browser does not have: accelerometer, contacts, device file system, camera and compass. Complement your HackVAN project by using PhoneGap and take it to the next level with additional device APIs. Add interactivity and easy monetization to your web application!
Here’s a sampling of our APIs:
- Accelerometer: Tap into the device’s motion sensor
- Contacts: Work with the device’s contact database
- Compass: Obtain the direction that the device is pointing
- Camera: Capture a photo using the device’s camera
Plus, you can check out the rest of our PhoneGap API docs over at http://docs.phonegap.com.
We’re also sending over a few guys from our crack team to help you hack. Say hi to Fil Maj, Michael Brooks, and Yohei Shimomae on Saturday!
HackREGINA Winners!
HackREGINA wrapped up this past Saturday, and for our first event we had 35 developers creating 14 applications. Not bad for our first time out! Here’s our winners:
1st Place – MoveTo.Me – This web application helps people looking for a place to move by showing all the nearby schools, shopping, nightlife, and restaurants around a specific address, partnered with some Google API calls to get the street view and map. Created by team SaskGamers.com, it used the City of Regina Open Data API, and Yellow Pages API.
2nd Place & Best Mobile App – Fixstarter.com – See a pothole that needs fixing or a burnt out street lamp? Take a picture and upload it to FixStarter.com – a crowdsourcing app that identifies things around your city that need fixing. Team HutchKillers used City of Regina Open Data API and Yellow Pages API to create this web application.
3rd Place – Saturday Night – A great iPhone application that works in three stages: a countdown to Saturday Night, a photo application to let you anonymously document Saturday Night, and a way to browse and vote on the previous night’s pictures. Pictures uploaded on Saturday Night are instantly pushed to everyone’s applications so you can see what’s going on. Team Appropriate Temporary Flanel used the XQ API for image storage, and the PixMatch API to ensure the uniqueness of the photos.
Best Social App – Find Your Doppleganger – Using an Android phone, upload your picture to a database to find someone who looks just like you. If a match is found, Find Your Doppleganger will find a midpoint between your two locations and suggest a restaurant that you could meet up at! Find Your Doppleganger was created by Team MashUp and used the PixSimilar and Yellow Pages APIs
Best Yellow Pages Integrations
- Yet Another Siri Clone – uses voice to text to run Yellow API queries, created by Team JATPH
- Android TransitLive App – Searches for businesses near bus stops, created by Team Lloyd
Congratulations to all our winners, and a big thank you to all our event sponsors that helped us have a successful first HackREGINA event. And of course, a big thanks to all the developers who spent all day Saturday attending the event!
Twilio is a HackVAN API Sponsor
While HackREGINA featured a fun voice-to-search and search-to-voice interface, I imagine we’ll see a lot more clever integrations like this having Twilio as another API sponsor. Interested what sort of other projects have been built with Twilio? Check out their project gallery.
You can find all the details on Twilio’s API from their quickstart page.
But wait, that’s not all! Carter Rabasa, Twilio Developer Evangelist, will be making the drive up from Seattle to join us and provide support for the Twilio API.
Here’s some more about Twilio in their own words:
Twilio, the cloud communications company, is reinventing telecom by merging the worlds of cloud computing, web services and telecommunications. We provide a telephony infrastructure web service in the cloud, allowing web developers to integrate phone calls, text messages, and IP voice communications into their web, mobile, and traditional phone applications.
Thanks Twilio and Carter, we look forward to seeing you this weekend!
Shopify is a HackVAN API Sponsor
Shopify will again be an API sponsor at this year’s HackVAN. It was great to have Joey DeVilla‘s accordion-slinging self with us, and he has posted some great pictures of the event from last year.
If you don’t know Shopify, it is an ecommerce platform that hosts 20,000+ online stores used by millions of users around the world. Their merchants range from stay-at-home moms and small budding entrepreneurs, to big names like Rovio, General Electric, Tesla Motors and Foo Fighters.
Shopify (like a great many of our sponsors) is also hiring. They’re mainly looking for people in their Ottawa office, but we noticed a Senior Operations Engineer that they’d be happy to work from space anywhere.
One final thing of interest to developers, is that Shopify has a special Shopify Fund to encourage development on top of their platform and in their appstore. How big is the fund? Why, $1 MILLION DOLLARS, of course! Here’s a bit more about the fund itself, in the words of Shopify:
If you have an idea for an app or utility, tell us about it. We’ll evaluate it, and if we decide to support your project, we’ll provide an advance in the neighborhood of $5,000 – $10,000 on future sales in the App Store. It’s like the advances that authors get on sales of their books. And just like those advances, it lets you focus on your Shopify project for a few weeks without having to worry about how you’re going to pay the rent, mortgage and the usual cost of living.
Thanks again to Shopify for being an API sponsor!