- BLOG RSS
- Mark as New
- Mark as Read
- Favorite
- Subscribe
- Email to a Friend
- Flag as Inappropriate
So this concludes our first international hackathon held at the AT&T Foundry in Israel at the Amdocs building in Ra'anana. With weather in the upper 80's for the week, we were all very glad that the AC was running full blast and we had plenty of cold drinks flowing around. Photos from the event can be found here. Please email me your shots of the event if you would like me to upload them to the Facebook album.
A big thanks goes out to Adam H., Marc N., Igal E, and the entire Israel AT&T Foundry team. Not only for support of the hackathon, but also for helping me get the security letter that allowed me to breeze through the airport security check points! The extra leg work to reach out to Mobile Monday and the rest of the community paid off! Perhaps the most telling part was that practically all of the champagne went untouched as the participants were too tired to drink!
This was the first hackathon that was held at the AT&T Foundry in Israel and everyone had a great time interacting with the different teams and kicking around ideas for apps. There was even an older couple that came in to try their hand at producing an app and they succeeded! I will post the link to their app at a later time, but they used Tiggzi.com and were able to complete the app within a day.
One of the creative apps was "PianoPhone," where the vision was to use smartphones to create a virtual keyboard where multiple people controlled different keys! Quite a fun idea and I would be curious as to see what the simplest and most compact implementation could be. For those of you interested in trying your hand at this, here is a link to a bunch of javascript touch libraries that should get you started.
Another interesting app was "Park Somewhere" where the twist was that the app woudl announce to other apps that it was leaving a parking spot. This app was well thought out and really speaks to the core issue of data relevancy.
The willingness to help, hospitality and openness of the developers in Israel will be missed and we look forward to the next hackathon. To the senseis and local developers that assisted others (you know who you are), thank you for taking the time to support a community effort. Everyone learned a lot and I have gotten numerous emails expressing gratification.
Additionally, a couple of us had kicked around the idea of a "programming 101" to be held at the Foundry to introduce new developers on a monthly basis to mobile app and app development. If you are interested in helping out, please ping me at alex.donn@att.com
As for the teams, here they are in no particular order:
- Happy Moments - Bring happy moments to your loved ones, by creating a unique Greeting Phrase Tapestry in 137 Languages, (I Love You, Happy Birthday, etc.), displaying prominently your native language. You can hear the greeting phrase in any language you choose and you can add a gift also.
- Buddy Ride - 2nd Place - An app that connects between driver and passenger, for a easy pick upthe app show the passenger the location of the driver, when his on the way to him and give an ETA time. "
- Brain Storm Stickies - By gamefing meeting rooms brainstorming process, "brain storm stickies" allows the whole team to post their thoughts, ideas, and action items directly from their mobile phone on to the shared screen thus allowing everyone to easily contribute to the brainstorming process.
- Random Likes - Changing random pictures of the pages your friends like
- Hotspots - 3rd Place - We were looking for the missing dimension related to visiting a place and describe the experience. We can check in and say “I am in that place” but we don’t have a tool to describe what is going on in that place. Maybe my friend checks in to a place but doesn’t have a good experience at that time. So should I go there only because of my friend is there? Probably not. So we were thinking to bring a solution that will enable us to express our opinion about that place at that time and share it with the whole world. As we can express our opinion about a place and situation in a lot of different ways We decided to rely on the huge research that we have done in the past years in this research We discovered that the most popular missing dimension is if there are a hot girls in that place or boys… Then we invented Hotspots Facebook browser based application that show you a warm map with Facebook places colored by real-time user rating the hottest place in that time.
- VoteIt - VoteIt is a voting services specifically designed for hackathon-like events. VoteIt includes a web interface that allows the presenter to set up the voting session and present the ongoing voting process on a large screen; and a client interface that loads on a smartphone and allows the audience to vote using various voting methods including facial expression, shaking the phone, and manual vote."
- Park Somewhere - 1st Place - "The application solves the annoying issue of finding a parking spot in a hot parking zone. Imagine this - you're using Waze, or some other navigation, to get to your destination. When it happily announces you've reached your destination, you are actually stuck in your car, circling the same block forever, looking for a parking spot! As the person looking for parking, you can use our application to locate those vacant spots. We use ""Park Somewhere"" to create a community of ""parkers"" that report when they park, when they intend to leave and when they actually leave their parking spot. This gives the community members an advantage over the poor common drivers. "
- Pianophone - I want to play your smartphones. All of them. Please, hand over your smartphones to me, and in 5 minutes I will turn all your smartphones into a one Pianophone....and play it. Them. Yours.
- SaverSide - "How many times have you heard somebody shouting ""Is there a doctor in the room?" Now assume that this call is triggered by a faithful citizen or by the troubled user himself that hit the emergency button on his cellular, and a near by doctor in a 3 miles radius circle gets automatically the call and reach the place as fast as he can?SaverSide is doing just like that and is a Life Saver app that activates this Crowed-Help for Emergency events. We build and manage a medical professional +Users Net that use and contribute to this Location-base Proximity Crowed-Help Solution.
- Net-Working - Linkedin for your phone where you can monetize your contact list on your phone
