AT&T Mobile App Hackathon - Seattle Recap

[#1]

What's a taco RC car you ask? Hit this link for the joke reference.

First, a big thanks goes out to all of the supporting groups, Apigee, Basho, AT&T mHealth, AT&T API, AT&T CTO, Microsoft, Amazon, GitHub, Serge, Sierra Wireless and Adobe. With the size of this specific event as well as the multiple moving pieces, the site support provided by the sponsors really helped make the event go that much smoother. So you guys and gals know who you are. Our hackathon hat goes off to you!

As for the numbers, we had around 130+ developers show up with around 40+ students on Saturday for an information session that gave them exposure to hackathons, mobile application development and jobs in the wireless industry. We will most likely try to hire at least two interns out of the group with our eyes on a couple more as they get into college. 

Moving onto interesting projects, RaaSIO, an idea focused on making robotics easier for developers and aspiring developers alike, essentially built an API for robotics. They took a number of off the shelf parts and assembled an RC car that had a mobile phone as the interface. The mobile front end used Tiggzi.com, SergeSDK, and WP7. For the backend, the team created a custom backend built on AT&T Cloud Architect that talks to an Arduino RC car. We will be sure to link to the video a bit later.

Another team that stood out and really took the hackathon plunge was Team BoozeNet who used a very new Javascript framework called Meteor, which released just this last Monday on HackerNews with some interesting comments! We always love to see the use and exploration of new technologies and highly encourage learning.

For pictures from the event, click here. As for the complete list of groups, here they are in no particular order: 

• MobiCloud - Manage your Cloud Architect Instances from your mobile device.
• Awesome or Awkward - Hot or Not for All The Things! Is this situation AWESOME? Or is it Awkward...
• Fightbit - Fightbit: to the death with FitBit - Challenge your friends to a deathmatch using FitBit and AT&T mHealth. 
• WeVote - “We vote” is a live free mobile app voting platform to sense the pulse of the public on any topic where you can (a) View voting results/total votes (b) Vote/Boycott (c) Create a topic for public to vote.
• FitStarter - Make fitness fun through head to head competitions!
• RaaSIO - RaaSIO (Robotics as a Service IO) provides a a cloud service platform for rapid deployment of integrated mobile, cloud, and robotics autonomy.
• GeoHop - Geolocation based shopping list. Shop & Hop!
• DangerousStreetz - Be afraid. The streetz are dangerous!
• SugarTrack - Manage your diabetes with Sugar Track. Safe and Secure and HIPPA compliant. Works on iPhone, Android, Windows Phone - http://glucose.herokuapp.com
• TheHealthyDrinker - The Healthy Drinker makes it easy to track your drinking & then understand how that's impacting your health, exercise & productivity.
• LostS - Smartphone recovery service.
• ProximityAlert - Don't risk your life anymore while driving. use Proximity Alert to let your loved ones know how far you are from them!
• ParkingGuru - Taking too many rounds around restaurant before your all important date!? ParkingGuru to your rescue!
• Fitness411 - Track, measure, and improve your workout.
• Correlate - An app that finds the ideal balance point for your best attainable health from sleep, exercise and blood pressure data.
• HipHype.me - Pimp your hackathon apps. 
• ScanGadget - ScanGadget turns your phone into a barcode scanner for your shopping, lifestyle and information needs. 
• BoozeNet - Meteor demo... And competitive drinking.
• ThreeThings - List your 3 favorite things and find people near you with the same interests.
• iTAPTHAT - Enter beers you enjoy and get recommendations on other beers you will want to tap.
• Ads - Inserts users names and pictures into advertisements to create a user based ad experience.

And the winners are.....

General Mobile App Category

• Fitstarter (One Year "Small" Github Account for each team member and $500 in gift cards)
• Boozenet (One Year "Micro" Github Account for each team member and $300 in gift cards)
• iTapThat (Six Months "Micro" Github Account for each team member and $200 in gift cards)

Best Overall UI

• Sugar Track (One Copy of Creative Suite Master Collection)

AT&T API Category

• Fitness411 (Sierra Wireless 4G Elevate Devices for each team member and $2,000 in gift cards)

AT&T mHealth Category

• HealthyDrinker (Ultrabooks for each team member [Max 3])

AT&T Cloud Category

• RaaSIO (Ultrabooks for each team member [Max 3])

SergeSDK Category

• RaaSIO (Ultrabooks for each team member [Max 3])
• HipHype.me (Tablets for each team member [Max 3])

AWS Category

• ParkingGuru ($1500 Gift Card to AWS)

Apigee Usergrid Category

• RaaSIO ($1,000 in Gift Cards)

[#2]

I really enjoy reading your blog. This post, even if old, was really useful.