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October 7, 2007
The first Hackday in India is over! About 100 hackers took on the challenge to take the Yahoo! APIs and create something using them in 24 hours. In the end, we had 31 submitted hacks and each team or single hacker had his 90 seconds of fame presenting the hack on three massive screens to the whole assembled audience and the 7 judges.
Let me say first of all that all the hacks were of a very high quality and the India hackers didn't fall into the trap of showing the classic Mash-Up of showing some information on a map and declaring it their hack. Instead the judges decided on the following winners:
Also known as "we admire the cheek", this hack was the presenter going up there and declaring that he does not know any coding but realized that it is a shame that you cannot type search queries in Hindi but that they show up in English type instead. He then went on to show Yahoo! where to get a live translation of the search query to Hindi type, and that we should implement that. We loved the implementation of the hack idea called the "developers itch". Hacks are there to work around things that annoy you with existing applications, and that is why we deemed it worthy to give this one a price.
This was a set of ruby scripts shown in 10pixel Courier on the bash that allowed you to deal with your tags in del.icio.us in a more automated fashion. The first script identifies duplicates like "movie" and "movies", asks you which to keep and automatically renames all tags accordingly. The second script allowed you to create bundles of tags instead of having to do them by hand inside del.icio.us.
Collaborative browsing was an application using xmpp4mosh plugin for mozilla , greasemonkey and javascript to allow two or more users to surf web sites in parallel. Without having to use a server as a proxy the gestures of one user are replicated for the others, which would allow for an easy way to show others how to use a site or find information online.
Desktop Wallpaper Love is a windows application that created a desktop wallpaper from images collected from flickr and filtered through the Yahoo! Buzz feeds. You could run it as a service and have a daily wallpaper of all things that are hot right now.
Third Tag is a Yahoo! Widget sitting in the bottom right corner of your screen that allows you to tag files to make it easier for you to find them much like Quicksilver or Finder on Mac allows you to. In addition to being able to drag files into the widget and add the tags you can also drag text files and get a list of recommended tags based on their content.
This facebook application allowed you to see all your friends, their photos (facebook and flickr), their geographic location on a map, their horoscope and their favourite movies in one single interface instead of having to click through each facebook profile.
Smart editor is a YUI Rich Text Editor that analyses the text you type while you type it and uses several APIs to show you relevant photos from flickr, news items and book recommendations from amazon to drag into the editor if you want to enhance your text with multimedia. This can save you a lot of time when you want to blog about a certain event, for example.
This application is a maps hack that uses the traffic APIs to show you how likely it is to arrive some place in time. As the really cool social extra it also interfaces with twitter to allow for your friends or "people in the field" to report street blockages and gridlock as and where they occur and offers shortcuts and alternatives based on the wisdom of the community using the app.
YaHealer was hack that allows doctors to share photos of a brain scan over two Yahoo! widgets that are connected over the web and change in sync. The hack showed a photo set of a brain scan and allowed the first user to go back and forth in the set, highlight parts of the brain and chat with the second user. The changes on the first widget would be reflected in the other and there was also a multiple undo option. This would allow for collaborative annotation of large sets of images (for example also architectural blueprints) without either user having to download the whole set of photos.
The best in Show hack is an implementation of Yahoo! Maps with a Canvas overlay. This allows you to doodle on maps or highlight a way to walk to a certain destination much easier than creating the lines using the API. Furthermore, your movements as you draw are being recorded and you can send them to a friend as a URL so that he or she can re-play what you have drawn out for them.
All in all we want to thank all the hackers for putting so much effort into it and coming up with such a wide range of hacks and ideas. All that was left after seeing all this was to get down and party.
We hope everybody had fun and that we'll see more un-conference style happenings in the area soon. I am back to the UK next week to see what we can do there again.
Chris Heilmann
Posted at October 7, 2007 12:07 AM
Interesting ! Thanks you have not declared the name of cheek :). Also Welcome you to BarCampMumbai2 www.barcamp.org/BarCampMumbai2
Posted by: Raxit at October 7, 2007 2:32 AM
Few comments for My Hack ! "Non-Technical"
does not know coding of Html and Javascript
you cannot type search queries in Hindi where there are more chances there use want to search in Hindi.<same thing for other lang. like Gujarati, Tamil etc.
transliteration is better word than "Live translation"
Transliteration is Just Javascript !
Finally very important, Thanks to IIIT-Chaps, where i am not able to get admission for my Master this year, for interesting Work !. Few folks there asked me there about url.
http://speech.iiit.ac.in/~speech/Transliteration/
Shame replace by "Yahoo Team can do something better with Easy Hack !, to give their user Best Experience. !".
Hey Proud to recieved Gift from the Author himself. ! and Yeah, Thanks for the Note on First page of the book, i'll try to learn some stuff.
Oh ! Time is up, have to rushout for BarCampMumbai2 Meeting, IIT-B is one hour from here. ! I will put update on my blog, www.raxitsheth.blogspot.com
Thanks to Yahoo for your great motivation !
-Raxit
Posted by: Raxit at October 7, 2007 2:55 AM
Has anyone blogged about the fun we had all night at the TAG ?? [:)]
Posted by: Parashuram at October 7, 2007 5:57 AM
Hey chiristian ,
It definitely was an amazign event, and i loved the energy and commitment from both the yahoo's . organising it as well as the hackers. Dint expect to hang out with the likes of David Filo ,apart from all the awesome hackers at yahoo ! Amazing event overall .
btw...is the list of urls for the hacks made public ?
Keep Clicking,
Bhasker V Kode
Posted by: Bhasker V Kode at October 7, 2007 7:49 AM
Hey Chris & everyone responsible for hackday ,
It definitely was an amazing event, and i loved the energy and commitment from both the yahoo's organising it - as well as the hackers. Dint expect to hang out with the likes of David Filo ,and so many awesome hackers at yahoo and elsewhere. Amazing event overall ,and great going ...
btw...is the list of urls for the hacks made public ?
Keep Clicking,
Bhasker V Kode
Posted by: Bhasker V Kode (hack: favrROOTS) at October 7, 2007 7:52 AM
It was a lot of fun..good experience..In case you guys want to try visualising :) visit here www.techjini.org
Posted by: Amit at October 7, 2007 12:51 PM
It was a wonderful experience to have been there for 24+ hours.. working on the hack an met and heard some good hacks and hackers.. Thanks to Yahoo! for organizing such a event.
Posted by: Ajo Paul at October 8, 2007 12:58 PM
Here's the wikipedia entry for yahoo hackday india 2007. Should be a good place to enter the details of the entries, team members, and url's .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_yahoo_hackday_india_2007 .
Keep Clicking,
Bhasker V Kode
Posted by: Bhasker V Kode at October 8, 2007 6:23 PM
Hey chiristian ,
That sure was one of the most memorable event I have ever attented. Thanks a ton to all the Y! folks for making it grand.
Cheerz
Shri
Posted by: Sridhar at October 8, 2007 10:54 PM
Hi All,
It was a great time and a memorable event. 24+ hours of hard work and get to meet real Yahoo brains. Thanks for providing such a great platform to share our ideas.
Cheers!!!
Vaibhav
Posted by: Vaibhav at October 23, 2007 3:09 AM
Goes on to showcase the capacity india has!
Posted by: karthik at December 30, 2007 6:40 AM
Hay Friends !!
Are you looking for beautiful, sweet, innocent cat pictures ??
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Posted by: mukesh at January 17, 2008 8:21 AM
Is there any url to checkout "No man's Land mashup"?
Posted by: Vivek at April 8, 2008 5:23 AM
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