hackday.blorg

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.

The winners were:

• Best "Non-Technical" hack: Yahoo! Hindi Search
• Best "Really Needs an Interface" hack: Del.icio.us Tag Management
• "Most Parallel" hack: Collaborative Browsing
• Best "Desktop Hack": Desktop Wallpaper Love
• "I wish I had a Mac" Hack: Third Tag
text files and get a list of recommended tags based on their content.
• "Most Viral" hack: Facebook Friend Folio
• "Best Self Expression" hack: Smart Editor
• "Most likely to arrive at next Hack Day on time": Social Routing
• "Brainiest Hack": YaHealer!
• "Best in Show": Maps Doodle

For a full description and a list of the rest of the hacks, please head over to the YDN blog.

The Yahoo! Research Berkeley team built a handy hack demo viewer:

"You can see a list of all the hacks (including which hacks won the judges awards), you can launch URL demos for many of the hacks, and, best of all, you can jump to any hack instantly to watch it (no waiting for it to load or fast forwarding through the video to try and find things). We’ve also displayed the list of hacks directly on the video time line, which makes scanning around for hacks incredibly simple."

Check it out at: http://timetags.research.yahoo.com/hackdayuk

Best Hack of the rules : Blue Steel, Beagle III

Should have been in the product yesterday on Yahoo!: Stephen Fernandez, Indicating Users in Flickr Photos with tags and notes (greasemonkey)

Should have been in the product yesterday on BBC: Dharmafly, Hack Hud

Best use of BBC API’s: Monkey Tennis, BBC Nwsr 24

Best use of Yahoo! API’s: Steffan Jones, Flickr Tunes

Most Useful: Richard Rutter & Andy Hume, "Get us Organised"

Best International Hack: Mnemosyne, You say potato, I say Solanum tuberosum (greasemonkey)

Funniest Hack: North and South, Top Gun

Best Overall: Nick Bilton and Michael Young, shifd.com

There were also a few special category winners presented by the Hack Day sponsors:

Make Magazine: Bli.mp

SecondLife: Supernova, SLorpedo: The mixed reality game of naval warfare

Flickr: Steffan Jones, Flickr Tunes (also "Best use of Yahoo! API’s". see above.)

BBC Radio: Erin & Kelvin, John Peeled

Christian Heilmann posted the complete list of submitted hacks, and Frankie Roberto liveblogged the demos.

In case you haven't seen the Hack Day imagery on the badge page or the Backnetwork, check out the logos here:

They look great on the event schwag we've organized.

Designer: Micah Laaker

Original photos:

• rightee


• DannieVDM


• Andy Hay

A lot of people have asked us how they could get involved in the Hack Day effort. Fortunately, we have a few guinea pigs (and a rabbit) who volunteered to scout out the idea of 'sponsorship' to help Yahoo! and BBC make this event even richer.

In no particular order, the following Hack Day sponsors are contributing to the event by providing access, assistance, small prizes, goodies and living, breathing engineers...some of which will participate, as well. No booths and no booth bunnies (except the hackable kind).

• Make Magazine


• IBM developerWorks


• Nabaztag


• Linden Labs


• Arduino


• Moo


• O'Reilly


• Instructables

Participants who wish to learn more about any of these companies and how to hack their products and services should look out for them at Alexandra Palace.

Thanks to all of you for experimenting with us.

{ "londonhackday" : {
  { "when" : "sat16-sun17jun07" },
  { "where" : "allypally" },
  { "schedule" : { [
    { "sat0900" : "registration opens" },
    { "sat1000" : [
      { "kent brewster" : "build a bbc search app" },
      { "george wright" : "interactive tv" },
      { "dan theurer & ryan kennedy" : "y! bbauth / mail" }
    ] },
    { "sat1100" : [
      { "ian forrester & matt cashmore" : "bbc apis" },
      { "aaron straup cope & dan catt" : "machine tags" },
      { "bradley wright & mirek grymuza" :
        "y! answers / local / maps" }
    ] },
    { "sat1200" : [
      { "christian heilmann & nate koechley" : "yui library" },
      { "chris bowley & tristan ferne" :
        "things to make & do" },
      { "mor naaman & tom coates" : "new geo services from y!" }
    ] },
    { "sat1300" : [
      { "cal henderson" : "flickr apis" },
      { "jonathan trevor" : "using pipes" },
      { "matt cashmore" : "bbc playground servers" }
    ] },
    { "sat1400" : "chad dickerson & matt cashmore" :
      "intro to hack day" },
    { "sat1430" : "start hacking" },
    { "sun1430" : "stop hacking" },
    { "sun1500" : "oohs and aahs" },
    { "sun2000" : "the rumble strips" }
  ] },
  { "food & drink" : "ongoing" },
  { "sleep" : "if you gotta, you gotta" },
  { "details" : "http://hackdaylondon07.backnetwork.com" }
}

With just over two weeks before a horde of developers, designers and engineers descend on Alexandra Palace, we thought it might be a good time to start talking about our illustrious speakers! From 10am on Saturday morning we'll be hosting three tracks of sessions from some of the very best people in the industry - many of whom are flying halfway around the world especially for the event. They cover between them the entire gamut of technologies that the BBC and Yahoo! have to offer, and represent much of the most exciting stuff on the net right now.

Better still, many of the speakers are going to be sticking around for the full two days. There should be plenty of opportunities to meet them and get advice and help with your projects.

The line-up may change before the day itself, but at the moment here are some of the people we're expecting to come along and the kinds of territories that they'll be talking about:

One of the most interesting projects that has come out of Yahoo! in the last few years has been Yahoo! Pipes, and we've got Jonathan Trevor flying over from the US to talk about how it works and why it's such a core and powerful part of the emerging web of data.

Ian Forrester and Matt Cashmore from backstage.bbc.co.uk will be doing a couple of sessions - one of which will be an overview of the various APIs and services that the BBC has to offer. The other one looks like it's going to be an announcement and introduction to a new service that the organisation is launching at the event. Obviously it would spoil things to talk about that now, but it's exciting. Keep your ears open!

Flickr's own Cal Henderson is going to be around for the full two days and is planning a session about the various web services that they offer, and the kinds of absurd and awesome toys and businesses that people have built on top of them.

If you're more interested in client-side technologies on the web, then we've got a particular treat for you. Christian Heilmann and Nate Koechley will be doing a rare double-header and talking about the Yahoo! User Interface Library—a set of utilities, scripts and controls for building rich internet applications.

More generally, we've got a whole load of other representatives from Yahoo's developer community coming along. Kent Brewster is going to be talking about the Yahoo Developer Network and will be putting together a BBC/Yahoo! hybrid application in under an hour.

In addition to Kent, Bradley Wright will be talking about Yahoo! Answers, Dan Theurer on BBAuth and Ryan Kennedy will be giving us all a guide to using Yahoo! Mail APIs.

One speaker that should be really interesting is George Wright from the BBC's interactive TV services. He's going to be taking us all in a very different direction when he talks about MHEG and Interactive TV and how people go about building services for set-top boxes in the UK. If you're interested at all in future media technologies, that talk should be a must-see.

Tristan Ferne and Chris Bowley from the BBC will also be talking about the places where media and technology collide, particularly across BBC Radio. They work for BBC Audio & Music Interactive as a small rapid-prototyping R&D team and are responsible for projects like Find Listen Label.

On the geo side, Mirek Grymuza will be talking about using Yahoo! Maps APIs and Mor Naaman from Yahoo! Research Berkeley will also be around to talk about some of the work they do including Zonetag. We're hoping to have some interesting new announcements from them as well.

And lastly, there's one session that I'm particularly excited about. It's as close to cutting edge as you can get at the moment and could really be a technology to watch. Flickr's Dan Catt and Aaron Straupe Cope are going to be doing a session on Machine Tags - the new triple-structured approach to folksonomies that allows anyone to annotate things in machine-readable ways. That's going to be fascinating.

If all of that isn't enough to whet your appetite, then I don't know what is. So on that note, I'm going to wish everyone a great weekend. We've got more announcements to come at the beginning of next week, and we'll see you at Alexandra Palace in just two more weeks!

So we sent out the first round of invitations to the Hack Day last week and more are going out all the time. The reaction has been phenomenal and we're all really excited, but probably the thing we've been enjoying most has been the way people are getting in the mood already and are putting together their own systems to help hackers meet, form teams and share ideas with each other. It's totally in the spirit of the day and we couldn't be happier about it. You guys rock.

For example, some enterprising hackers have set up an unofficial wiki! People are listing the kinds of areas they work in, the kinds of projects they're interested in doing and are also swapping tips about some of the logistical stuff as well (like how to get to the venue - we'll be putting out some more information about this nearer to the day). It's already a quite extraordinary list. We've got people coming who are interested in everything from the Semantic Web and Microformats all the way through to Arduino-based hardware hacking and hardware interaction design. We have graphic designers, perl programmers, python enthusiasts and a sizeable group of Rails hackers.

Oh, and the password is h4ck. Of course!

But that's not all. Over at Hackdayforum.com there's a message board for people coming to the event, a list of the resources available for hackers, the latest information from this site and a list of all the links from del.icio.us tagged hackday. If you've got a particular project you'd like to bash around with a few people, this might be the ideal place to get some feedback.

Meanwhile, if you're interested in working with the BBC's APIs then there are a lot of conversations going on right now on the BBC Backstage mailing list that you should maybe get involved in.

And of course if you're still looking for ideas, then you should visit Backstage's list of the BBC's feeds and APIs, the Yahoo! Developer Network and Flickr's list of services.

Anyway, that's enough for now. We'll have more announcements for you next week, including some of the speakers!

We're seeing a lot of excitement building around the Hack Day event in London. I've pulled together a few interesting links to comments about it from the blogosphere here:

First, BBC's Matt Cashmore explains how it will go down via the BBC Backstage blog: "The event is going to be truly amazing, Tom and I (not to mention a whole army of really passionate people at both organisations) have been working our bums off to make sure it's going to be THE event for hackers in Europe. Essentially 400+ developers will descend on Alexandra Palace on the 16th and 17th of June - there'll be truck loads of pizza, beer, wi-fi and shed loads of help."

BBC's Ian Forrester adds that sleep may be unnecessary: "As the hackday.org site says, stimulation will be provided in Food, Drinks, Feeds and APIs. Like BarCamp, you are welcome to play werewolf sorry hack or (sleep) through-out the night."

Mr. Cashmore then puts the event in historical context on his own blog: "I was dead chuffed when we decided to hold it [at Alexandra Palace]. There’s so much history for the BBC there, and it seems perfect to me that the place of birth for TV, is the place of birth for a whole load of amazing stuff that can be distributed in so many cool ways. Ally Pally was the first place that broadcast regular HD TV transmissions way back when TV sets were 4'’ wide... it just seems fitting that we’re now trying to work out how we wire the worlds most advanced studios (at the time) for wi-fi!"

The Guardian shares the news of the event more broadly: "Fancy building something tremendous, useful or - well - a bit weird? Then Yahoo Hackday might be for you."

Andy Budd explains why Hack Day is a good idea: "It allows people to be creative and come up with ideas that would never get built otherwise. So it could be anything from a serious business changing app, through to something more fun like mashing up news and astrology data."

Webreakstuff's Fred Oliviera is excited to see Hack Day jump the Atlantic: "Europe doesn’t get this kind of 'love' often, so if this is your cup of tea, make sure you drop by hackday.org and sign-up (this is an invitation-only event, limited to 500 people)."

Sarah Blow of London Girl Geek Dinners sees the potential of Hack Day: "It sounds to me like a really interesting concept and I reckon some innovative softwares will come out at the end of it and possibly even a few business ventures!"

Hack Day business services are emerging already such as Tom Loosemore's house: "Ally Pally is my back garden. My shower will be available for rental on Sunday morning."

Damien Mulley likes the hackday.org site design: "The HackDay site is haxorifically cute with all the oldstyle terminal green and text changing as you mouse over it."

Thom Shannon of Liverpool is looking for a partner to build stuff with: "I've got a few ideas for hacks, so is there anyone else out there who's planning on going and would like to join forces? I'm a .NET developer (C#, ASP.NET, Compact Framework etc) and also do a lot of JavaScript (GM, YUI, bit of XUL) and know my way around Flash. So come on, don't be shy, doesn't matter if you're not "sh*t hot", who is? I work much better with someone to bounce ideas off."

Yahoo!'s Ryan Kennedy of Yahoo! Mail Web Service fame plans to share more knowledge with us at Hack Day: "I’ve been asked, once again, to come and give a talk about the Yahoo! Mail Web Service. Last time I gave an overview of the API, which was nice since the web service was entirely new at the time. But now that it’s officially released, I think I’m going to come loaded up with some sample applications that show the power of the platform." He also offered to help you with your hack. Now, that's service.

BBC's Chris Bowley also plans to give us all something to chew on: "To get everyone in the right mood for rapid prototyping, there will be a number of speaker sessions from Yahoo! and the BBC. Tristan and I will be presenting one of the sessions so you don't need any more reason to sign up for a place!"