First prize over all went to an impressive hack by Addy Cameron-Huff named HackDemocracy:
http://yahoo.summerhilldesign.com
Addy managed to organize an incredible amount of data and put an easy-to-use and very polished UI on top of it. In the end what we get is an incredible political research tool that allows us to dig into how your local MP has represented you by looking at what he/she has said on-record in Parliament. You can see see the excerpt about the topic you care about or the entire speech. You can also see how the parties stand on issues you care about based on how often they talk about those issues. And finally he added a simple RSS API for you to fetch the text of speeches by topic to let you build off of his hard data ming work.
Second place went to Flare by Michael Campagnaro and Niall Wingham:
Flare is a semantic markup tool written in Javascript. Flare currently only supports RDFa, but we really hope Michael and Niall continue working on it and add eRDF and all the popular microformats to it. Anything that helps push the web towards semantic validity is very important.
Third place went to Globami, by first-year studenut Renaud Bourassa:
http://globami.rhinosphere.com
Globami is a friend visualizer that lets you easily see where anybody's friends are on a couple of different networks, either through a nice Web UI or in a SearchMonkey info bar. Not bad for three weeks of instruction!
In the BOSS category we selected Clustr, by Alex Leong, Nick Engelking, Danielle Alessio, and Josh Lamontagne:
Clustr does a number of BOSS searches to determine the relationship between search terms, finds images to represent each and gives you a graphical cluster where the size of the images and the distances between them indicate correlation.
In the BluePrint category we chose Mobill by Chong Su, Toshio Wang, Carol Yu, and Jason Cham:
http://beta.m.yahoo.com/w/devtest-chongasu-mobill
Mobill keeps track of your expenses, giving you some nice sorting and graphical visualization tools right on your phone. It also includes a Web service where you can download your expenses into a spreadsheet.
In the SearchMonkey category we chose Jeff Pound's API Monkey app:
http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=09H.s
API Monkey provides language-specific reference help for a number of languages. And it does a really nice job of showing the most relevant parts of the various reference docs.
Honorable Mention:
Jimmy He's Tiny Vector Graphics Editor, which brought back memories of Logo and Turtle Graphics for me, and is great fun to play with.
We also liked the ideas in the CalendrViewr2.0Beta hack. Are they perhaps trying to poke a little fun at Web product names, numbers and everlasting beta cycles with that name?
MaybeNotSpam gave us an interesting way to give messages in the spam folder on Yahoo Mail or GMail a second chance at the In box.
Edgar A. Bering gave us a fascinating lesson in quantum computing and Scheme that we ... didn't quite grasp a word of. :)
Other highlights included a mobile RSS reader written using the BluePrint API called Feedy! and a Web directory index enhancer simply called DIR.
We also saw another stellar batch of SearchMonkey apps, the simplest and funniest being the "Canada Eh?" app that added an "Eh?" to the end of all Canadian URLs.
Also in SearchMonkey we saw a nice combination of IMDB, Torrent searches and Last.fm apps, along with a tv.com app, a World Of Warcraft app, and a very nice Map Infobar with driving directions from your location, derived from GeoIP.
Photos from Waterloo are on Flickr, here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/70883693@N00
Onwards to Stanford!