Posted: 28 Sep 2010 10:14 PM PDT
Last Saturday the Palm team descended on Atlanta to help WebDirections USA host an incredible one day hackathon called Amped!. The goal of Amped is to form a team, code up an app to meet one of several challenges, win prizes, and of course have a ton of fun; all in a single day. And what a day it was! Prizes were won and fun was had by all.
The Palm team showed up at the venue, the GTRI conference center graciously donated by premiere engineering school Georgia Tech, at around 7am to set up the space. This mainly consisted of putting together tables and couch spaces for people to hack away, plus a ton of power outlets. Around 8:30 the attendees began to arrive, breakfasting on the free coffee and pastries in the hall.
Most entrants were students, but there were several experienced members as well. Some people came as a team and others formed teams there. A lot of locals showed up, but a team from the University of Tennessee drove two hours very early in the morning to compete!
Each Amped sponsor had their own challenges. Palm feels very strongly about cross-platform development, so we issued the following challenge: Create a mobile application that works on webOS and at least one other platform. We gave prizes for Most Useful, Most Creative, Best Conversion, and the Grand Prize, whose winner gets to come to New York City for the webOS Developer Day in November.
Throughout the day teams designed, hacked, and coded, occasionally taking breaks for munchies and lunch. The organizers thought of everything; at the height of the hot day they even had an ice cream truck show up to give us some refreshment. I haven’t had such a yummy ice cream sandwich in years.
To help the teams really polish their apps, many of the speakers from WebDirections USA came over to give training sessions and mentor teams who wanted assistance. WebDirections had an amazing number of great speakers with a wide array of talents, so the teams were not lacking for help.
By 7pm the teams had been coding for over 10 hours straight. That’s when the judges started touring the tables and asking questions. We were all amazed by the quality of the applications. Deciding on the winners would be hard!
At 8pm we all gathered in the main session hall to have some refreshments, relax, and be entertained by our host doing a little river dancing. (We’re not kidding!)
Finally it was time to announce the winners. The brave entrants to Palm’s challenge were not to be disappointed:
Honorable Mention: Team AASK created an amazing demo that let you play pong over the network from both a webOS and an Android phone with the playing field on a third screen, a desktop computer. Though not as polished as some of the other apps, we wanted to give them special mention for the incredible technical challenges they overcame.
Most Useful: The Omnipresent team set out to solve a simple but annoying problem. Managing birthday and Christmas wish lists. It’s so easy to set up an email thread and accidentally mail the person receiving the gift. Gift registries help, but they aren’t updated in real time. Omnipresent solved this with an attractive mobile app displaying the presents on your friends’ lists, with the ability to mark off purchased items in real time so the other gift givers receive the update immediate. This definitely sounds like an app with a lot of potential.
Most Creative: Team Hack Stars created a completely new way of enjoying sports. It has both a mobile and a TV component that let you bet in real time on what each team will do for each play. You can play against your friends and compete for prizes from the teams. This sounds like a lot of fun, and one of the few that integrated a traditional mobile device with TV.
Best Conversion: Team Ninja was made up of Georgia Tech students who use a web-based tool called GT Dir to get contact info for fellow students. Team Ninja created a mobile application to let you get this vital information on the go.
Grand Prize: NiteOwl created a solution to a problem they had experienced earlier in the week. They had had a party at a local restaurant. When the restaurant closed, they wanted to search for other restaurants based on closing time as well as location and how many people are already there. At the hackathon they built an application to do just this; and what an app it is! NiteOwl looks great, takes advantage of several web technologies including custom fonts, and runs on pretty much every mobile device known to man.
Take a look at these photos:
Each winner received a new HP printer and Palm Pre Plus, as well as a gift certificate and T-Shirt. The Grand Prize winners got all of that, as well as a free trip to New York City where they will polish up their app and show it on stage at the webOS Developer Day in November.
Amped was an incredible success. Lots of great apps were produced, and everyone learned something and made great new friends. This is one event we will have to do again!
Link: http://developer.palm.com/blog/2010/09/amped-hack-event-summary/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+pdnblog+%28Palm+Developer+Connection+Blog%29&utm_content=Yahoo!+Mail
The Palm team showed up at the venue, the GTRI conference center graciously donated by premiere engineering school Georgia Tech, at around 7am to set up the space. This mainly consisted of putting together tables and couch spaces for people to hack away, plus a ton of power outlets. Around 8:30 the attendees began to arrive, breakfasting on the free coffee and pastries in the hall.
Most entrants were students, but there were several experienced members as well. Some people came as a team and others formed teams there. A lot of locals showed up, but a team from the University of Tennessee drove two hours very early in the morning to compete!
Each Amped sponsor had their own challenges. Palm feels very strongly about cross-platform development, so we issued the following challenge: Create a mobile application that works on webOS and at least one other platform. We gave prizes for Most Useful, Most Creative, Best Conversion, and the Grand Prize, whose winner gets to come to New York City for the webOS Developer Day in November.
Throughout the day teams designed, hacked, and coded, occasionally taking breaks for munchies and lunch. The organizers thought of everything; at the height of the hot day they even had an ice cream truck show up to give us some refreshment. I haven’t had such a yummy ice cream sandwich in years.
To help the teams really polish their apps, many of the speakers from WebDirections USA came over to give training sessions and mentor teams who wanted assistance. WebDirections had an amazing number of great speakers with a wide array of talents, so the teams were not lacking for help.
By 7pm the teams had been coding for over 10 hours straight. That’s when the judges started touring the tables and asking questions. We were all amazed by the quality of the applications. Deciding on the winners would be hard!
At 8pm we all gathered in the main session hall to have some refreshments, relax, and be entertained by our host doing a little river dancing. (We’re not kidding!)
Finally it was time to announce the winners. The brave entrants to Palm’s challenge were not to be disappointed:
Honorable Mention: Team AASK created an amazing demo that let you play pong over the network from both a webOS and an Android phone with the playing field on a third screen, a desktop computer. Though not as polished as some of the other apps, we wanted to give them special mention for the incredible technical challenges they overcame.
Most Useful: The Omnipresent team set out to solve a simple but annoying problem. Managing birthday and Christmas wish lists. It’s so easy to set up an email thread and accidentally mail the person receiving the gift. Gift registries help, but they aren’t updated in real time. Omnipresent solved this with an attractive mobile app displaying the presents on your friends’ lists, with the ability to mark off purchased items in real time so the other gift givers receive the update immediate. This definitely sounds like an app with a lot of potential.
Most Creative: Team Hack Stars created a completely new way of enjoying sports. It has both a mobile and a TV component that let you bet in real time on what each team will do for each play. You can play against your friends and compete for prizes from the teams. This sounds like a lot of fun, and one of the few that integrated a traditional mobile device with TV.
Best Conversion: Team Ninja was made up of Georgia Tech students who use a web-based tool called GT Dir to get contact info for fellow students. Team Ninja created a mobile application to let you get this vital information on the go.
Grand Prize: NiteOwl created a solution to a problem they had experienced earlier in the week. They had had a party at a local restaurant. When the restaurant closed, they wanted to search for other restaurants based on closing time as well as location and how many people are already there. At the hackathon they built an application to do just this; and what an app it is! NiteOwl looks great, takes advantage of several web technologies including custom fonts, and runs on pretty much every mobile device known to man.
Take a look at these photos:
Each winner received a new HP printer and Palm Pre Plus, as well as a gift certificate and T-Shirt. The Grand Prize winners got all of that, as well as a free trip to New York City where they will polish up their app and show it on stage at the webOS Developer Day in November.
Amped was an incredible success. Lots of great apps were produced, and everyone learned something and made great new friends. This is one event we will have to do again!
Link: http://developer.palm.com/blog/2010/09/amped-hack-event-summary/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+pdnblog+%28Palm+Developer+Connection+Blog%29&utm_content=Yahoo!+Mail
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