Moblogging purse takes Hack Day grand prize

Posted October 2nd, 2006 at 4:32 pm by Nicki Dugan, Blog Editor

 5 Comments / Filed in: Cool Stuff, Trends & News

Black Box Nation, a team of three fashion designers turned hardware hackers, unanimously swept our first open Hack Day event by mashing together a purse fitted with a Nokia camera phone, Bluetooth GPS, a pedometer and ZoneTag, a prototype from Yahoo! Research Berkeley that geotags photos and uploads them to Flickr. Every few steps, the purse snaps a photo and moblogs it, creating a photo diary of the day. Creators Diana Eng, Emily Albinski and Audrey Roy all get to fight over the 32″ plasma TV they won. And if Diana looks familiar to you, she was the nerdy aspiring fashion designer on Project Runway. More here. Photos here.

We’re all pretty wiped out from the weekend, which was described as transformative, off the hook, familial and hard to top. People came from Boston, Florida, New York, Tennessee, Chicago, Vancouver, and Abbotsford, Ontario. The hacks were judged by David Filo, Jeff Weiner, Ash Patel, Bradley Horowitz, Chad Dickerson, David Hornik, Peter Fenton, Gina Trapani, Salim Ismael and Mike Arrington.

For you numbers types, we had nearly 250 hackers at our developer workshops, roughly 50 campers and a grand total of 54 hacks demos. Sustenance included 14 kegs of beer, 400 large pizzas (that’s 3500 slices), 280 ounces of nacho cheese, 660 Krispy Kreme doughnuts, 480 ounces of popcorn and all the Red Bull scored from a convenience store at 2:00am.

Rather than giving you the blow-by-blow run down, I thought I’d let the prolific attendees, judges and Yahoos put it in their own words (and images):

• Hack Day impresario Chad Dickerson has a bunch of posts on the weekend.
• Yahoo! VP Product Strategy (and “just the finger”) Bradley Horowitz reflects on what it took to pull this thing off.
• Hack Day judges recap their experience: Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani, VentureBlog’s David Hornick and PubSub co-founder Salim Ismail.
• TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington (and tireless event emcee) recaps the winning hack and then some.
• Guy Kawasaki put together a photo slide show.
• Susan Mernit comments on the significance of the gig.
• Zooomr’s Kristopher Tate recaps the adventure of it all.
• Laughing Squid’s Scott Beale has some incredible photos of the Beck concert.
• Yahoo! Senior Product Manager Matt McAlister reflects on Hack Day’s indelible mark.
• Yahoo! Senior Product Manager Ian Kennedy on the virtues of audience participation.
• Yahoo! Platform Engineering Developer Scott Schiller offers a great summary of the Beck show.
• Canadian hackers Jay and Silent Rob chronicle their road trip and bad demo karma.
• Hacker Jonathan Grubb was tapped to help pull together the Beck puppetron video.
• Shawn Bolan on hacker chicks, Beck and the camaraderie.
• Beck’s puppeteer recovers from breaking a mouth string.

And that’s just a taste of the buzz out there. If you’ve got time to kill, search for “hackday06” or “yahoo hack day” on Flickr and you’ll find a bonanza of more than 3,000 photos. It’s worth the ride.

And stay tuned for a sweet clip of Beck’s performance. Coming very soon.

UPDATE: Here’s a list of all Hack Day winners.

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5 Comments Add your own

navin | October 2nd, 2006 at 9:23 pm

Interesting! Way to go Yahoo!

Salim Ismail | October 2nd, 2006 at 10:06 pm

Hey Nicki, I’m wondering if you’d mind fixing the spelling on my name (Mike Arrington misspelled it… my last name is ‘Ismail’)… thanks! S.

Nicki Dugan | October 2nd, 2006 at 10:09 pm

Sorry about that, Salim. I won’t call you Ishmail. All fixed.

jr | October 2nd, 2006 at 10:40 pm

I’ll add in 60 lbs of corn chips for that melted cheddar cheese.

(I’ll also add that the guys at the Smart and Final seemed both confident and pretty darn quick with that number when asked “How many chips should I get for around 17lbs of cheese?)

Jacques Snyman | Website Design | April 21st, 2009 at 5:33 am

Geez, them hackers sure don’t eat too healthily! Imagine how much better they’ll be able to perform if they are relying on optimal nutrition! Those Red Bulls especially make me nervous. Why not just use a kaffeine drip?