Watch out folks, as the geeks are coming to your neck of the woods sooner or later. After the big successes of the Open Hack Days in Sunnyvale and London, we decided it was time to see what Asia has to offer in terms of hack minds and went over to Bangalore for the first ever India Hack Day.

In 24 hours last weekend, around 150 developers took the open APIs Yahoo! and other companies have on offer and created a hack or mashup to show the other hackers and the jury.

We turned one of the ballrooms of the Taj Residency Hotel into a hack-garage: two very sturdy and fast wireless networks, a giant laptop stage showing the countdown, music, coffee, energy drinks and plenty of fresh food allowed for collaboration, necessary breaks, and, above all, smooth hacking.

To give people some ideas for what to use for their hacks, I gave the rundown of services Yahoo! offers developers in the Yahoo! for You presentation, while Raghu Rao of Adobe showed what Flash, Flex and Air can do. Bangalore Yahoo Shivku Ganesan introduced the new Yahoo! India Maps APIs.

One of my favourite parts was seeing people collaborating and seeking skills in other hackers in order to build a strong team. It was much less of a competition than working together to show what’s possible in 24 hours if you let developers loose without any product or management overhead and boundaries.

During the night, many Bangalore Yahoos stayed around to help out and the tech support team happily fixed technical issues that came up (including one complete re-install of a Windows machine). I hung around most of the night to help and was amazed by how many technologies people used to produce the final whopping 31 hacks.

Since Joe, our anchor for evening (and almost the entire event!), refused to let go of the purple chair, we had thrown in loads of beanbags and an entire room dedicated to rest and relaxation with an Xbox and a Wii .

The illustrious panel of judges (including co-founder David Filo... and me, as a last minute add-on) took their sweet time to determine who deserved prizes and to come up with names for the categories. Even those were unknown until the very end. The final scores were:

• Best in Show: Maps Doodle (An implementation of Yahoo! Maps with a Canvas overlay allowing you to highlight a way to travel by doodling over the map and sharing it with a contact.)
• Brainiest Hack: YaHealer! (A tool that allows doctors to collaborate and connect/share medical files and photos online with live annotations and no need to download all the images.)
• Best Desktop Hack: Desktop Wallpaper Love (a windows application that created a desktop wallpaper from images collected from Flickr and filtered through the Yahoo! Buzz feeds.)
• Best "I wish I had a Mac" Hack: Third Tag (A del.icio.us file tagger that locates files on your hard drive, analyzes the text and offers tags for it.)
• Most Viral Hack: Facebook Friend Folio (aggregates friend content on Facebook – Eg: photos, video - in one application.)
• Best Self-Expression Hack: Smart Editor (pulls multimedia-rich search results as you type; easily drag and drop search results into text box for instant sharing. Combines Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! News, Flickr and Amazon results.)
• "Most likely to arrive at next Hack Day on time": Social Routing (Combines Maps, Weather, Traffic together with live messages via Twitter to plan travel routes.)
• Best Non-Technical Hack: Yahoo! Hindi Search (which simply asked to offer a live translation of English into Hindi inside the Yahoo! search box.)
• Best "Really Needs an Interface" Hack: Del.icio.us Tag Management (bundles tags automatically and removes and collaborates duplicate tags.)
• Most Parallel Hack: Collaborative Browsing (allows multiple users to simultaneously browse the same web page.)

It all ended with a party with a popular local band, Thermal and a Quarter, playing their version of rock-hacks for the rather exhausted bunch of hackers. Then a DJ offered some great Bollywood music “mashups” and live VJing to get everyone going till late into the night.

Have a look at the photos that just about capture the energy and enthusiasm that was India Hack Day! And here's the PodTech podcast I did with Filo. I cannot wait to find out where and when Open Hack Day will strike next.

Christian Heilmann
Lead Interaction Architect
Yahoo! UK

Photos from code_martial