USA, hacked. Europe, hacked. Asia… hacked!

Posted October 11th, 2007 at 10:21 am by Christian Heilmann, Yahoo! UK

 9 Comments / Filed in: Conferences/Events

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

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9 Comments Add your own

Amber | October 11th, 2007 at 10:29 am

Awesome!!!!!!!!!!

Ara Pehlivanian | October 11th, 2007 at 11:19 am

Canada… soon?

Hollywood | October 12th, 2007 at 12:06 am

Does, the Collaborative Browsing hack destination page have an HTML coding error?

The link that is on this blog is not going to a page like the other links – it is going to a directory. Clicking on any HTML page returns HTML code and the source code returns JavaScript.

That was the hack we really got excited about trying out.

gag | October 12th, 2007 at 7:47 am

for me this post was like one of those television episode (No Reservation) which i might have watched more then once. I like what was said in the podcast about communication and loved the analysis of various hackdays. I m @ peace…
On a different note:
-in the yahoo directory could yahoo give links in the description of websites. Every site has a few pages or a module which should not be missed. This could be given as link right at the description.
-browse is different to search, i guess in many of the categories yahoo should/could think of providing Questions right at the top of the page for that category and when a user chooses a question the page should highlight the various results which are relevant to that question or re-list the results based on the question chosen. Latter this could even be connected to yahoo answers, questions.

gag | October 12th, 2007 at 7:57 am

yahoo should consider a very casual discussion of ‘my brand value’ in countries like India, China n other Asian countries. This is something like every person sharing his brand preference and in the process establishing his social brand ranking.

gag | October 13th, 2007 at 10:05 am

http://kamlabhattshow.com/pdcst/india/yahoos-david-filo-and-brad-horowitz/
-interesting podcast, something about it made me think of the below quote.

“We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.” — The Borg

Human brain is interesting but demanding, it seeks perfection and that comes at a cost. Non biological is not perfect but it will get the job done…….

meanwhile we will soon go the lego way online, i would be happy if websites cease to exist and smart nano webapps take over, likewise with offline technology where nano gadgets with the help of smart online computing will act as macro machines.

gag | October 16th, 2007 at 9:46 am

i use old mail n dont know what all features new one has but i was thinking of sending mail from ymail to social networking site profile contacts. I cant send from ymail to y360 but i think a module within ymail can be created where i can enter all my social networking site address and then while i am at mailing, i can just pull up this module and select the name of the site and then a new tab opens where i can get to mailing at that site. yes the above is as dull as plain water……

Jacques Snyman | Website Design | May 6th, 2009 at 1:27 am

It would be nice to see a South African event at some stage, but our market is really small, and Google really dominates this side…aaargh! India is turning into a regular online powerhouse, and the hacks turned out are representative of the quality of work that can be had by dealing with Indian companies.

sandrar | September 10th, 2009 at 5:52 am

Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog. :) Cheers! Sandra. R.