One of the side benefits of going to a hackNY event, such as this past weekend’s Fall Hackathon at NYU’s Courant Institute, is learning about all the astonishing public APIs that are available.
Need face recognition? There’s Face.com’s web APIs for detecting smiles and frowns. Looking for trending articles or blog posts? NYC startup Parse.ly—nice to see them in the spotlight— has the feed for that. Aching to add an on-line menu and food ordering interface to your Boxee client app? Order.in l can do that. Graphing real-time analytics? Chartbeat is the go-to service.
Over this past weekend, developers from nearby colleges and universities—NYU, Columbia, Princeton, Rutgers—as well as few far flung hackers hailing from McGill (Montreal) and Carnegie Mellon (somewhere in Pennsylvania) came together to work with these APIs.
On Saturday, they formed pickup teams with the object to craft a hack in under 20 hours for their amusement, the entertainment of their co-hackers, and oh yes, there were some cash prizes.
And now with help from a few hackers these previously transient hacks can live on forever.
The Hacker League site was formed over the weekend when a few hackers decided it would be a good idea to preserve some of these midnight coding efforts. Hey wasn’t Jennings, one of the three hackers who put together the HackerLeague.com, the same Ian Jennings Jablonowski who is a two time hackNY winner and known for his Rooster.am hack?
Why yes it is. Glad to see Jennings is using his super-human hack abilities to preserve, protect, and benefit the development community!
I took a peek at Hacker League to see how second place winner AdRunner turns ad aversion into an arcade game. Grant Kott (Juiliard) and Joey Dong’s (Rutgers) JavaScript code pulls in ads using the HyperPublic APIs, displaying them as 3D obstacles which hurtle towards your craft. If you collide, you are forced to view the web page containing the ad.
This one was a crowd-pleaser, and I’m impressed how their HTML5 code performed on my FireFox browser. Nice work Grant and Joey!
And wouldn’t you know it, a dating app receive third place honors. LoCreep lets women give out a fake number to a bothersome male creature and through the magic of Twilio then transcribes the voice message left by the unfortunate homunculus and posts it on a web site.
Or maybe I’m confusing LoCreep with rejectile, which does something similar.
Of course the bigger point here is that both these services turn what was once a private male humiliation into a public shame to be gloated over by males and females. Dudes, you’ve been warned!
Before I get to first place, let me give a few shoutouts.
ArtByBit, by a Columbia student, is described as Shazam for artwork. It takes the guesswork out of identifying paintings. It was a little unclear how it goes about deciding on a match between submitted photos and its Mongo database of great artworks. Certainly this is a must-have app for art lovers and students of Art Appreciation 101.
Smiley.me, which uses the previously mentioned Face.com and chartbeat APIs, detects the mood of a headshot taken by a front-facing camera. If it finds too many frown pixels, it sends an uplifting LOLcat picture to boost endorphins.
I also liked the idea of Tokoro (means place in Japanese) and which takes on a problem that a lot of these map-based services have avoided: finding efficient routes connecting dynamically placed pins on a Google Map.
Devised by Princeton students, Tokoro is a tourist app that finds interesting restaurants, museums, and other travel hot spots. It then discovers an efficient path—I thought I saw someone studying a comp sci books on graph theory— circumnavigating the whole thing. If they can productize it, Tokoro will gain the keys to the on-line trip planning kingdom.
And let us now praise command line hacks. Ordr.in CLI, cooked up by Rutgers student Artem Titoulenko, provides a command line interface to the Order.In APIs, allowing developers to send out for food from a local restaurant without every having to, oh my gosh, leave their shell prompt to go into a silly browser.
Envelope please … NYU students David Cross and Michael Bartnett came up with the winning app, called MidiPHON.
As the name suggests, callers can phone in their music, creating a group composition by controlling a MIDI device with their cellphone keypad.
Congrats and I await an Ode to Joy phone-in.
References