Superstar judges and the crowd take in the hacks.
On Monday, we hosted our first Xobni Gadgets Hack. The hackers were quick, the pizza was awesome (Little Star FTW) and the judges were generous with prizes. Well, Xobni was generous with prizes, but the judges were generous with their time!
The challenge was for hackers to build gadgets using Xobni’s new OpenSocial-powered platform. We held this hack event 1 week after the launch of the Xobni Gadget Store (see TechCrunch story here), to allow developers to familiarize themselves with the new platform, which now brings services like WebEx, Evernote, Yammer and Salesforce into Outlook.
In total, we had over 100 attendees, 35 people hacking, 15 hacks submitted for the contest (2 virtually via WebEx), 150 beers consumed and 20 pizzas devoured – all in just 3 hours. Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Joseph Smarr (Google), David Lee (SV Angels) and Mark Weitzel (OpenSocial) were the esteemed judges determining the winners and handing out the dough.
Prizes went to Best Overall ($500 or Xoom tablet), Most Useful ($250), Most Creative ($250), Best Crammer ($250 – def: /kram’ mer/ noun – one who crammed a gadget in from start to finish in under 3 hours), and Developer’s Choice (chosen by the crowds via Twitter). Box.net also kicked in another $250 to the best gadget using their APIs.
And the winners are: (drumroll please…)
- Most Useful – Google Docs Gadget created by the SheepDogInc team
- Most Creative – Link Preview (Bastian Hofmann)
- Best Crammer - GoldMail Gadget (2.0) (Arsen Yeremin of GoldMail)
- Developer’s Choice Award – Wishery Gadget (Cooper Marcus and David Albrecht of Wishery)
- Box.net Award – Box Gadget (Ryan Gerard)
- Overall Best Gadget – Nimbb Gadget by Benjamin Bérubé of Nimbb
Cooper Marcus of Wishery with his prize.
Thanks to everyone who came out and made it happen! It was so exciting to see so many smart and creative developers leveraging this platform to integrate their products and services into consumers email workflow, and this is just the beginning. We’ll work with these developers to see which gadgets might be offered through the Xobni Gadget Store in the future. We hope to see the Xobni Gadget Store fill up with even more gadgets that improve productivity, add new functionality or just inspire a smile. If you are thinking about a hack or just have a question about the platform, you can always post in the Developer Forum.
To see all photos, go to our Flickr set.
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