Hack Day London

Alexandra Palace was an inspired venue choice for the first Hack Day outside of the US, organised by BBC Backstage and the Yahoo! Developer Network. As the place where the first television transmissions were made in 1936 it seemed appropriate just over 80 years later to be hosting a weekend (16-17 June) for 500 hackers to play with the latest APIs and muck around with hardware, oh and play with Nabaztag bunnies.

The bunnies weren't the only fun to be had, with 400 Flickr balls on the loose a game called Faceball gathered popularity, and even got its own hack. Strictly played it involves two people sitting exactly 10 feet apart facing each other and attempting to hit their opponent's head with a ball to score points. To the uninitiated it seems that players (well geeks) have a really bad aim and really should get out more - until you discover that the ball is extremely lightweight and almost acts like a balloon.

The results of all this fun, frolicking and hacking (with a bit of Dr Who thrown in) were that on Sunday afternoon 73 hacks were presented to the audience and Hack Day London judges - no mean feat.

The hacks varied hugely:
Fun
The Beagle 3 attempt at launching (and filming) a rocket into space using mentos and coke as fuel.
The Helium Hackers of Bli.mp let loose their mini internet-user-controlled airships.

Scary
Flickr user face recognition... by Team Steve.

Socially conscientious
The MySociety crew added mobile functionality to FixMyStreet and gave a glimpse into their latest project, UN Democracy.

Very clever
Meteor - real time, event driven statistics.

Why didn't I think of that?
Flickr Tunes - a Mac widget that associates songs with appropriate images in Flickr and puts the results into a slideshow.

Matthew Cashmore, one of the BBC organisers, said he was "blown away" by the imagination and variety of hacks that were presented. Tom Coates, from Yahoo, is also extremely happy in how the two days went. Stating that his favourite period of the weekend was on Saturday night and early Sunday morning:

"Where the lighting was atmospheric, where the coding was focused and everyone seemed to flow, where the room was gently buzzing with key-strokes. And the experience of all of those people turning around to the stage and running like kids to watch Doctor Who on a huge screen with a hundred of their peers and friends for one of the most extraordinary cliff-hanging episodes of the series was just amazing."

If there are any criticisms to be made then it was the lack of women - although there were far more at the Hack Day than at similar meetings - but this is a reflection on the industry rather than the event itself, whose demographics were otherwise extremely mixed.

Notes and links:
A full list of all the hacks and associated URLs can be found here.
Photos of the day can be found on Flickr
HackDayLondon tagged pages on Del.icio.us
More associated links.

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