This past weekend Pearson APIs attended the 4th AngelHack at the Ebay / PayPal headquarters in San jose, California. The event comprised an enthusiastic batch of 500+ participants who are now very familiar with the drill. Many of the participants came straight from a Windows 8 / Facebook Hack. Participants were well equipped with pillows, toothbrushes, and coordinated outfits ready to get down to business. Hackers were there to solve a problem, impress judges, win a prize or for some unknown reason, maybe they just like pain! This weekend brought on the most intense rainstorm I have seen in years, so it was not a small feat that many of the participants made the commute from around the Bay Area to San Jose to be a part of the event.
Just over 24 hours later, Ben Parr and Rip Empson were utilizing their nerf guns to intimidate presenters to keep pitches within the time constraints. This was actually much appreciated as there were over 80 presenting teams.
PayPal Town Hall, San Jose, CA
Great Uses of Pearson APIs:
Maptouria - Pearson Eyewitness Travel Guide API - http://www.maptouria.com/: A tool for a traveler to take a virtual guided tour or for use on a mobile device during an excursion. Maptouria integrates with google street view and the Yelp API offering great visuals, tracking a user by geolocation and showing the user relevant points of interest and reviewed restaurants nearby.
Johnson Liu and Angelo Huang of Maptouria
Bundletron - Pearson Penguin Classics API: This creation allows readers to select a number of the Penguin Classics, instantly converted to e-ink or other e-reader formats, bundled into one mega ebook to read on the kindle on the go.
Other ideas pitched that I thought were really cool:
1) Spacetimes - awesome way to share your travel experiences with content on a map, google earth plug-in, filepicker.io
2) digs.io - Landlords and tenants communicating more easily
3) tropeboard - take tropes - character elements - setting elements, plot elements - create storyboarding by grabbing different tropes
4) snaparound.me - http://picstream2-jhackathon.dotcloud.com/ - real time photo sharing based on geolocation
5) Enki Learning - the ultimate study edge - learning algorithms - study cards, self generating tests, uploading content through filepicker.io
6) Instantabtesting.com - easy way to do A/B testing quickly
7) Pipe - http://pipehack.com/ - mobile app for project management and team collaboration
8) Houselife - task management between roommates, can assign tasks to certain people or by geolocation using gimbal
9) Cashbox.io - http://cashbox.io/ - easily collect payments from group - awesome UI and a great product
10) Penpress - easily self publish a book and sell it as an e-ink or through the amazon store
11) Side Load app - app marketplace - don’t need to jail break an iphone - can easily get any app on any phone
12) Feeding forward - http://feedingforward.org/ - connects organization that are need of food with others who have excess food
13) Firemap - see in real time where visitors are clicking on your website with a heat map used the firebase api, great hack, #highschoolhackftw
14) What it’s like - helps travelers better assess the conditions of a place they are looking to travel to - really nice UI and UX
Thanks to the AngelHack Team for a great event, we look forward to the AngelHack finals in 2013!
Check out our facebook gallery for more images.
Feel free to reach out to us on twitter @PearsonAPI or you can reach me (gregg.alpert@pearson.com or @alpsgm) if you have any questions.
