London Real-time hack event ends with exhausted and innovative winners

On Friday we reported the start of the Real-time London event taking place at White Bear Yard. The event saw GoSquared provide participants with APIs from Amazon Web Services, Geckoboard, RabbitMQ, Twilio and Pusher to make something cool in just one weekend.

This evening that drew to a close with creative, but exhausted competitors gathered to show off what they made and victors to be announced. Hackers were encouraged to use as many of the available APIs available to construct their application and the show and tell was pretty impressive.

Each of the API providers chose its own winner. GoSquared went for a neat demonstration called ‘GoCubed’ as its champion. A light strip was programmed via an arduino to create a physical and visual representation of visitors to a site. Twilio chose Tring Tring, a voice enabled social roulette game (think Chat-roulette but in audio and not filled with images that are NSFW).

Pusher plumped for Shout JS, a fun application where users can phone in a sound and add it to a drum machine to create inventive beats. Geckoboard chose Many Pie Charts, a very ambitious live display of information that would eventually show graphics reminiscent of an LED message board and Rabbit MQ went for YouChoose, an application where friends watching videos on YouTube can text in song choices and cue up videos to watch together in real time. (Yes, that’s a lot of Rickrolling right there.)

The overall Frankenstein prize went to Coupon Interest. This application noted how many visitors were looking at a product on a site, when that number hits a particular threshold, the vendor is notified and a coupon is sent out to those people. A lively and useful application, it worked right there for the judges in the room and was frankly a heck of a feat to make in just one weekend.

More generally the event was a fun one with a lot of younger participants getting involved. The youngest person to pitch was 10 year old Mark who created a web app along the lines of 20 questions with animal answers (and a little bit of help from Dad).

The weekend itself appears to have had it’s moments of drama and mostly sleeplessness. An ambitious attempt to create a geolocated massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) didn’t quite come together but the creators still appeared to be having fun.

As ever, a hack event provides the time and means to work on cool projects that might not get done alone or at work. Other clever ideas created this weekend included, data traffic measurement, live remote games of Pong, live site stats presentation, a nagging app to keep you awake named ‘Girl friend’ and many more.

Though there were prizes up for grabs, the participants appeared to be much happier just taking part in the hack and testing their coding mettle in a creative race against time. You can find all of the hacks in a handy list on the London Real-time website.