The Winning Apps of New York’s First Hackday.tv

This past weekend, Shelby.tv, a startup born at Techstars and General Assembly hosted New York’s first ever video hackathon: Hackday.tv. In case you haven’t yet used Shelby, it’s like watching TV or gazing into a magic ball of all the videos your friends post on Facebook and Twitter. It’s a browser-based service that pulls in videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion and Blip.tv that have been posted by your friends and the people you follow on your social networks. Shelby pulls in full embeds, including ads, providing publishers with greater distribution without disrupting their business models.

In the same spirit of Aviary’s Photo Hack Day, Shelby’s Hackday.tv gathered together some of New York’s finest developers, this time in a cozier way. Powered by energy gum, burritos and custom order grilled cheeses, hackers braved 48 hours of sleepless coding to create well polished apps. The grand prizes totaled to over $5,000, with first place featured on NASDAQ’s gargantuan Time’s Square display. Shelby.tv also called for videographers (what good are video hack’s without video?) to make sure the hacks finished looking sharp.

In honor of the 10th anniversary of 911, the presentation was opened by Brian August, who came in and talk about 110 Stories. His team created an amazing app that augments an outline of the Twin Towers through your camera. The app will let you “Orient. Augment. Comment.”

Simply activate the app on your iPhone and you’ll be guided towards the World Trade Center. Once properly oriented, augmented reality kicks in and renders their silhouette — in a pencil-like outline during the day and in shimmering light at night. Snap a picture, fine tune the image, add a personal story, and submit it to www.110stories.com. You can learn more here.

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After the presentation, hackers presented their work one by one. Their projects varied greatly from parody to social needs and practicality. Without further ado, here’s the awesome hacks that took home the gold, silver and bronze:

First Place & People’s Choice: Terminator Vision

In what can only be described as pure (comedy) genius, hackers Haris Amin and Richard Cameron teamed up to develop an iOS app that lets you see with Terminator Vision. Using Face.com’s API, any user can now detect their friends and view their information overlaid on a red-tinted screen. If you were worried about Google turning into Skynet, you can now rest knowing that a terminator-like experience is on the way. Follow @TerminatrVision on Twitter to stay up to date on the release.

Second Place: Screening Room

Screening Room lets you share videos with your friends in real time and chat while you watch them. Its goal was to create Turntable.fm for videos, and it did it well enough to win $1000 & a year of Github Bronze. It was hacked together by David Wolf, Du Hoang and Rabih Nassar using Shelby.tv and Vimeo’s API’s. You can check out their site to see it in all its awesome-ness, but it’ll be more of a teaser if you haven’t already been let into Shelby.tv‘s alpha release.

Third Place: Open Live Streaming Server

Open Live Streaming Server is a server that lets applications share videos via a URL. In their own words:

We’ve coded up an open-source video server that lets applications POST pieces of mp4 video clips to a single URL, which show up at a public URL that shows a live stream of those video clips as they roll in right in their browser.

Stay in touch on their developments through their Github.

Honorable Mentions:

Open Captions lets you access closed captions from YouTube videos. You can then select individual words and see an American Sign Language Representation on screen.

Yontage is an experimental Youtube video viewing experience.

Camcorder+‘s goal is to create the best video recorder app for iOS.

CEO of Shelby.tv, Reece Pacheco spoke on the event:

We’re so happy with our first hackday.tv. We had a great turnout with strong developers, a bunch of awesome demos of not just hacks, but shippable products, and most importantly, we had a lot of fun. Our sponsors and API partners provided some outstanding catering and stellar prizes and we’re all looking forward to doing this again soon in another city.

If you were one of the lucky attendee’s, use the comments below to share your experience with us. Otherwise, check out this Flickr set, and visit the apps above (let us know your favorite)!

Lastly, check back soon. Shelby.tv told us they will be posting links to all the other great hacks shortly!