HackMTL was a blast! Montreal represented!
HackMTL was fantastic. And Montreal represented! Thanks to everyone who participated by writing code, supporting developers, sponsoring and simply showing HackMTL some love!
At the end of the day we had 14 applications completed. It was an incredible Saturday for everyone involved. But first the winners as I am sure you are all curious about which developers made the applications that the judges considered worthy of the awesome HackMTL prizes!
First Place: Flushfinder. First prize: MacBook Air + an awesome flight on a Piper Cherokee
Flushfinder helps users find public washrooms. The application was built by Jean-Luc David and Daniel Nerenberg. Jean-Luc and Daniel used the YellowAPi and foursquare for their application which is live today and can be used everyday. They completed their application within the allotted 6 hours, and did a smashing presentation for the judges.
Flushfinder
This application was not only a judges top winner but a crowd favourite as well. I think everyone related to the plight of needing to find a washroom real quick!
Second Place: SuperMailer. Second place prize: an iPad + a Mesh Conference pass
SuperMailer is a WordPress plugin that let’s you use your choice of mailing provider (CakeMail and NetResults to start) to offer subscription services for your site. Visitors can subscribe using a handy widget to be notified whenever new content (posts or even custom post types) is published. The plugin let’s you create and manage your mailing lists as well as customize the look and feel of your emails. The application was developed by Colin Vernon and Mo Jangda a Montreal/Toronto developer combo!
SuperMailer
Third Place: Ceviche. Third place prize: a Kindle and a Micro github plan for one year.
Ceviche was developed by Adam McKerlie and Terence Lo. Ceviche is a hyper-local application that allows users in the Montreal area to make restaurant reservations. Think of it as OpenTable on steroids. Adam and Terence being HackDays pro choose to use 3 of the provided APIs: YellowAPI, CakeMail, and Cineti.ca. They also made use of the Google Maps API for visualizing the locations of the restaurants. So that’s a grand total of 4 APIs used for Ceviche! CakeMail API was used to send out restaurant reservation reminders to the user. The Cineti.ca API was used to make a movie theater and movie recommendations based on the time of the restaurant reservation and finally YellowAPI was used to find restaurants for this project and to map the theatre names to locations. Hopefully we will see Ceviche launch soon?
Ceviche
Our HackMTL judges had a really hard time picking the winners: they were 14 applications to consider with a combination of difficulty, API usage and team compositions to take into consideration. They were so excited about the applications developed that in addition to the winners, they each selected a project that received the Judges Mention.
Judge Mentions: Coalesce by Christine and Project Tex by Joaquin
Coalese by Christine
Coalese is a distributed image mosaic project using the Piximilar Multicolor API from Idée. The general idea that Christine was after was to build an application where a collection of computers would talk to each other in such a way that they could collectively show a colour gradient. You can read about Christine’s development of the application directly on her blog. Congrats Christine. This was brilliant!
Coalesce
Project Tex by Joaquin Lopez
Joaquin developed an application that allows users to search 3D image collections by colour and texture. 3D object search is a challenge when you are trying to describe a 3D object with words. Joaquin used Piximilar Multicolour the multicolour API from Idée.
We enjoyed organizing HackMTL and going from Toronto to Montreal to create what we hope will be strong connections between our two developer communities. It was exciting to see 50 developers work to produce a series of applications over a 6 hour window. Congratulations everyone and keep on coding!
HackMTL APIs
We have an incredible number of people and companies to thank for the success of HackMTL so please stay tuned for our next blog post and the announcement for our next hacking event in a city near you!
HackMTL Prizes and Judges: it is not all just for the glory!
Now that the HackMTL APIs have been announced, I am sure you are all rolling up your sleeves and preparing for Saturday! Let us then introduce the HackMTL judges who will review the applications you built and let us tell you about the prizes you will score!
Drum roll for: Raymond Luk, Fred Brunel, and Mark O’Sullivan
Raymond is the founder of Flow Ventures, a consulting firm and venture accelerator based in Montreal. He is also the founder of ArtAnywhere. He was a founding executive of Aptilon Corporation, a publicly traded software company, as well as founder of Opendesk Corp. and HBE Software Inc. He has played numerous operational roles in his ventures covering strategy, financing, R&D, operations, human resources and sales.
Raymond is an active Angel investo and a member of the Board of Directors of Anges Quebec and is co-chair of the National Angel Capital Association 2010 Summit. Besides starting and investing in startups, Raymond is heavily involved in Canada’s startup community. He is the founder of StartupDrinks Canada and Chips for Trips, a charity poker tournament that provides travel subsidies for entrepreneurs.
Frederic Brunel is the CTO of WhereCloud, a company providing strategy, design and product development services for the iOS platform. They help innovative startups and big brands to go mobile. With over 15 years of high-tech industry experience, Frederic has built innovative technologies & products in a wide range of domains; from real-time 3D video games, mobile applications, high-availability IT architectures to web applications.
In early 2000, he was a pioneer in mobile gaming services as the software architect of an innovative high-availability gaming and delivery platform. The platform serves million of mobile players accross the world and was the first of its kind to allow players to purchase and download games titles from an embedded store (like the Apple “App Store”). Also, being part of the Advanced Technology Group, he did research & development of next-generation mobile games taking advantage of high-speed 3G networks, accelerated 3D graphics to build real-time persistent multiplayer worlds.
Mark O’Sullivan is the founder of Vanilla, open-source community software that powers discussions on over 500,000 sites around the world. Vanilla is the simple way to grow online communities, allowing you to join & manage the discussions taking place around your product, brand, or business.
These are the judges who will be standing between you and the HackMTL prizes! Work to impress them and you will win:
- 1st Prize: Macbook Air: 11 inch and 128 GB, 1.4GHz intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 2 GB memory, 128GB flash storage and an awesome flight on a Piper Cherokee!
- 2nd Prize: iPad and a Mesh Conference (Canada’s web conference) ticket
- 3rd Prize: A Kindle (wi-fi) and a Micro github plan for one year
Happy coding!
Thank you RPM. You are our hero!
HackMTL is run by volunteers and as such we rely on the kindness of our community and sponsors to make our events happen. For HackMTL happening on Saturday November 27th in Montreal, we have many sponsors to thank but we wanted to single out one in particular because without them this entire dream would not have seen the light of day.
Corey and I have been organizing events for quite some time now and you know what is the hardest thing to find? A space. That’s right. And not because there is a lack of space in any city (Toronto or Montreal) but because when you are organizing a geek event you want to be in a space that understands that, that is fully wired, that is supportive of the event you are trying to organize and that in a single word is going to be AWESOME. RPM is that and more.
RPM is a shared co-working space in Montreal’s Griffintown district. It has everything entrepreneurs need to build their businesses. It’s an informal place to get work done, with plenty of bandwidth and great coffee. RPM is also home to some great Montreal startups including bitcurrent, bitnorth, DokDok, Vanilla Forum (the best forum plaftorm in the world!), Year One Labs.
So, hackers, geeks, developers, friends of the universe, give me a hand in thanking RPM Montreal. Alistair Croll and Ian Rae are our heros!
HackMTL: Ready, Set, Go! APIs
We are super excited for this HackMTL and are looking forward to welcoming all of you on Saturday November 27, 2010 at 9 AM sharp. You have all been waiting for the API line up so here it is (in alphabetical order). I am personnaly looking forward to some awesome applications to be released during HackMTL.
Iambik makes audio of books they love. Iambik is a bit different from traditional audiobook publishers, though. They partner with print publishers and authors, and work with a collective of skilled independent audiobook makers around the world. They record new books and old ones, great books that have been overlooked by traditional audio publishers. They work almost exclusively on a revenue-share basis, with narrators, publishers/authors, and iambik all sharing in successful audiobooks. Their API works with Librivox titles currently.
CakeMail is a white label email marketing platform. CakeMail Takes email marketing one step further with an interface that looks and feels like your very own product. CakeMail provides total control over branding and the ability to manage multiple clients. Their fully loaded API the CakeEngine API includes more features then the CakeMail application itself! But… you will need to wait until Saturday to get direct access to this API.
Cineti.ca is a simple way to access movie showtimes in Montreal. Get the API documentation.
DokDok enhances your email inbox to make it easy to find, compare and work on versions of email attachments. Their API has been in use in production for a few months and is already tracking more than 15 million emails in mailboxes kept in sync via IMAP.
FreshBooks supplies online billing services, allowing freelancers and small businesses manage their cashflow and get paid faster. The FreshBooks API allows 3rd party developers to expand and build on the FreshBooks platform. Access FreshBooks account data using HTTP and XML to create web and desktop applications that integrate with a FreshBooks account. The API documentation is online and implementation examples are a plenty!
Shopify is a hosted application that allows you to set up an online store to sell your goods. It lets you organize your products, customize your storefront, accept credit card payments through payment gateways, track and respond to orders — all without the hassle of running a physical store. The Shopify API is implemented as XML over HTTP using all four verbs (GET/POST/PUT/DELETE), basically a REST API! with full documentation.
Idée, the good folks who brought you TinEye – the greatest reverse image search engine ever! – will be providing access to their multicolor search called Piximilar. You won’t be seeing the documentation for this API until you show up on Saturday. But you can certainly start dreaming about the multicolor applications you can be creating. The API basically allows you to index images and make them searchable using colors. Very much like our own multicolor lab where you get to search 10 million creative commons Flickr images by color!
Yellow Pages Group is Canada’s largest directory publisher. The YellowAPI powered by the Yellow Pages Group provides access to a large database of Canadian business content and allows direct streaming of local search content including video, photos, ad thumbs and more. Get geo-localized listings for map overlays and proximity search. The API allows anyone to build their own applications and mashups by providing dynamic local business data. Get documentation for the YPG API
HackMTL: Everything you need to know
We are less than a week away from HackMTL and if you have yet to register you better hurry up as we will be sold out pretty soon! If you are registered and are wondering what to expect at HackMTL let us answer all your questions!
What is HackMTL?
A gathering of geeks, developer and hackers. We will spend the entire day building applications on top of some great APIs. These APIs will be announced tomorrow (Tuesday November 23, 2010). Support for the APIs will be provided the entire day so if you have any questions while working with the APIs, assistance will be right there.
Who attends HackDays events?
This is a developer event. So when you arrive, you will be expected to roll up your sleeves and start coding or join a team that’s coding an application and get involved to the best of your abilities. All developer levels are welcome. So don’t feel like you can’t participate because you are just learning, come and join us.
What can I build at HackMTL?
Anything you wish provided it is using some of the APIs provided. The applications you build will be your application.
Why do developers participate in HackMTL?
Well as Paul Graham said: “The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way.” We want to create many beautiful things hence HackDays!
Am I allowed to use third party APIs (APIs not provided via HackMTL) for my application?
Yes. But your usage of the third party APIs needs to be in addition to the HackMTL APIs. Also keep in mind that judging is partially based on utilization of the provided APIs, though, so their use should be prominent.
What if I don’t have an idea for an application by Saturday?
No problem, there will likely be many people who could use an extra brain for their ideas. Ask around during breakfast or Open Planning.
How large can the teams be? Can I work solo?
Teams can be as large or as small as you like. Solo is okay, too!
What is the Saturday schedule?
This is a full day event. HackMTL is being held at RPM. The RPM team has been wonderful at supporting us in Montreal and making their space available to us for the entire day. The day’s schedule is as follows:
- 9:00 – Breakfast and introductions
- 9:30 – API presentation: learn about the APIs available
- 10:15 – Open Planning: come up with hacking idea and build a team
- 10:30 – Hacking setup and start
- Noon – Lunch
- 1:00 – Hacking
- 5:00 – Application presentation – 5 minutes for each presenter!
- 6:00 – Judging and prizes
- 6:30 – Off to nearby pub for celebrations!
Will you feed us?
Yes! Awesome breakfast and lunch will be provided. Drinsk, snacks, cookies, fresh fruits will be available throughout the day. Beer after 5 PM.
What do you need to bring?
- Your Guestlist receipt (HackMTL will be sold out)
- Your laptop
- Your mobile device if you are developing a mobile app
- Cables, chargers and connectors for any of the above
What happens at the end of HackMTL?
We will wrap up HackMTL between 6:30 Pm and 7:00PM and will then head to a near by pub for a few celebratory drinks.
What will the HackMTL prizes be?
We will officially announce them on Tuesday November 23. But we hear the HackMTL prizes include a Macbook Air, an Ipad and a Kindle and perhaps more!
I am coming from Toronto, Ottawa or some other city to join HackMTL, can you help with accomodations?
We will do our best to connect you with local developers attending HackMTL who would be interested in hosting you. Leave us a comment below.
See you in Montreal! and Register now!
HackMTL APIs
We are 9 days away from HackMTL in Montreal and we are finalizing our API line up and prizes for the best applications developed during the hackday. So stay tuned for our next announcements. We are still considering APIs submissions until Monday November 22, 2010. If you are interested in including your API for HackMTL or are with a technology company that you think ought to be involved, drop us an email would love to hear from you.
To have your API considered you will need:
- A ready and released API (not something that is still under development!)
- API documentation
- Someone familiar with the API to attend HackMTL. We like to make sure that the API is supported during the hackday so that developers are not wasting time to try and find our answers in forums or via emails when they are on a tight development deadline
- Excitement for hacking!
API used in previous hackdays have included: Cadmus, Freebase (Metaweb/Google), Freshbooks, fxTrade from OANDA, Idée‘s API (PixMatch, Piximilar and Multicolor search), Internet Archive, PostRank and YellowAPI (Yellow Pages Group) amongst others.
Get involved!
[photo by Craig A Rodway]
HackDays across Canada!
Big news! We wrapped up the most recent HackTO in Toronto in September with a promise to come back with plans for our next Hack event. We’ve got something far more exciting than just another Hack event in Toronto: We are taking HackTO nation-wide and will be holding hacking events in Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary and many more cities across Canada. So please expect us, welcome us and come out to code!
We’re calling this traveling circus of mad-hackery HackDays — keep an eye out for us!
We’re still putting the full schedule together, but our first trans-Canada HackDay event will be “HackMTL” — in Montreal, on Saturday November 27th, 2010. We are actively looking for local Montreal companies to supply our eager hackers with APIs they can use. So what does it mean for HackMTL? The same successful formula as HackTO:
- Great APIs to work with
- Awesome developers to meet and team with
- We will provide an awesome space to work in, breakfast, lunch, snacks and API support and
- Fantastic prizes for the best applications and GLORY!
If you’re in Montreal, and spending a Saturday building new applications on top of some of the coolest public APIs around sounds like fun, come join us! Come with some friends and hack as a team, or just come on your own and make new friends while you hack. The last HackTO was a blast: peek at some of the applications built.
HackDays are run by volunteers — without the extraordinary support of our community and sponsors, well… there would be no HackDays! So without further ado let us introduce our latest sponsor: Yellow Pages.
Yellow Pages Group support is making it possible to hold HackDays events across Canada starting with Montreal. YPG recently opened its own API with the launch of YellowAPI to allow developers to tap into the more than 1.5 million business listings across Canada. We are very excited to grow our developer community and to meet you all. Stay tuned for HackMTL registration details!
