Last Wednesday, we challenged our collective of senior coders, newbies and techies, to our first-ever hackathon, a competition to see who could build the best and most relevant app on our Oxygen platform–in just 23 hours!
This internal event was a company brainchild designed to not only celebrate, but to also vet our recently debuted SDKs for iOS and Android. Hackathon #1 started at 3pm PT Wednesday and ran right up to 2pm on Thursday.
After some ice cream to kickoff the competition, our team disbanded into groups of 3 to 6 and made a beeline to the nearest open office space, abuzz with ideas. Among these were an XBMC plug-in, a RISK-inspired board game “Island Hop”, and a couple other top-secret architecture design quests–all built on the Oxygen platform using our own APIs.
Fueled by coffee and sugar-free Red Bull, our team immersed themselves in strategy and execution of the challenge at hand.
And trust us, the stakes were high:
- $3000 to transform one of our open conference rooms
- Team dinners for 1st and 2nd place
- Opportunity to showcase apps to the public
Given all this unfettered excitement, our office was alive and active well beyond the wee hours of 2am the next morning. As competitive as we are, we couldn’t help cross-pollinating our knowledge with other teams.
Come time to crown the winner, our judges (which included our C.E.O Peter Chang) sure had a difficult time. So without further ado, here’s a preview of our winning ideas:
- 1st Place: A Workflow Automation Tool to enable users access (especially in the fast-paced, error-sensitive industries) to the most current data within milliseconds of a file update
- 2nd Place: A Lightweight Music Streaming App to stream and play the most expansive of mp3 libraries without ever waiting to download a single byte
Ideas to apps–it’s that easy. How? By using our patently simple and user-friendly SDKs, of course.
And the best takeaway from this event? That anyone, “not just developers, but everyone,” could pursue an idea and see it to fruition using our Oxygen SDKs. If we can push an idea to market–some new apps are coming to Google Market, folks!–in such a short burst of time, just imagine what other incredible things you can do with our platform.
Following the success of this hackathon, expect our next one to come in the near future, where the general public will finally get its chance.
Can’t wait to build an app on a platform that really matters? Join our Mobile Enterprise Alliance and get your hands on our SDKs.
We’ll see you at the next hackathon! Until then, enjoy the montage we compiled from our hackathon:
- Emma
@emmolam
