A Picture Perfect Photo Hack Day For Twilio
Time to read: 2 minutes
August 23, 2011
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The first ever Photo Hack Day was held in New York City this past weekend and the event made a splash in the city with a killer cast of sponsors, snacks a plenty and nearly 150 hackers in attendance.
Held at General Assembly, the 24 hour hackathon focused on photos encouraging developers to mash APIs from Aviary, Instagram, Flickr, 500px, Face.com and other image-centric services into their hacks. Competitors vied for $10,000 in prize money as well as a spot in New York’s legendary Times Square where the winning hack gets displayed by NASDAQ.
Photogenic Winners
Twilio hackers represented strongly over the weekend with a number of clever projects, including 2nd place finisher Honey Badger. Created by Abe Stanway and Misha Ponizil, the hack uses Face.com’s recognition API to determine if someone other than yourself is using your computer. The brilliantly titled hack then uses Twilio to shoot you a warning message via SMS to alert you of an unsavory element using your machine.
The overall Twilio prize winner taking home a Macbook Air and $600 in Twilio Credit was Michael Schonfeld with the elegant photo gallery chat app PhotoJabber. Using a bookmarklet users can select a photo on any webpage and chat via Twilio Client with other PhotoJabber users looking at the same photo.
Michael put together the hack at 3am after running into some roadblocks on another project he was working on. “The idea actually came up because I was trying really hard to come up with an original way of combining voice and photos,” Michael said. “I know everyone was going to do some sort of SMS voting, etc – and so I wanted to be unique.”
A Panorama of Ideas
Photo Hack Day featured many more Twilio integrated hacks, netting each participant $500 in Twilio credit. Here’s the rundown:
- Crowd Frames – Samantha John and Ben Moss: Text keywords you want to appear on a rotating billboard using the stunning photography from 500px.
- Slideboard – Brian Yang: A web interface for mobile devices and tablets to browse photography and send to friends via SMS.
- Peanut Gallery – Amin Haris: Timed gallery conversations using Twilio Client.
- Albumpl.us – Amir Shimoni: A live photo gallery where users vote via SMS, top photos rise to the top.
- Zone Minder – Jesse Chan-Norris: SMS notifications for time zones on photos, using FourSquare checkins.
- Tag Fight – David Huerta: Text in tags to compete on the photo currently displayed on the billboard.
Well done to all who participated – it was truly a photo finish.
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