Mobile App Hackathon – Los Angeles Recap

The July 27th Mobile App Hackathon (Los Angeles) was held on the tourist favorite Hollywood Walk of Fame. Luckily, our venue was located towards the end of the walk where the parking was good and traffic was light at a facility called “io/LA,”an incubation facility focused on helping startups succeed. For those of you that didn’t get a chance to make it out to the event, here is a link to pictures from the event and here is a great write up about the event from Denise Walker, who was part of the Venue Pop team!

A big thanks goes out to Anywhere Science, OC Hackers and the senseis/mentors that helped out at the event over the course of the weekend. The attendees loved all of the help that you gave and we kept hearing about how wonderful you all were. With 40+ ideas presented at the beginning of the hackathon, we really have to tip our hats to the mentors for working with everyone’s ideas and helping the teams form. All told, 120+ attendees pumped out 22 apps at the end of the weekend, team management was no small feat.

The top app that pulled in the awards at the end of the weekend was FamilyHeartBeat with an app that provides centralized communication for family members who have a loved one in the hospital. If you have a family of a decent size, you know how difficult it can be to coordinate communication amongst as few as event three people. With larger families, communicating information gets more difficult when you weave in multiple hospital staff interactions with a multitude of family members especially with the added emotional stress of the situation. FamilyHeartBeat aims to centralize communication through a central location to post conversations and information individuals have gathered as well as serving the information out through SMS to everyone that is subscribed to the page.

Without further ado, here are the teams and their associated prizes/places:

SplitR – 1st Place General – Figuring out the bill when you have a large group can be stressful for everyone involved.  SplitR simplifies the process of figuring out who owes what by digitizing your bill and providing a simple interface for splitting the check.  In addition, the data generated can be anonymously uploaded to build a powerful database of restaurant prices that is searchable in app.  Unlike Yelp and similar services that only provide vague ratings like “three dollar signs” we can show actual prices and what people paid.

FlashCard Kid – 1st Place AT&T APIs – Fun educational game for kids and teachers.

Lightcycle Reconfigured – 3rd Place General – Cross-platform network multiplayer Tron-like game. The goal is to make people using any mobile device to be able to play together in real-time through a wifi connection. This will make friends want to buy the same app to play together regardless of their device. The objective of the game is kill your opponents by forcing them to crash.

PRESENTO – Create your next presentation with Presento, the next generation presentation builder with live interaction.

GoodzFinder – One of the problems of many web-based free classified advertisement web sites like Craigslist is that they lack mobile convenience and mobile capabilities. GoodzFinder brings the power of mobile in locating goods within your proximity.  From used toys and clothes to LCDs, you can find the perfect product wherever you are.”

Auction1 – Auction Tote Board App

Remedi – 1st Place mHealth APIs – Get a handle on your medical insurances the free and fast way. Remedi does all the work of organizing and categorizing your medical insurances for you on your mobile device. Alerts on appointments and prescription pick-up. Identify your provider information. Locate local physicians in your network. Access reviews of medical providers. Make healthcare decisions you feel good about.

tagg – With almost every aspect of our social lives going mobile, the life of paper business card is very limited. By creating a “tagg” profile with your business information (picture, name,  company, position, twitter handle and short bio) and then using a QR badge to network, managing your new connections (“taggs” ) from start to finish could never be easier. Current cool features include: being able to update/customize your tagg to remain unique for different types of events, as well as receiving a QR code through your email.

Manipulyte – You create a digital board game and play it with your friends

SayHi – SayHi, the easiest way to keep in touch with people you care about

PayMate – PayMate is an app that helps you manage money borrowed between family and friends.

GetMyApps – This app is going to be the first app you’d download on your new ANDROID device. PERIOD.

vTagger – Home/Small Business (NFC and QR Code ) tag reader/writer. Each tag created or sold by vDex.com will have a UUID. Additional metadata can be added to help with searching and organization. vDex.com aim is the be the repository and search engine for NFC and QR Code tags. vTagger is our first effort to help populate vDex.com with content. Version 2 of vTagger will introduce virtual tags (vTags). Example: use one of our coupon templates to create a sale item, add your metadata, then publish.

Deal Flash – 1st Place AWS – Buy and Sell products and services locally to your neighbors, friends, colleague and those who are around you.

G2G – “Do what you love. Do it with trusted people. Do it anywhere.” G2G is a social platform that allows people to do their favorite activities anywhere in the world. It pairs guests with local hosts who share a passion for the same activity.  Guests choose from trusted local hosts who offer local services or bid to be their match.

The Loop – An app that teaches programming to kids

EMRlite – Each time a patient visits a different doctor, the same forms must be filled out with pretty much the same information. What if a medical record that fit on a business card or an image on your phone held that information? And could be updated easily and quickly without refilling out the entire medical record form? EMRlite solves that problem.Besides reducing the redundancy and physical size of an EMR, this increases portability, and can also augment health systems in developing countries.

FamilyHeartbeat – 2nd Place Overall & 1st Place Apigee Usergrid – An app that is a centralized communication tool that helps keeps families together in a time of need. Our iPad app allows all family members to keep up with the status of a hospitalized regardless if they are on Facebook, have a smartphone or simply a feature rich phone. Best of all its controlled on a secure and private network. So keep your family business within the family and keep the family on the same heartbeat.”

FreeBike Project – FreeBike Project is the Toms Shoes of Bicycle sponsorship;
www.freebikeproject.com/media

VenuePop – 1st Place Cloud Architect – Venue Pop is a venue based social media application. We provide a trivia game that requires a facebook login and gives venues marketing information about their customers. The game is fun, engaging and allows venues to get key information about their customers demographics.