Can we call the first Wix Hackathon a success?
Based on how the participants seemed to enjoy themselves and the number of completed applications, I think we can. 17 teams formed, breaking the traditional company structure. 16 working innovative applications were delivered. Some are on their way to the Wix Apps Market.
For the first Hackathon, we selected to focus on our new Applications API (see http://dev.wix.com). We asked our developers to build applications for this API, but did not restrict what ideas to follow. Developers, product, support and designers came up with different ideas for applications, formed the teams and delivered applications.
As preparations for the Hackathon, we first allowed 2 weeks to raise ideas and form teams. As we were focused on our API, we developed a vanilla API application based on Google App Engine that implements the API but does nothing else. It enabled teams to start hacking right away (the app is at https://github.com/wix/wix-gae-sample-app).
The Hackathon took place at Wix HQ, in Tel Aviv harbor, during Wednesday and Thursday, allowing people to work during the weekend. On Sunday, we had an exhibition were people could judge the different applications and vote for what they likes the most. The application with the most votes won. The two applications that took the lead are Affiligate for Amazon and Rolling Notes.
Affiligate for Amazon enables a site owner to promote Amazon products on their site. It also enables the site owner to display his own products on his site and get more sells via Amazon. Rolling Notes allows a site owner to update his site visitors with news and notifications.
The second runner up was the Countdown Clock application which adds a countdown clock for events on a site.
The third runner up was PhotoSynth with integration of the excellent 3D panoramic images display.
There are many more excellent applications like Yelp, DropBox, FlyToMe, AdSense and many more. Stay tuned for those applications soon to appear in our Wix App Market.
We have gained with the Hackathon a number of innovative apps, as well as a great fun company social event.
This post was written by Yoav Abrahami
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