hackathon Archive

If you are heading to Austin next month for the SXSW 2012 event, you may want to check out the “app hackathon” that will be held on March 9, 2012. Hackathons have become the big thing in the developer space over the past couple of years. The event will start at 7pm and will run through Saturday morning at 9am. The hackathon will be held at the Austin Music Hall which is within walking distance of the convention center.

The event organizers note, “More than 250 developers will create unique new iOS and Android software and HTML5 apps leveraging the latest in application programming interfaces (API) for these platforms.” The event is sponsored by Zypr (they provide an API to create voice controlled mashups) and it looks like there will be a push to build applications using the Zypr API.  I’ve never heard of Zypr – if you are new to it like me, check out Robert Scoble’s interview with Zypr’s parent company Pioneer. If you prefer text, here is an overview from Peter Bright at Ars Technica.

Register for the SXSW hackathon here.

Hackathons seem to be the hottest thing for developers this year. A hackathon brings together developers for a short period of time (usually one day or a weekend) and the idea is to hack on new ideas or technology. Last week Techcrunch held a three-day hackathon at their Disrupt conference — over 90 ideas were hatched during the event.

The Hackathon Austin group is bringing a news- and journalism-oriented hackathon to the city later this month. The event is described as, “…a collaboration of newsy people who understand communication and nerdy people who understand application development. Collaborative teams will conceive and define data-driven news applications, and build real, workable open source solutions that transform raw data into headline news.”

For this hackathon, the idea is for journalists and bloggers to come together with developers. There is a goal to work with openly-available data sets.

The hackathon will be held on October 16 at the Austin Community College. There isn’t a registration link (just this info document) that I could find so I guess you just have to show up and be ready to hack or be hacked.