We, who are about to hack, salute you

When we heard that BarCamp London 8 was postponed we worked with the BarCamp team to create a new kind of event within the following constraints:

• It had to be set up quickly
• People couldn’t stay overnight
• It had to incorporate people’s desire to watch the England vs USA World Cup match and Doctor Who
• People were flying in who didn’t have a place to stay during the weekend

I’m pleased to say that the community pulled together and we succeeded. The result was 100 people hacking away in the Google London canteen. They may not have been engaged in a battle to the death but there was definitely a gladiatorial undertone to the hacks that were put before the judges. We had judges and API presentations from companies including mFlow, Twitter, Yahoo and GigJunkie who awarded a range of prizes.

There were some amazing hacks including:

• BrowserToPhone: An iPhone version of our ChromeToPhone project.
• Tariff Finder: A Firefox extension to see how much a foreign product *really* costs to import.
• Pianoe: A real-time, multi-user, piano jam session. HTML5 client with NodeJS back-end.
• Mapnificent: which shows you how far you can get on a nightbus in London.
• Gigamajig: which shows you the nearest musical gigs based on your musical tastes according to last.fm.

The overall winning hack was by Lisa van Gelder with GU-Recipes: which aggregates recipes published by the Guardian newspaper and allows users to browse them by chef or ingredient.

Posted by: Ade Oshineye, Developer Advocate

Photos: http://www.flickr.com/groups/hackcamp/pool/