Most incubators aim to help startups land funding for their ideas, but one healthcare technology startup is aiming to change this model. Prebacked hosts pre-incubation programs that get customers (large enterprises, such as Fortune 500 companies) to pitch the problems they are facing to early-stage startup teams, rather than the other way around.

The teams then build innovative, scalable solutions to solve these challenges. Winners land a revenue-generating contract with the enterprise.

“We call ourselves a reverse hackathon because we source together talented teams and pair them up with major enterprise clients,” its co-founder and former healthcare strategy consultant Chris Edell said in an interview with VentureBeat. “Our goal is new disruptive innovations and to act as a pipeline for the best talent.”

This past weekend Prebacked hosted 25 teams of three to five people, recruited from hackathons and code-a-thons, at one of its reverse hackathons in Campbell, Calif. Prebacked pitched three problems to the groups to solve. Prebacked judges will analyze the teams’ presentations on May 11. A 90-day incubation period follows, along with an integration stage in which enterprise will sign a major contract with the winning startup(s).

Hackathon program

Sameer Sonalkar, chief technology officer of the health insurance company Wellmark, works with Prebacked to select winners and come up with healthcare problems to solve.

“Because of healthcare reform, the industry is going through significant challenges,” Sonalkar said in an interview with VentureBeat. “The operating models are going to change; prices are going to change. We will need to adopt systems and solutions to help communities.”

Edell added that it also provides Wellmark with an incredible innovation channel at low price.

After being selected, Wellmark writes the team a letter of intent that indicates it is interested in seeing what the team can produce during the incubation period. These teams are also invited to weekly private events, dinners and mixed with top industry and venture capital (VC) executives.

“This attracts micro VCs and sends a signal that you’re a startup close to landing major deal with large enterprise,” Edell said.

An example of a past challenge Prebacked worked on was how technology lowers costs for the disabled/handicapped. The Prebacked team, which eventually became Benevolent Technologies For Health (BETH), built a low-cost prosthetic.  The team built a mold using coffee grounds and ground walnut shells, which conform to the body. The company is now in discussions with Band of Angels and other VCs.

Prebacked also poses questions like this one: “Different health care providers often charge different rates for the same procedure. Members are unaware since they only pay a flat co-pay per visit. There is no incentive to ‘shop around,’ contributing to excess health spend. What technologies can you build to: increase transparency of costs to our members and actively engage them to ‘shop around’?” Solutions could garner up to $100,000 rewards.

“Prebacked, at its core, stems out of Chris and I realizing it’s critical that we get enterprise and startup people talking,” said Prebacked co-founder and startup veteran Garrett Dunham in an interview with VentureBeat. “Coming from oil and water, we still are able to mix. Other people are doing it wrong by focusing on one to the extreme; it’s about having a balancing act between the two.”

Dunham said they also hope to alleviate some entrepreneurs’ fears of navigating the territory of acronyms, $1 million fines, regulations and a massive industry with insane amount of capital.

Competitors include 2020 VC and TechStars. Prebacked was founded in March 2012 and their first successful event was in October 2012.

The May 4 and 5 event included three C-suite executives from health insurance, three Blue Cross Blue Shield plans participating, five partners from Venture Capital firms and over 100 attendees.

Top image: Prebacked founders: Garrett Dunham (left) and Chris Edell (right). Photo credit: Courtesy

This month, Facebook and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will be hosting two events to get hackers to channel their attentions on education.

The hackathon series, called HackEd, is expected to bring together ed-tech advocates, top-shelf technologists, and education experts to solve mission-critical problems in education systems around the world. The hackathons will take place at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters on April 9 and at the company’s London offices April 24.

As far as teams go, Facebook reps told us via email that more than 20 teams will be participating — including a few all-women teams and a few Facebook engineers, as well.

“Historically, the notion of the ‘achievement gap’ has been thought of as primarily academic,” a Facebook rep said in an email.

“The debate has focused on the long-term structural challenges — improving teacher quality, creating school choice, and other issues. These are all important issues but in the age of social media, we have an opportunity to achieve real progress right now. Today’s websites and online service providers give children and teens access to an unprecedented variety of resources to foster and support teaching and learning. They also connect the community — parents, educators, teens.”

During the hackathons, teams will focus on building Facebook apps for college-going, social learning, and out-of-school study. At the California event, a panel of judges will award $5,000 prizes to the best apps in several categories. For the London event, the top three teams in the social learning category will be awarded £5,000, £3,000,and £1,000 respectively.

Last year’s HackEd event, a California-only affair, drew a crowd of 150 developers and focused on helping college-age kids find financial aid, academic support, and academic pathways to college admittance and graduation.

“At the Gates Foundation, one of our priorities is unlocking the power of innovation and technology to impact learning,” said a rep in a statement on the hackathons.

“We do this by investing in new kinds of courseware, tools, and systems for improving the progress and success of students, and by encouraging new, agile developers to enter the sector. We are excited to support the creation of more digital tools that use technology to target young people where they spend their time, and help many more students prepare for, get into, and succeed in postsecondary education.”

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This month, I participated in an epic hack trip on the “StartupBus” — and it was the 12th hackathon I’ve been a part of in as many months.

I love everything about hackathons. The idea of simultaneously building relationships, teams and products for a fleeting moment under various constraints is fascinating, exciting and educational — and most of all, fun.

But post-judging, participants typically feel disillusioned. When they don’t win, the team is bitterly disappointed. When they do win, they argue over who gets what part of the prize. It happens nearly every time.

I’ve watched this again and again, and thought, “Isn’t this just about having a good time? Just relax!”

On the StartupBus from San Francisco to Austin, I got to know lots of brilliant, friendly people and was inspired by the ideas and passion of every team involved in the event. For those unfamiliar, it’s an annual 72 hour hackathon on a bus ride to the tech conference SXSW.

If there’s a better way to transition from a group of strangers to a tight-knit group of friends in 72 hours, I have yet to see it. From the lack of sleep to the sprints of work to the downtime without internet to the confined space to the rest stops to the steady stream of alcohol to the hard, looming deadline; everything about StartupBus seems designed to make you walk away with some new best friends.

As the week progressed, six buses from six cities converged in San Antonio. Emotions, stress and energy fluctuated aggressively. After the first round, half the teams were eliminated. After the second round, half the teams were eliminated. In the final round, 8 teams remained — mine included.

Each time we progressed, I was thrilled to see my team move forward, but disheartened to see the road end for other teams that worked just as hard as we did. And after each round, there was more chatter of disillusionment around the whole event. In some cases it was petty, while in others totally justified (as was the case for the teams Robert Scoble was admittedly disrespectful to.)

In the final hours, my team rallied and got really excited about our prospects in the event. We perfected phrases, designed a pitch deck, planned transitions and talked about what would happen if we won. Then we lost.

Shortly after, we joined in on the negativity party. “The judges didn’t understand our product vision,” we said. One brilliant losing team had built an anonymous chat platform called Ghostpost, so without missinga beat they created a #losers room where we could all complain behind the cloak of anonymity. One person even complained on StartupBus’ public blog. Nearly every losing team was complaining about something, myself included.

It took me a bit to realize that I was engaging in the same exact behavior I’ve watched with bemusement at past hackathons.

Once I realized that, I looked around me. I saw a group of people whom I know will be successful as they push onward, because I’ve seen them go through hell and still come out on top.

Suddenly, I was smiling again. The event was never about prizes and pitches and organizers and judges and equity. It was hardly even about product development and traction. StartupBus was about people and shared experience, and I got my fair share of each.

I’ll never forget being in a taxi at four in the morning with five people from five different countries, all of whom made the bold decision to go out to the San Antonio bars despite having slept just a handful of hours in several days. I’ll never forget working until 6am in a random town in New Mexico, as the rising sun glistened on the self-proclaimed “World’s Largest Chili Pepper” outside the hotel.

Most importantly, I often think about that ephemeral moment when I came together with three strangers and nothing mattered except moving our project forward, regardless of the outcome. Those strangers are now my friends.

Next time you find yourself at a hackathon, consider this: If you and your team want that first place iPad Mini so badly, couldn’t you find a couple of hours of contract work and buy it? If that decidedly easier path to the prize isn’t as alluring, then think for a minute about why you’re participating in the hackathon.

And if you win, great. Winning is fun, and the aspect of competition is key in making hackathons fun. Of course, I wish I had won StartupBus.

But if you participate in hackathons just to win hackathons, then you’re missing the point.

Austin Smith is the community manager at Singly, a service for transmitting personal data between applications. 

Follow him on Twitter @awwstn

photo credit: hackNY via photopin cc

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The White House just posted this video from its recent We the People API hackathon. The group that gathered — twenty-one souls, all told — wasn’t the crowd we’re used to seeing at some hackathon events. Still, these folks were there to support a great cause: increasing access to the White House petitions system.

We the People is based on the First Amendment principle that every citizen has the right to petition the federal government “for a redress of grievances.” The We the People website and API attempt to bring that principle and promise into the current and future centuries by digitizing tools for submitting and circulating petitions.

From the White House’s official blog post:

By the time the sun set over Washington on the 22nd, sixteen people got up to share their projects with a room packed with other hackers and guests from around the White House. Among them was Mick Thompson, who created Where the People, a time-lapse visualization of zip codes where petitions are being signed, weighted for signatures by percentage of population. Douglas Back built Widget the People, a tool that lets you create an embeddable thermometer showing how many signatures your petition needs before it reaches the response threshold. Catherine D’Ignazio developed an embeddable map that shows where signatures came from, right down to the zip code level. Yoni Ben-Meshulam’s R We the People is a package for the R statistics environment that allows users to generate word clouds and visualize the issues that petitions are created about over time. Other projects included a dashboard that predicts when petitions will cross the 100,000 signature threshold, documentation and step-by-step primers on using the API, email alert systems that inform you when a petition on an issue you care about has been created, and more. …

By letting this group of smart people work with an early version of the API, by helping them come up with their own ideas and bring them to life, we found ways to make both We the People and its API better. Some of the projects from the hackathon will be released as open source code, or incorporated into We the People itself, but all of them helped the team from the White House find ways to make the API more flexible, better documented, and easier to use when it’s officially released.

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StartupBus is a hack week with a twist: you board a bus filled with strangers, and 1800 miles later, you’re expected to demo a product to a roomful of influential investors and journalists.

No pressure or anything.

Participants will tell you that StartupBus is the mother of all hackathons. You’re not just assessed on building a product, but also on your market vision and the traction you can generate.

Imagine building a real startup in a compressed time capsule traveling at 60 miles per hour.

It’s physically exhausting, mentally consuming, and it’s definitely not the most glamorous thing in the world.  You’re constantly outside of your comfort zone, never alone, and the experience is filled with moments of ambiguity and uncertainty. These constraints are intentional — the goal is to create a unique kind of experience that only certain personality types can thrive in.

The organization is run by alumni, and the energy and passion that goes into executing this event is directly transferred to the participants. The application process is no joke. You have to be referred by someone from a previous StartupBus trip, then you write up an application and get interviewed.

When I explain StartupBus to other people, it occurs to me we’re all a little crazy to try it. The premise doesn’t make any sense: building a technology product on the road from San Francisco to Austin with intermittent wifi. Ladies might not love the idea of spending the night in hotels sharing beds with teammates you just met. Wake up calls at the crack of dawn? As if launching a startup wasn’t already a crazy enough thing to do!

So why did I do it?

I had been working with the wrong cofounder on my startup and was in the process of figuring out next steps.  The timing seemed perfect and I had never been to the Austin-based tech conference SXSW, which StartupBus coincides with.  I figured it was the most productive use of my time and that I’d learn a lot along the way.

What I found interesting was that most people were in a similar position as me — they were experiencing inflection points both personally and professionally and trying to figure out next steps.

I’ve outlined the top five takeaways from my StartupBus experience below:

1. Discover new skills: Any experience that puts you outside your comfort zone will help uncover new aspects of yourself that you may not be aware of. I learned for instance that I am extremely good at performing in high pressure situations, pitching to investors, and am comfortable interviewing on camera. Had I not participated in StartupBus, I would have never been exposed to interviewing with press from all over the world or pitching ideas under the gun.
2. Make new friends: It’s always great to gain more experience with different team dynamics and working with strong personalities. The interaction of the StartupBus Alumni community is testament to how powerful this experience is in creating new relationships, it really is a global family. I’ve made some lifelong friendships on the bus and some participants ended up starting companies together. The possibilities are endless, you just have to be open to it.
3. Test your product ideas: If you have a few ideas that you’ve been brewing for years, StartupBus is the perfect environment to test them. Pitch an idea to the bus, and if you are successful in recruiting a team that believes in your vision, you’ll get a chance to experience building an MVP for real investors.
4. Disrupt your outlook: I wanted to come back from this experience with a perspective on what I should do next. If you’re going through a transition period and are trying to figure out what you’re passionate about, this environment will help you figure it out.
5. Be Open to Serendipity: There were plenty of moments during the journey when I had no idea where I was, where we were going, when we were stopping, and what would happen the next day — you learn to go with the flow. The value of SXSW is meeting new people and you need to make sure you’re open to that, and actively putting yourself in a position to have that happen.

The StartupBus environment provides a glimpse of what entrepreneurship is like without any of the risk or negative consequences. And like any experience, you will get out of it as much as you put in.

If this sounds like like the perfect match for you, we are inviting the first 50 VentureBeat readers to apply here. I will be the West Coast conductor, and we’ll set off to Austin on March 3rd.

Falon spends her time advising and consulting startups on everything from product development to launch strategy and is passionate about taking life changing technology mainstream. She was most recently was a Partner at MkII Ventures, had a failed dating startup, and was Head of Business Development for Firespotter Labs.

Falon began her career at Google at 19 and graduated from Santa Clara University with a BS in Finance and emphasis in Computer Engineering and Entrepreneurship.

In her 6+ years at Google, she developed her love and talent for sales strategy, operations, and business development while holding variety of roles across syndication partnerships, Google.org, and YouTube. You can subscribe to follow her updates at facebook.com/falonfatemi or follow her on twitter @falonfatemi.

Startup Bus image via Facebook

Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s most well-known incubator, is finally getting onboard with the hackathon, an event trend so well-established it’s almost passé. But the YC twists keep the concept fresh and will definitely interest a bevy of developers.

The YC event will be centered around hardware, and participants will have a clear shot and becoming Y Combinator funded companies if their work is promising.

Hardware hackathons themselves are a relatively new concept; they allow attendees to design, hack on, and improve hardware of all kinds, from server racks to — well, one’s imagination is the only limit.

The hackathon is being run by Upverter, a DEMO-launched company we’ve been following with great interest. Upverter gives hardware hackers valuable software for creating, sharing, and collaborating around hardware designs.

Upverter recently conducted a two-day hardware hackathon for the Open Compute Project, a Facebook-led organization for open-source hardware — specifically, open-source data center hardware. Upverter co-founder Zak Homuth told VentureBeat via email that hackathon participants took their designs “all the way from idea to hardware in just nine hours. … All of the hacks are mostly complete, very demoable, and some ready to manufacture.”

Homuth said he expects the same for the YC hackathon. “[The] plan is to get 80 or so teams together, enable them with tools, then much like the OCP hack, we expect they will spend most of the hack designing new hardware, adding features to their existing hardware startups products, and most importantly meeting like minded hackers.

“Hopefully some future YC companies get formed!”

However, while the OCP hardware hackathon was all about servers, Homuth expects a wildly different focus (or lack of focus) from the YC crowd. “Imagine stuff like Fitbit, Pebble, Lockitron, Wattvision, Double Robotics, etc.

“I want to see more quantified self stuff. More sensors. More small distributed smart phone connected hardware 2.0. Cyborgs FTW.”

If you want to play ball, you’ll need to start working now to refine your idea, learn about the available tools for hardware design, start working on a design diagram, and get your laptop environment squared away for the big day.

Interested parties can apply online. The event will take place February 23, 2013, at YC’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. Accepted participants will be notified by February 8, 2013.

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The beginning of a startup’s life is well-documented. There are the Redbull fueled white boarding sessions, epic all-night coding marathons, and a constant stream of pitching. But once a product is built, launched, and attracting a respectable stream of users and perhaps even investment, many entrepreneurs wonder “what now?”

Growth, for a startup, can be a complicated balancing act of acquiring users, building a team, scaling to meet demand, entering new markets, expanding marketing efforts, and developing the product itself. The Growthathon is a conference and a hackathon where a group of entrepreneurs, engineers, marketing gurus, and mentors will come together to tackle distribution and acquisition issues.

“Most startups on the market have the same pain point of finding users,”  said Ken Zi Wang, founder of FanDrop, in an interview with VentureBeat. “Many startups spend months designing and engineering their products, but struggle to find the right distribution channels before running out of cash. This is an issue that relates to companies of all sizes.”

FanDrop is Wang’s third company. He is both an organizer and a participant of the event and said there is a strong need for this type of a community, particularly with all the discussion circulating about the “Series A Crunch,” where seeded startups cannot prove their product enough to attract institutional investment. Unlike angel investors or firms that focus on early-stage, traction is an important factor for venture capitalists to consider before doling out millions.

But how do you achieve this elusive and fickle traction? This is the nut the Growthathon will try to crack.

Aaron Ginn, the other instigator for this event, first got into “growth hacking” when the doors were about to close on his first startup. Faced with failure, he and his fellow team members hunkered down to keep their company afloat. He has turned that experience into a position as the Head of Growth at StumbleUpon and will act as a featured mentor at the Growthathon.

“Distribution is the number one challenge facing startups right now,” he said. “It is a saturated market and Silicon Valley is all about growth. As Paul Graham said, startup = growth. The difference between a startup and a small business is rapid growth, but people have forgotten that. At the Growthathon, we will want companies to know the core problem they are trying to solve, the core metrics, and what it will take to move it. We need the same diligence on the distribution side as we have on the product side.”

There are seven companies participating in the event- Fandrop, FamilyLeaf, ApartmentList, Carrot Mob, Intro, Wello, and Crowdtilt. Each will come to the event with a set of growth challenges and pose them to a group of experts. Over the course of the week, these “growth hackers” will play, experiment, and hack to achieve their goals. It will all culminate in an awards ceremony on December 15th when each team will present their progress and receive prizes, if deserving.

CrowdTilt is a startup that went through YCombinator and raised $2.1 million earlier this year. It was founded as a place where friends could pool their money together online for a specific purpose. Unlike Kickstarter and and Indiegogo which mostly feature creative and business projects, Crowdtilt focuses on enabling group experiences or shared causes. The company has been chugging along nicely, with large campaigns successfully “tilting” on the platform and a national use base. However, like with most consumer-facing startups, the more users, the better.

“We wanted to see how people unfamiliar with Crowdtilt would apply their ‘growth hacking’ skills to drive new traffic to our website,” said Marek Zareba, who deals with user acquisition at Crowdtilt. “We’re excited to listen to some out-of-the box ideas and see how quickly these teams can execute on their ideas.” 

In addition to the hackathon, the event will also feature expert talks, mentoring sessions, and networking opportunities. Wang said in the four weeks since they first had the idea, there have been tremendous displays of support and the project has grown into a “mini ecosystem.” It may not be as sexy as the excitement of getting an idea of the ground, but to build a legitimate, profitable, successful company, growth is key. Got milk?

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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In honor of Veteran’s Day, I wanted to dedicate Startup Spotlight to entrepreneurs with military experience, or who were working on projects to benefit the veteran community. I found a company that embodies both.

Women Veterans Connect is an online community for women who have served in the military. At its core, it is a network where women veterans can connect, exchange stories, engage with peer mentors, and find relevant information. Jo Ann Martinez founded the organization after serving in the Air Force and receiving strong support from an informal group of women veterans. She realized not everyone had the same access to this network and set out to create WVC.

“I have been immersed in the women’s veterans community since day 1,” Martinez said. “These are all women whose stories I know personally, and I realized that we typically don’t ask for help until we are in crisis. I took on project after project trying to figure out what to do, and it finally came down to stopping, looking back at all the reasons why things failed, and doing the opposite. My expertise was with women’s veterans. I wanted to serve that community for all the mentoring they provided me and I wanted to contribute by helping them successfully reintegrate into the community.”  

After multiple unsuccessful attempts to get something off the ground, Martinez met the Katherine Webster, the woman behind TechCentral SF and VetsInTech. That encounter led her to attend the first ever VetsInTech hackathon in March. Up until this point, Martinez taught herself basic elements of front end development and design, but knew that to launch a fully-featured web-based platform, she would need more education and help. Much to her surprise, her team placed third and she found the bridge she needed from the military world into the technology world.

“I think veterans make great entrepreneurs,” she said. “Military personal go through so many leadership programs, it makes sense. Plus, we have all the work ethic and commitment that is involved. The Air Force core values are integrity, service before self, and excellence in all we do. I still apply this win my everyday life.”

Many members of the military also receive extensive training in math, science, engineering, and logistics, which can provide a solid foundation to learn programming. Furthermore, startup life can be a desirable route for veterans who struggle to find more traditional forms of unemployment.

“People getting out of the military can have a stigma,” she said. “We’ve got employers out there that are not going to say this directly, but they might look at you as a liability. Veterans come back after multiple deployments, some with PTSD, to a weakened economy and it can be really really difficult to get a job. This is why entrepreneurship becomes attractive for us.”

Women Veterans Connect is not only about supporting returned military personnel, but also about supporting women. Technology and the military are both male-dominated industries and part of Martinez’s mission is to encourage women to throw themselves headfirst into these worlds, even when it can be intimidating.

“I had my daughter in the same year that this idea was born,” she said. “It is my mission to not just tell her, but actually show her all of the possibilities that we are capable of as women. In my experience, women are always willing to make more out of less, whereas men are asking for more and getting more. What I hope happens down the road is women veterans show up more and there are more women overall in tech community.”

The WVC officially incorporated as a non-profit in April 2012. It currently focuses its efforts on the 167,000 women veterans in California, but the vision is to expand the platform nationwide and hopefully gain some influence at the government level.

While women veterans comprise a relatively small segment of the population, Martinez strives to make the services and her vision relatable to the rest of the country. She wants to honor the accomplishments of women veterans, beyond their military service, and tell stories that not only provide recognition, but inspiration.

For more information about this weekend’s VetsInTech hackathon, click here. 

Startup Spotlight is a new weekly series that features a company with a unique idea or story to tell. If your company would like to be considered, please submit an application at http://venturebeat.com/news-tips/.

Facebook has announced the winners of its around-the-world hackathon: Three teams from a diverse smattering of countries around the globe.

The champions of the hour are the Paperclip.io team from Taipei, the Unchained Developers team from Buenos Aires, and the BoostMate team from Moscow.

These grand-prize-winning teams will all get free trips to Facebook’s Menlo Park campus to meet with its engineers (and we’re pretty sure at least a couple of job offers may be thrown around, too).

Facebook’s Developer World Hack kicked off back in August as a two-month series of hackathon events for software developers. Each hackathon lasted a full day, and each team (or solo developer) had to build an app on the Facebook Open Graph, with the best apps winning the grand prize.

The winning teams came up with some cool ideas. Paperclip.io indexes and sorts the things you’ve liked on Facebook and across the web, giving you a simple way to browse your likes by category or by the date you liked them.

The winning Buenos Aires team came up with Chained Story, a web version of a storytelling game in which players take turns adding a sentence or paragraph to a story. The completed story can be published to a user’s timeline.

Finally, BoostMate, the grand prize winner from Moscow, analyzes your social graph and the connections you have with all your friends. It then yields a ranking of your network, including people you interact with most and least and whether those interactions were positive.

The hackathon series took place in cities around the world, including Austin, Vancouver, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Berlin, Barcelona, Warsaw, Moscow, Taipei, Jakarta, and Bangalore. Altogether, the events brought out more than 2,000 developers and 330 app demos.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Silicon Valley hackathons, once the pinnacle of nerd cool, are typically thrown today by new-to-the-area startups who don’t know any better.

In the Bay Area, if your tech company needs to expand its core team of engineers (join the club!), you better have an acquisition budget. Alternatively, hop a flight to the East Coast, where hackathons like Pennapps are the epicenter of a nascent hacker community.

Pennapps, I’m told, is now the largest student-run hackathon in the world. This year, 320 students from over 30 East Coast schools participated in the event, which took place September 14-16.

“It’s exciting for me to see how the culture of campuses, especially on the east coast, is changing,” said Dan Getelman, the chief technical officer of learning-management startup Lore. “Even a couple of years ago, a lot of the hackers at PennApps would have been destined for banking, but now they’re getting to experience the thrill of building thing and hacking.”

Lore is one of the sponsors of the event. A few of its young founders participated last year, before dropping out of the University of Pennsylvania to work on their venture-backed company full-time. At Pennapps, big-name tech companies like Facebook, Dropbox, and Twitter were also waiting in the wings, hoping to catch a few minutes with the most talented coders.

As is typical with hackathons, no one slept or showered for 48 hours. Illuminated by computer screens, students sit in silence, and the only sound you hear is the furious tapping of laptop keys. As fans of the movie The Social Network know, this kind of intense all-night hacking led to the development of Facebook by young collegiate Mark Zuckerberg during his time at Harvard.

Investors, increasingly looking to feed tech talent into their portfolio companies (Bain Capital Ventures’ Startup Academy is a good example), were also in attendance. As you’d expect, the winners were given the opportunity to participate in hackathons and internships in Silicon Valley for the summer. Check out the full list of sponsors here.

As with all worthwhile hackathons, one of the projects has already gone viral. Hack My Facebook, a site you can use to mock-hack your own Facebook account to play a practical joke on your friends, won a $500 prize from AddThis. The big winners of the weekend were:

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Today, Facebook is announcing Developer World HACK 2012, a two-month series of hackathon events for software devs.

Given the world’s rabid interest in events like f8, the company’s developer conference, and its Mobile HACK Roadshow earlier this spring, bringing more Facebook hackathons to more developers makes a ton of sense. Since demand for these events is so high, register soon to secure your place at the upcoming hackathons.

“The World HACK series is designed to bring the Facebook Developer story to a new set of cities — homes to some of the world’s most vibrant and fast-growing developer communities,” writes Facebook developer advocate James Pearce on the company blog.

“This year, to recognize that talented developer communities we meet around the globe, the best team we see on each continent will also win a trip to San Francisco to visit our campus and meet the Facebook team.”

Facebook’s got a soft spot for hackers. The developer-centric company wrote an open love letter to the “hacker way” in its official IPO documents, and it hosts the annual Hacker Cup contest, a programming competition that brings the best of the technical best to Silicon Valley to compete. And its new campus sports multiple signs, both hidden and obvious, paying homage to the art and science of hacking.

For the World HACK series, each event will last a full day. Teams (or solo developers) will be asked to hack on the Facebook Open Graph; the best Facebook app will win its team the prize.

Devs in attendance will also get facetime with Facebookers, including technical sessions on social gaming, Open Graph, and mobile apps. Demos and code samples will also be available, as well as hands-on help from Facebook engineers during the event’s eight-hour hackathon.

HACK events are taking place in cities in every continent, starting now and stretching into early October. The first event is August 23 in Austin, Texas. The only other event in North America will take place in Vancouver, Canada. In South and Central America, the tour will make its way through Mexico City; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and São Paulo, Brazil, during the rest of August.

The HACK tour will make its European stops in Berlin, Barcelona, Warsaw, and Moscow. Events in Asia will take place in Taipei, Taiwan; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Bangalore, India.

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Appcelerator, maker of mobile development tool Titanium, is gearing up for Codestrong, its big code conference and hackathon set to take place in San Francisco this October.

In just three months, more than 500 developers will descend on the Intercontinental Hotel for two days of keynote talks, around 30 breakout sessions, and Hack to Help, a charity-focused hackathon.

“Last year’s Codestrong conference was amazing, and this year is going to be even better,” said Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie in a statement today.

“In addition to delivering great mobile and technical content, this year we have a big focus on building a successful mobile business … [and] compelling apps for both consumers and the enterprise.”

Last year’s Codestrong did have a hackathon for mobile developers, conducted in a fairly typical hack through the night/be judged/declare the winners format. This year, the Hack to Help event will also take place overnight, but in addition to having an overall winner for the hackathon, each app will be built for the benefit of a pre-selected nonprofit organization.

Twelve teams will work around the clock to build apps for 12 charities. The apps will help each nonprofit boost their fundraising and awareness efforts. Some of the organizations that will receive apps include Stop Hunger Now, Mercy Corps, Special Olympics, and the Avril Lavigne Foundation, which supports organizations working with children and youth who have serious illnesses or disabilities.

“I am very excited that my fans will have the opportunity to give back from the convenience of their mobile phones,” said Lavigne in a statement on the hackathon.“I think an app will be a great way for them to help make a difference and to follow all the great things we do for sick or disabled children and youth. I am very grateful to all of the developers who are participating in Hack to Help, and I can’t wait to see the final results!”

Codestrong is Appcelerator’s annual mobile conference. This year’s two-day event will take place in San Francisco, Calif., at the Intercontinental Hotel starting October 21, 2012. Currently, all-access passes are available online for $599.

Top image courtesy of olly, Shutterstock

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Startup Weekend, the household name in hackathons, has expanded its operations to a much wider international audience. Although the organization has for some time been conducting hackathons around the world, it is now opening offices in two non-U.S. locations: London and Mexico City.

Startup Weekend hackathons are what they sound like: weekend-long hack sessions that focus on creating interesting solutions to the hackers’ own problems. In San Francisco, this can amount to a lot of tech and apps, but in other parts of the world, the company has seen weekend warriors present game-changing ideas about farming innovation or other, less digital means of improving their communities.

The Seattle-based Startup Weekend team of 20 employees will be putting together more than 500 events in 2012, and around 65 percent of them will occur outside the United States.

“The most important thing we could be doing for society, our economies, and the world right now is helping more people become successful entrepreneurs,” Startup Weekend CEO Marc Nager said in a release this morning.

“We’ve had demand for more than 2,000 events this year in over 100 different countries. Regional operations will allow us to scale faster and continue to feed a fundamental shift in communities that are trying to create more vibrant startup ecosystems.”

The next steps for Startup Weekend include opening more offices in Brazil, India, and China to help communities in those areas increase the quantity and quality of entrepreneurship, thereby boosting the local quality of life and stimulating the local economies.

Startup Weekend success stories in the Western startup world so far include buyer-powered marketplace Zaarly and Eventup, an amazingly cool site that helps event-throwers find the perfect, unique venue.

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On the eve of the largest technology IPO in American history, the company at the center of all the hoopla is celebrating in a geeky-chic style emblematic of its eight-year history.

Friday morning at 6:30 a.m. Pacific, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will ring the opening bell in a remote ceremony held at the social network’s Menlo Park campus. Up until that moment, thousands of Facebookers will be participating in an all-night employee hackathon designing and coding away on what could be come the next Facebook Timeline. And from the looks of photos already trickling out on Facebook, this is one party not to be missed.

Facebook kicked off its hackathon, Hackathon 31 to be exact, at 7 p.m. Pacific Thursday evening. A crowd of several thousand employees gathered in an outdoor make-shift arena in the middle of the campus’ corridor (the same place where the bell-ringing will take place) to watch Zuckerberg and senior staffers rally the troops for one final night pre-IPO hacking. Zuckerberg, as pictured below, was greeted with a standing ovation from the crowd.

Thursday afternoon, Facebook priced its shares at $38 apiece for a $104 billion valuation. The company will debut on the NASDAQ tomorrow under the “FB” ticker symbol and raise $16 billion (up to $18.4 billion with its over-allotment option) through its offering.

Tonight, however, Facebook celebrates its “Hacker Way” culture and, in the process, sends a message to Wall Street and the world that its focus will always be on building and shipping products.

To prove that the “Hacker Way” is alive and well at Facebook, the social network will be hosting an all-night, employee hackathon at its Menlo Park campus and satellite offices.

The event, dubbed Hackathon 31, is especially significant for the social network as it comes on the eve of its initial public offering and is meant to reinforce the mantra that, while its public listing is important, Facebook’s focus will always be on building and shipping products, a source familiar with the event told VentureBeat.

Facebook’s 31st hackathon starts tonight around 7 p.m. Pacific on campus at the company’s “Hacker Square,” and will run up until the company rings the opening bell early Friday morning. All participants will receive a commemorative Hackathon 31 t-shirt — t-shirts are a traditional part of Facebook hackathons — and are only required to work on a project that is not their day job. The hackathon is also said to be inclusive of all Facebook staffers, not just the engineers.

The event clearly reaffirms CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to Facebook’s Hacker Way, a company philosophy that means code is the be all, end all and that “done is better than perfect.” The affair could even produce the next Facebook Timeline, chat, or video, all products that got their start at previous hackathons.

“The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration,” Zuckerberg explained in a letter to investors included in the company’s prospectus. “Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.”

There is the possibility that Facebook’s Hacker Way culture will clash with the demands that go along with being a public company, Altimeter Group digital advertising and media analyst Rebecca Lieb said in an interview with VentureBeat.

Under this mentally, Facebook sacrifices perfection for fast iteration. “That might be difficult for Facebook as a public company,” Lieb said. “The Street might want to see more instantaneous revenue generating results.”

The hackathon then serves as an important message to Wall Street that public company or not, Facebook will live and die by the ethos of code-based solutions, practicality over perfection, and risk-taking.

Photo credit: Matt Harnack/Facebook

A few dozen Facebook employees have put their own massive mark, literally, on the social network’s expansive new Menlo Park campus.

The mark in question is a gargantuan, scannable QR code taking up 42 feet of rooftop space atop one of Facebook’s new buildings.

The code was painted by crafty Facebookers during a company hackathon in February. The story goes that chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced a “Space Hackathon,” via Facebook of course, to encourage team members to make the new office space their own. Mark Pike, an associate on the intellectual property team, decided to take the call to action literally.

“Hack yeah! I’d like to paint a gigantic QR code somewhere so we can RickRoll online maps, or point people to our careers site, or send them to a ‘Clarissa Explains it All’ GeoCities Page,” Pike wrote in a Facebook post that became the catalyst for a late-night rooftop painting session.

After several planning sessions, a group of employees purchased the fbco.de domain and came up with a plan of attack. When the hackathon rolled around, they headed up to the roof, determined the best spot for the most visibility, and set about painting the code with, “chalk, twine, paint rollers, a few drums full of black paint, and some cold beer,” according to Pike’s description.

The team’s efforts proved successful. The 42-foot code can be scanned from the skies, and will soon start appearing in satellite captures of the area. What scanners will find, however, remains a mystery. The code, for now, simply redirects to a “coming soon” landing page.

“The next time you zoom in on Facebook from a satellite map or find yourself flying into SFO, take a close look at our roof,” Pike said. “We can’t promise you wont be Rick Rolled, but we can promise something cool.”

Photo credit: FBQRCode/Facebook

More than 6,000 hopefuls from around the world entered Facebook’s programming challenge, the Hacker Cup, in January. Three months later, just 25 finalists went head-to-head in a three-hour battle for supremacy today at Facebook’s new Menlo Park campus.

The winner will have his name (all 25 finalists are male) inscribed on a 50-pound trophy, a sort of pixelated-looking two-dimensional brass fist with the work “HACK” blazoned it, which is set on top of a cube of concrete.

Update: After three hours of competition, Facebook has announced the winners of the 2012 Hacker Cup:

• 1st place: Roman Andreev from Russia, completed one problem correctly in 1 hr 4 min
• 2nd place: Tomek Czajka from the US, completed one problem correctly in 1 hr 5 min
• 3rd place: Tiancheng Lou from China, completed one problem correctly in 1 hr 44 min

There’s a $5,000 prize for the first-place winner, but most of the reward will be the glory of being named, publicly, as one of the world’s top coders. Plus, of course, there’s the thrill of going up against a roomful of world-class programmers.

“They’re here because they love competing in these things,” said David Alves, a software engineer at Facebook and one of the event organizers.

All but one are from overseas. Countries represented in the finals include Russia, Germany, Ukraine, Poland, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and the U.S. After making it through three successively more challenging qualification rounds, the 25 finalists are here at Facebook’s expense for a couple of days of visiting, bowling, and three intense hours of coding.

Facebook’s Hacker Cup is not the only such coding competition. Many of the coders here also compete in TopCoder contests and Google Code Jam, as well as in coding contests in their home countries. That’s one reason Alves surmises that certain regions, such as Eastern Europe and Asia, produce more successful code contestants: They are more used to competitions like these. Plus, he adds, their countries have excellent science and math education.

The Hacker Cup works like this: Each coder is given three difficult programming problems and three hours to solve them. In the first round, the problems are easy: For instance, figure out the maximum size font you can use for a sign of a given size and specified text. By the time the challengers reach the final round, the problems are mind-bendingly tough. (See below for a sample problem from last year’s competition.) Alves expected that only one or two contestants would complete all three problems and that only about half of them would even complete one — which is how things turned out last year at Facebook’s first Hacker Cup competition.

Contestants can use whatever programming language and development environment they want, though 70 percent choose C++, Alves said. (A minority use Java, and one or two might use C#.) After completing the program, the contestant can test it out, then submit it to the judges. The program has six minutes to run, and if it produces the correct result, it passes.

Judges determine the winners based on the accuracy of the results their programs produce, followed by the speed with which the coder came up with the solution.

It’s a challenge that tests the computer science skills of all the contestants but also demands a level of intuition and out-of-the-box thinking.

“Usually the straightforward way of solving the problem won’t be anywhere near fast enough,” Alves said.

Physically speaking, the Hacker Cup is not much to look at: A bunch of young men staring intensely at their oversized monitors for three hours straight. The room was so quiet that the clicking of my camera’s shutter was the loudest noise to be heard. After an hour, the Hacker Cup webpage displayed on the wall showed that three contestants had completed one problem apiece. The silence with which that news appeared belied the underlying intensity.

Contestants are not supposed to collaborate or communicate with anyone on the outside, though they do have Internet access and can, for example, look things up on Wikipedia. But Alves is not too worried about anyone outsourcing their problem sets.

“Who are they going to outsource to?” Alves said. “The people in this room are the best qualified to solve these problems.”

Sample problem

Wondering what it’s like to compete in the Hacker Cup? Take a look at this problem from last year’s competion. Remember, this is just one of three problems, and you’d have just three hours to create a program to solve all three.

Party Time
You’re throwing a party for your friends, but since your friends may not all know each other, you’re afraid a few of them may not enjoy your party. So to avoid this situation, you decide that you’ll also invite some friends of your friends. But who should you invite to throw a great party?

Luckily, you are in possession of data about all the friendships of your friends and their friends. In graph theory terminology, you have a subset G of the social graph, whose vertices correspond to your friends and their friends (excluding yourself), and edges in this graph denote mutual friendships. Furthermore, you have managed to obtain exact estimates of how much food each person in G will consume during the party if he were to be invited.

You want to choose a set of guests from G. This set of guests should include all your friends, and the subgraph of G formed by the guests must be connected. You believe that this will ensure that all of your friends will enjoy your party since any two of them will have something to talk about…

In order to save money, you want to pick the set of guests so that the total amount of food needed is as small as possible. If there are several ways of doing this, you prefer one with the fewest number of guests.

The people/vertices in your subset G of the social graph are numbered from 0 to N – 1. Also, for convenience your friends are numbered from 0 to F – 1, where F is the number of your friends that you want to invite. You may also assume that G is connected. Note again that you are not yourself represented in G.

Input
The first line of the input consists of a single number T, the number of test cases. Each test case starts with a line containing three integers N, the number of nodes in G, F, the number of friends, and M, the number of edges in G. This is followed by M lines each containing two integers. The ith of these lines will contain two distinct integers u and v which indicates a mutual friendship between person u and person v. After this follows a single line containing N space-separated integers with the ith representing the amount of food consumed by person i.

Output
Output T lines, with the answer to each test case on a single line by itself. Each line should contain two numbers, the first being the minimum total quantity of food consumed at a party satisfying the given criteria and the second the minimum number of people you can have at such a party.

Constraints
T = 50
1 ≤ F ≤ 11
F ≤ N-1
2 ≤ N ≤ 250
N-1 ≤ M ≤ N * (N – 1) / 2
G is connected, and contains no self-loops or duplicate edges.
For each person, the amount of food consumed is an integer between 0 and 1000, both inclusive.

Photos: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat, except as noted.

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I didn’t know it could be someone’s job to attend hackathons. I hadn’t heard of a developer evangelist before, so a year ago when I stumbled across an opportunity to become one, I was drawn by its novelty.

The mission was to build a developer community from the bottom up by saturating the hackathon scene, gaining allegiance from the early-adopters, the enthusiasts, the hackers. The kind of people who geek out over a new JavaScript library, smother their MacBook Airs with stickers, and maintain wardrobes consisting primarily of startup t-shirts.

If the goal is to build a business on an API, were hackathons the place to start? I wasn’t sure. The tactic seemed so niche. But hey, if someone wanted to pay me to travel and build weekend hacks, that sounded fun to me.

My first hackathon surprised me. I expected it to be quiet and secluded, consisting of the most die-hard geeks, an exclusive community disconnected from the outside world.

But it wasn’t. It was inviting. It was cool. It was a spot for anyone with an entrepreneurial itch to try something new, from bankers to artists to lawyers, all sprinkled amongst designers and developers of all skill levels.

I expected it to feel underground, but it didn’t. Microsoft and Amazon, among other high-profile sponsors, pitched their tools, platforms, and APIs to an eclectic group of would-be world-changers.

I realized after that first event that my weekend calendar was not going to be free for a while. There was no shortage of events to attend or companies wanting to throw sponsorship dollars at those events.

I travelled to hackathons in Dallas, Portland, Boulder, Chicago, Las Vegas, Seattle, DC, and Boston, among others. Every city I went, I asked them the same question: what’s the tech scene like here?

Every time I got the same response: It’s growing.

Everywhere I went, people told me that their tech community was thriving, that their city was going to be the next big tech hub. A year ago there was nothing. Now there were incubators, investors, meetups, and new hackathons popping up every month.

It quickly became clear to me that hackathons are not an outlandish trend, popular only among techies in Silicon Valley and NYC. They are a national phenomenon.

So I asked 150 hackathon attendees, hosts, and sponsors from across the country what they thought about the rise in hackathons. I found some interesting things:

• Why they go: Learning (85 percent) and networking (81 percent) were the top two reasons, followed by changing the world (38 percent) and winning prizes (28 percent). More people are interested in the tech scene and want to learn to code but this community has many people who really have big, ofter altruistic visions. Hackathons offer newbies an environment to learn from experienced coders while building something tangible. Some of those hacks have turned into real businesses, like GroupMe, Launchrock, Zaarly, and Foodspotting.
• APIs are a core strategy: 78 percent of event attendees said APIs are becoming an increasingly integral part of their business strategy. They attend hackathons to increase awareness (56 percent), partner with other cool brands with APIs (75 percent), and build a showcase of apps using their API (56 percent). Since hackers are driven to go to these events, hackathons are a good place to get in front of early adopters, get feedback, and gain enthusiasts for a new API.
• Women are underrepresented: While this is true in many areas of the technology and startup worlds, it was interesting to note that only one in 10 attendees at hackathons are women.
• So many hackathons: The combination of more people wanting to hack on new projects, and more companies wanting to get their APIs consumed has stimulated a surge in hackathons. The top three reasons why attendees believed there are more and more hackathons going on were: an increased awareness of APIs (46 percent); an increased general interest in tech (40 percent); and an increase in the number of hackers (39 percent).

It will be interesting to see if these findings change over time. Perhaps my company will run the survey again next year. But for now, we compiled our findings into a nice infographic to provide a bit of a peek into what really goes on at those hackathon events.

Jon Mumm is a developer evangelist for TokBox, a San Francisco-based startup that provides an API for live video chat. Follow his hackathon adventures on Twitter @jonmumm.

Top image courtesy of lenetstan, Shutterstock

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The event was held in partnership with the global advertising giant OMD, which brought big brands like McDonalds, Doritos, and Mountain Dew into the mix. That meant a lot of prize money, and hackers responded, travelling from as far away as Australia and Pakistan to attend the 48 hour event.

The big winner was Swarm, an app created by Peter Watts, which picked up the $10,000 grand prize. The app made it simple to add a list of friends and then pull in their music activity from Facebook and other sources, generating a dynamic playlist in Spotify of what your friends were listening to that day.

“Spotify is an incredible platform in certain ways,” Watts told VentureBeat. “Everything happens inside their player, so you don’t have the problem of discovery that you do when trying to start a web app from scratch. There are ten million people who end up inside the Spotify client every month and for early apps, before the marketplace is crowded, that is a golden opportunity. And because they are already Spotify members, you don’t have issues like you might with R.dio, where people find your web app, but then need to register or log-in and lose interest.”

Watts says that there is definitely room for improvement in terms of making the platform flexible and developer friendly, “But that is the point of having a hackathon, to work out those kinks.” For someone who has been working on music apps for the last five years, Watts says Spotify solves the two main challenges. “It gives you access to people’s taste graph and solves the hassle of licensing.”

It’s unclear yet how apps on the Spotify platform will monetize. That may be part of why OMD and big commercial brands were invited, to try and connect independent developers with a revenue stream through partnerships. “We think this is a pretty new approach, bringing in brands to work directly with developers during a hackathon,” said Jeff Levick, Spotify’s chief advertising officer. “This weekend was all about having fun and exploring the possibilities, but at the end of the day people need to get paid.”

Image via Spotify PR

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“Big data” is everywhere you look these days.

As digital information continues to expand exponentially, this affects everything — how much we pay for health insurance, how we predict the weather, how we play the stock market.

The music industry is no exception. Big data is making music a more meaningful and connected part of our lives.

That might sound insane at first. “Music” and “data” feel like polar opposites. Music is intimate, soulful, and organic. Data is cold and impersonal.

But where music and data come together is in understanding the vast and always-growing world of music: new artists, new influences, technology mashups, and discoveries. All of this music ultimately forges common connections between us all.

Big data, in a musical context, forms the backbone of the Music Hack Day series, where music is not only represented as literal data (good old ones and zeroes), but each song, artist, and album is also surrounded by all kinds of context and understanding that open up mind-blowing new ways for us to discover, interact with, and share music.

Music Hack Days bring together APIs from The Echo Nest, Spotify, SoundCloud, and other digital music platforms so that hundreds of software and hardware hackers can build functional music apps and demonstrate them to each other over the course of a single weekend, in cities around the world.

My company, The Echo Nest, has spent seven years building the world’s largest music database, which contains more than five billion individual data points about 30 million songs and more than 2 million artists.

Half of The Echo Nest’s “musical brain” is dedicated to understanding music content — analyzing audio with software to understand it the way a musician does (tempo, key, song structure, etc.). The other half parses what people are saying about music everywhere online (blogs, reviews, news, social media).

Together, this understanding of music allows independent developers to build scalable music apps with major labels and create all sorts of stuff they wouldn’t otherwise be able to build.

Imagine what you could make if you knew the tempo and song structure of every song in the world; if you knew what everyone on the Internet is saying about every artist in the world right now; if you knew the musical collaborations and influences of everyone to ever pick up a guitar.

At Music Hack Day, hundreds of developers have all of this data and millions of songs sitting right in front of them. At the San Francisco Music Hack Day just last week, more than two hundred participants built a total of 62 working music hacks. That is a ridiculous rate of productivity, and the apps show why big data matters to any music fan.

Here are some of the highlights from San Francisco Music Hack Day (in alphabetical order — and keep in mind, these are rough, time-limited hackathon projects that will likely be acquiring several layers of polish before a public release):

• Automello takes any group of audio samples and groups them by pitch so digital music makers can play them like a piano.
• Buddhafy lets you build a Spotify playlist with your brain, based on its mood.
• Coming to Town Rdio lists concerts coming to your area and lets you hear what those bands sound like.
• Echo Tunes takes a look at your iTunes library, then lets you build playlists with all sorts of smart sliders Apple never thought of including.
• Frankie’s Organ translates any song into a pipe organ version, played by a virtual Frankenstein.
• GenRedio makes radio stations based on a combination of moods and musical styles.
• Hide That Tune is a new twist on the familiar “name that tune” game. One player select an arcane section of a well-known song and challenges the others to identify it.
• Lyrics Cloud builds “word clouds” based on any song, so you can see which terms pop up most in the lyric.
• Make Up Recs lets non-techies import playlists from Pandora into the unfamiliar world of the powerful Tomahawk music app, without skipping a beat.
• Paul vs. Billboard predicted 6 of 13 Grammy Award winners with artificial intelligence.
• PlayHead plays customized radio stations based on the cities and bands you like.
• SideTrack, strictly for the geeks, is like a digital Rube Goldberg contraption whose point is to find music through incredibly circuitous routes.
• SocialSongQ lets people send tweets to the artificially-intelligent “DJ Fail Whale” creating a queue of songs to hear at any event.
• Sonos+Spotify++ adds smart playlisting and the ability to buy tickets to Sonos’ digital music system for the home.
• WetheDJ lets you invite friends to build party playlists together.

Music Hack Day is meant to be fun. It’s essentially a jam session for developers held over a weekend. The fact that these talented hackers can put together so many functional apps in 24 hours using The Echo Nest, Soundcloud, Last.fm, and dozens of other great music APIs has major implications for businesses and consumers, for how we will all discover, play, and share music in the future.

Jim Lucchese is CEO of The Echo Nest and has worked in digital music strategy and corporate development for about 10 years. Before The Echo Nest, Jim was a music lawyer at Greenberg Traurig, specializing in music and digital media deals. Jim holds a B.A. from Boston College and a J.D., Magna Cum Laude, from the Georgetown University Law Center. When he’s not at the Nest, Jim plays drums and still represents a few indie artists pro bono for fun.

Image courtesy of Yuri Arcurs, Shutterstock

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Interested developers and other parties can register for the event now.

Attendees of the bi-partisan event will include members of Congress, their staffers, developers and other tech-minded types. These folks will be hacking together for four hours “to explore the potential connections between legislative data, constituent correspondence and social media,” said Facebook today in a release.

On December 7, House majority leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) and minority whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) will host the event from 3:30 pm to 7:30 pm Eastern Time in the Capitol Visitors Center in Washington, D.C.

Hoyer said in a statement, “Americans have a right to petition government, and new online technologies are giving that right exciting new possibilities.”

Hoyer continued to say that members of Congress should “embrace these technologies to make the legislative process as open and accessible as possible.

“We welcome the help and advice of industry leaders like Facebook, as well as individuals and academics who have innovative ideas on how to do so.”

Over the past year, Facebook and Congress have been working at opposite ends of the same problem: using technologies to safely and securely allow more room online for various aspects of the democratic process. While the event itself will be brief and not every interested developer might be able to attend, the hackathon represents the ability of any good hacker with a great idea to have a huge impact on our government and legislation.

“As social media increasingly plays a central role in all areas of our everyday life, it is essential that Congress fully incorporate these platforms into its daily operations,” Cantor said in the same statement.

“Software developers, designers and program engineers have a unique opportunity to help us improve the legislative process resulting in more citizen engagement, and we are very excited about working together and getting started.”

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At least, that’s how it’s been up until now. Most freelance developers typically rely on contract jobs. But Appirio, a company that ports applications to cloud services like Salesforce.com and Amazon’s AWS, is trying to change that, with a system for documenting and scoring hackathons, which debuted at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.

That’s important because hackathons — competitive programming competitions — are one way that independent developers can win recognition and, sometimes, jobs. Up to now, however, they’ve been pretty ad-hoc affairs.

Appirio launched Cloudspokes, a program within the company that hosts  hackathons, as a way to crowdsource cloud-based app development. But the company wants to take it even further by creating an official documentation system for hackathons that anyone can go back and reference.

“I’m a baseball guy, so I’m always going back and looking at box scores and stats,” Appirio community architect and Cloudspokes manager Dave Messenger (pictured above) told VentureBeat. “There isn’t anything like that for hackathons, so we want to be the hackathon system of record, so you can go back and view those scores and see whatever the equivalent of stats are for a hackathon.”

Appirio is applying that system for the first time at Salesforce.com’s sponsored hackathon at its Dreamforce convention in San Francisco, Calif. The hackathon took place over the course of the week, where developers were asked to make something related to “open, social, mobile and collaboration,” all of which are themes for this year’s convention.

Cloudspokes is providing the back-end scoring system for the whole competition, where a panel of judges rate participants in categories fitting the theme of the convention. For example, contestants are graded by how much the use public cloud servers, which are remote computers with beefy hardware that run computing-intensive programs and then deliver results over the Internet.

“It’s a pretty fun idea, I like that the competition was really open-ended,” hackathon participant Daniel Llewellyn, a former Cloudspokes hackathon winner pictured below, told VentureBeat. “You have to build something social and cool from scratch.”

The judges submit the scores through Cloudspokes’ application, which then records all that data on remote servers and keeps a running tally of which developers are leading the competition. The winner is automatically determined from the scores, and Cloudspokes even has a flashy reveal animation to go along with the application. Anyone can then go back and view those scores from the Salesforce.com Dreamforce hackathon whenever they want.

Cloudspokes was originally created to generate more interest around problems that companies desperately need solved and don’t want to handle in-house. So the company hosts competitions with cash prizes that attract anywhere from a few to a dozen developers. They code furiously for anywhere from a few days to two weeks in order to come up with the best solution, and the winner gets a cash prize and visibility. But until now, the company didn’t keep official records for scores or code quality.

“You had to rely on things like Github badges and word of mouth if you wanted to have something to show from a line of freelance work,” Appirio chief strategy officer Narindar Singh told VentureBeat. “It’s hard for someone without some kind of academic or employment pedigree to get attention that way.”

There are three kinds of Cloudspokes competitions: those hosted by Appirio, by Cloudspokes and by third parties. Appirio can outsource a number of problems its clients present them to Cloudspokes for quick solutions, and that makes up about 30 percent of Cloudspokes’ revenue. Cloudspokes also serves as a developer community of sorts that aims to attack problems that will attract more interest. Then there are companies like Box.net that can ship problems out to Cloudspokes for hackathons.

Appirio expects to run an even greater number of hackathons, and particularly wants to expand into lightning-fast competitions that attack more simple problems only last a few hours. But more than that, the company wants to create a community that actively seeks out interesting problems. Like the ones that keep some of the top intellectuals in the world awake at night. Practically speaking, the program still has to make money, but Messenger said that there’s much more interest in those kinds of problems — and the developers are willing to work for less to collaborate on those problems.

“We want to do more problems with collaboration, because those can improve problems themselves as well as finding interesting and unique solutions,” he said. “We want to run hackathons for the kinds of problems that have real ‘a-ha’ moments.”

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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That means you can soon look forward to apps that make more extensive — and immediate — use of what’s going on in your Flickr photo stream and those of your friends.

Back in June, the photo-sharing service allowed developers to access photos and favorites from a user’s contacts in their applications using some of Flickr’s nifty PuSH API methods.

As Flickr’s “nils” noted in the Flickr developer blog, those methods were “pretty neat, but that barely scratches the surface of stuff that happens on Flickr that people might be interested in. So we added some more stuff to subscribe to.”

The new APIs make use of Pubsubhubbub (for instant notifications when something is published — say, a new photo) and allow developers to grab a lot more interesting data for their users, including:

• Photos of you
• Photos of your contacts
• Your photos and favorites
• Photos from a specific area (using geodata)
• Photos with a certain tag or tags
• Images from the Flickr Commons
• And, of course, photos and favorites from your contacts

When grabbing photos from the Commons, you can specify a particular institution or institutions to pull from — for example, you could just get pics from the Smithsonian and the White House. Or, you could scrape all photos and updates from the Flickr Commons in real time.

As for geodata, you can specify an area using a point and radius or a set of WOE IDs, then subscribe to images from that area. This would be handy for getting a real-time stream of photos of tourists “holding up” the Leaning Tower of Pisa, to name a terrible example that should never be implemented by anyone.

Etsy developer Kellan Elliot-McCrea was kind enough to post about how to get started with the new APIs, including some lovely PHP snippets.

Flickr will be at Photo Hack Day (or, more accurately, Photo Hack Weekend) in New York City this weekend. Flickr dev Paul Mison will be on hand to talk about the Flickr APIs and answer questions.

Image courtesy of Flickr, gagilas.

Check out DevBeat, VentureBeat’s brand new channel specifically for developers. The channel will break relevant news and provide insightful commentary aimed to assist developers. DevBeat is sponsored by the Intel AppUp developer program.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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The nonprofit’s annual report, released last week, shows huge growth for the still-young organization. Nearly 36,000 people have attended a Startup Weekend even, and 43 companies say they got their start there. But what’s more exciting than the stats is the future.

In the months and years to come, the Startup Weekend team hope to bring their tried-and-true formula for overnight entrepreneurship into new territory, including health, developing areas, education, government, arts and the environment.

“People want to do these events to solve real problems,” Startup Weekend CMO Joey Pomerenke told VentureBeat. And he said that not all of the solutions need hard technology. While developers made up around 39% of all Startup Weekend attendees, 25% of participants identified as businesspeople, and 10% said they had a focus on user experience.

The event was founded in 2007 by Andrew Hyde in the startup hotbed of Boulder, CO. Like other hackathons, such as the Change.org hackathon, the Rails Rumble and the Django Dash, early Startup Weekend events were developer-heavy and focused on building mobile and web apps for the tech-obsessed. In 2009, Hyde turned the keys over to Marc Nager and Clint Nelson, who turned the event into a nonprofit, secured a grant from the Kauffman Foundation, and expanded the event to multiple cities. It’s now one of the biggest developer/entrepreneur events and the only one with a broad, entrepreneurial focus — it’s as much about building teams and creating a community of entrepreneurs.

“It’s evolved into something bigger than we ever thought it would be,” said Pomerenke. “It’s turned into more of a global movement to inspire and educate entrepreneurs; it’s not just a hackathon anymore.”

In fact, Pomerenke mentioned that not every great idea necessarily needs a great developer to execute it. “In Borneo, the winning idea was a better way to farm chilies. It’s a real problem they have there, and the team had a great way of solving it… There’s a lack of developers in a lot of regions, but there are still great ideas, and a lot of them aren’t necessarily technology-related. But they do solve real-world problems.”

In addition to its expansion beyond its traditional techie roots, Startup Weekend is also coming to universities and colleges. As Pomerenke said, “We want to get this model into schools: Who needs a business plan? Just take an idea and build it!”

While job creation is “not our number-one metric,” Pomerenke did say the events have an overall net positive effect on the economy.

“We’re a nonprofit, and our focus is on building a healthier startup community in cities around the world. And it just so happens that there are legit companies coming from Starup Weekend that are creating full-time jobs, so we’re starting to track that.”

Around three quarters of Startup Weekend attendees reported that they planned to continue working on their SW projects once the weekend had ended. Among the 43 companies that self-reported, the founders said that 130 full-time and 90 part-time jobs were created and that an additional 92 full-time and 71 part-time jobs would be created within six months.

While reaching out to and encouraging participation from non-developers is a big push for Startup Weekend right now, so is reaching out to women.

Pomerenke said, “We do a lot of promotion [to women]. We work with Women 2.0 really closely. We just did an informal partnership with Astia. And we always get way more women attendees when we do those partnerships.”

Although the lack of gender parity in fields such as technology and entrepreneurship is a larger cultural problem and not one that’s solvable by a single group, Pomerenke did say the Startup Weekend staff is also asking female attendees lots of questions about their choice to attend and their experiences. “That’s something we focus on: How do we get more women to participate? We’re trying to figure out why more women aren’t going to events like these in the first place.”

Image courtesy of David Newman.