London Hackathon: 120 Developers, One Night of Building
Dropbox hosted its first London hackathon last weekend, drawing more than 120 developers to build applications on top of the Dropbox APIs. The event opened with remarks from Mark Van Der Linden, the company's new UK & Benelux Country Manager, and Ilya Fushman, Head of Product, who discussed Dropbox's own Hack Week tradition. Jon Mountjoy from Heroku spoke about building efficiently and the future of cloud collaboration, while Steve Marx, PM for Developer Platform, closed the presentations with an introduction to the APIs and a live demo of an American English to British English translator running on the Core API and webhooks.
Twelve hours of coding followed, fueled by soda and snacks. The projects ran the gamut from practical to playful. Bookbox used machine learning to deliver e-books directly to Dropbox, while 3D-Dropbox combined a 3-D scanner with the service to digitize physical objects. For pure fun, SelfieSomething let users snap a selfie, save it to Dropbox, annotate it with drawing tools, and then share it with a friend.
Top Honors: Matter
The overall winner was Matter, a private blogging tool built to store and sync memories. The mobile app lets users save photos and text to Dropbox in a timeline view, but because the underlying data lives as files in Dropbox, it can be accessed and edited anywhere—even without opening the app.
API Excellence: Easy Wallet
Easy Wallet earned the Dropbox Star prize for the most creative use of the Dropbox API. The hack effectively turned Dropbox into a bitcoin wallet, using the file system as the entire interface. Users could make change by renaming files and transfer bitcoin to someone else simply by sending them a file.
Walking the City: Dropbox Pictour
Dropbox Pictour captured the London Local prize, awarded to the hack with the strongest focus on the city. The app guides users on directed walking tours by first presenting a hint for a starting location. Once the user arrives and snaps a photo, Pictour detects the new image in Dropbox, checks its geolocation, and delivers the next hint.
Pushing the Tech: Dropbox Live
The Cool Tech prize went to Dropbox Live for the most technically impressive project. The team hacked together an SD card mirroring system with a Raspberry Pi to achieve near-instantaneous photo uploads from a DSLR camera directly to Dropbox. They shared sample images captured live at the event via their Twitter account, @dropboxlive2.
More photos and commentary from the event are available on Twitter under the #dbxhackathon hashtag.
