Almost won TopCoder $25K Hackathon!

Last week, TopCoder (http://topcoder.com/) was in San Francisco for its annual programming & design tournament. As part of it, Facebook sponsored a $25,000 API Mashathon (aka a Hackathon) where teams had 36 hours to develop the most compelling and complete products using sponsor APIs. Each team had to spin a wheel to draw the APIs they'd use for the competition. We entered a 2-person team to see how we'd do using Graph (http://graph.fm) and no written backend code whatsoever. 60 teams entered. By the end of the first round, we'd made the top 10. Less than 24 hours later, we almost won the whole thing! That's where the "almost" comes in from the subject line. We came in SECOND!!! The team from Draper University ended up taking the top step with a truly fantastic mashup. When they presented, we knew they were the winner. They definitely deserved it!

What turned out to be so fantastic was that we accomplished our objective solely using the APIs we were assigned, some HTML and JavaScript for frontend user interface, and Graph. We used no backend code whatsoever. We chose to build a meeting-prep mobile app that aggregated the meeting participants' social feeds (from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) and then used sponsor API, HP IDOL On Demand, to extract and display concepts and sentiment for each piece of content. Using ADL, the visual programming language we've developed at Graph, we were able to build API calls and app logic in minutes, visually, and then leverage Graph's plugins for tasks like activity stream storage and event and user management. That enabled us to spend a ton of time making it look beautiful and easy to use.