Wollongong’s first Hack-A-Thon, HackAGong was a fantastic success with 85 registrations and 27 teams competing in the event. If you missed it on Saturday, HackAGong was started by Nathan Waters (a member of the Wollongong eClub) just a few weeks ago. The Hack-A-Thon allows teams of programmers and designers to design and develop an application in just 30 hours.
The Major Prize of $2,500 was awarded to KickstartKristmas, a Kickstarter-like website that allows people to pledge money towards a gift you’d really like. For example, you’d might like an iPad Mini for Christmas but simply don’t have the money. Place it up on KickStartKristmas and you can have your friends pledge small amounts of money towards your campaign. Check it out here: http://kickstartkristmas.com/
The Audience Prize of $1,000 was awarded to CheckMySite. A tool that allows you to view information about a website which includes WHOIS, CMS information, tracking information and security compliance. You can check it out here: http://checkmysite.com.au/
A number of minor prizes were also awarded to a number of teams including:
- Best Use of Government Data to Agency Locator – A web app that allows you to find the nearest government agency/building using your current location.
- Most Viable Business Potential to Infinite Small – A web app that shows data in a concise and pretty way. You can see a live demo here showing stats about population.
- Best Safety, Security or Intelligence Application to Melon Messaging – A website that allows you to anonymously send text messages to people with the ability to reply over the website.
- Best Overall Design to UOW Mash The Tower – Information about this game will be here soon.
- Best Multiplayer Game to TankU – A game that allows players (up to 100 at a time) to destroy other peoples tanks.
Overall, the participants in the HackAGong challenge all had fun and made great applications which all have a lot of potential. The HackAGong organizers plan to have 2 events a year with the next HackAGong starting in either 3 or 6 months time.