This year’s AngelHack London was thrown in the escalator and aquarium equipped Bloomberg office in the center of downtown London. Over 250 attendees created a total of 41 products by the end of the weekend.

Amidst the excitement, creativity, and inspiration of the evening, rules for a brilliant and addicting drinking game emerged. Now named AngelHack Ring of Fire, the game rules have been made available for the enjoyment of hackers everywhere.

About the winning team: Projekta, or PiProjector, the winning team joining us later this year in San Francisco for the AngelHack Accelerator program, built a system to run projected presentations through a phone via a Raspberry Pi. This solution would replace the need for dongles and hooking up projectors to laptops!

Bonus winner: In a surprising and yet unseen turn of events, the judges selected a 2nd winner, Camel Mania, for their multi-screen gaming technology. Entering into an industry that takes in about $29 billion in the US alone, this product shows real promise.

Thanks so much to our amazing London sponsors: Bloomberg, PayPal, Google, Mailjet, Tropo, Pearson, Nokia, Microsoft, Yammer, Context.io, .Me, Paymill, and our media partner TechMeetUp.

Much love for the sweet judges who chose to spend their Sunday with us: Bindi Karia, Bill Earner, John Spindler, Simon Menashy, Mark Rock, Jo Rabin, Julia Shalet, Manfred Bortenschlager, Kristel Viidik, Tim Green, Thibault Rouffineau, Ryan Kennedy.

And of course none of this could have been possible without the effort and dedication of our AngelHack London ambassadors, Dougie Surplice and Calypso Harland. You guys rock!

Cheerio!

• The AngelHack Team

Hosted at Cross Campus, an 11,000 square foot creative and innovative workspace in the heart of Santa Monica, AngelHack LA included over 250 attendees and over 150 competitors. Amazingly, a total of 41 products were created in 24 hours.

Students from all over the Southern California region represented a majority of the attendance, with participants from UCLA, USC, Caltech, UC Irvine, UCSD, and Harvey Mudd. Professionals and businesses from the up and coming Silicon Beach also represented, aiming to give their Northern California Silicon Valley rivals a run for their money.

Some of the best pitches of the top 10 teams included Buzzwords (an education game using the Oculus Rift VR Headset), Adjacent (a social app that uses location to help people find similar people nearby), Tessi (a life gamification app for goal setting), and Shortlog (a personal 160 character micro-journal).

About the winners: The grand prize winners of AngelHack LA were a team called Eyeweight. This team of all UCLA students created a visualization technology allowing users to monitor the nutrition facts of their diet using an iPhone camera. In just 24 hours, they were able to create an oustanding product and business model that impressed the judges and audience alike.

A special thanks to our LA sponsors: Cross Campus, HR Cloud, Mandrill, Gunnars, NextSpace, .Me, Voicebunny, TokBox, Pillow Pocket, and Showkit and our media partners OCHACKERS, NextSpace, TechZulu, Built in LA, PreApps, and Founder Dating.

We’re grateful to our wonderful judges who took the time out of their busy schedules to be with us: Rick Zaki, Henry Lowenfels, Alexander Krivicich, Tony Karrer, Gannon G, Damir Davidovic, Robert Jadon, Erik Rannala, Tomer Kagan, Ian Hunter, Rob Meadows, Liron Shapira, Vishal Agarwal, Dan Dato, and Eytan Elbaz.

And last but not least, a shout out to our amazing AngelHack Los Angeles ambassadors, Jake Foley and Jad Meouchy. We couldn’t have done it without you.

• The AngelHack Team

iOS developers: have you ever wanted to share your iPhone screen with someone? Have your users ever wanted to collaborate with each other in real time? Could your app benefit from a FaceTime-like chat inside of your app?

ShowKit’s powerful SDK enables drag-and-drop audio/HD video conferencing, screen sharing, and gesture sharing. Ringadoc uses ShowKit to virtually connect doctors with patients. FixUp connects homeowners with plumbers, electricians, and carpenters for quick expertise before an on-site visit.

AngelHack LA attendees not only get beta access to ShowKit, but the chance to compete for a $500 prize for the best ShowKit implementation. What kind of connections could you facilitate with ShowKit? Do you have a social game idea that could use multiple players’ input to level up? Could you fix your parents’ iPad remotely? ShowKit’s capabilities enable interactions we haven’t been able to use inside of our apps before. So show us your great idea!

ShowKit is based in LA and is excited you’re joining them this weekend! Find the special promo code at the event to get beta access.

• Follow them on Twitter: @ShowKitSDK
• Like them on Facebook: ShowKitSDK

We’re excited to announce that Tropo, the worldwide leader in API telecommunications, is joining AngelHack as a global partner on our Spring 2013 world hackathon tour!

Tropo offers toll-free and local phone numbers in over 40 countries. Its powerful API lets you build voice calls, voice recognition, and SMS messaging right into your apps and websites. Tropo provides scalable infrastructure for global telecoms AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, and Globe Labs, but is completely free for developers of any size to get started.

To sweeten the deal, Tropo will be offering free credits to everyone on top of their free trial offers. Double Boom!

What are you waiting for? Check out Tropo FAQs.

You can find more Tropo updates or on their forums, #tropo IRC channel, or follow them on Twitter as @tropo.

30 cities and counting! Upvote us on Hacker News HERE

That’s right, the AngelHack Spring 2013 hackathon bonanza has officially begun. As you may have heard we’ve expanded to 30+ cities around the globe. From Sao Paulo to Bangalore, Berlin to Jakarta, AngelHack is uniting developer communities around the world. Go to angelhack.com for the full list of cities, dates, and links to get your tickets.

Special Offer: Use the secret promotional code “hackmonkey” to receive 50% off your ticket on Eventbrite. It’s good only for the next 48 hours. So don’t wait!

Having trouble getting your ticket? contact: stephen@angelhack.com

And one more thing…

We’re launching an Accelerator (or better yet, a Hackcelerator)

At AngelHack we don’t want the excitement to end with our hackathons. Our goal is to help aspiring entrepreneurs follow their dreams of building a real business from a crazy idea that started with a hack. The AngelHack Accelerator program does just that.

- 12 weeks of mentorship

- 2 weeks in San Francisco (hotel stay included)

- Tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt SF

- Access to the top (angel investors, seed VCs, incubators and thought leaders) in Silicon Valley

- Introductions to incubators and investors around the world that can help you

Tech Crunch Feature

In other news, Tech Crunch also ran a story on us today featuring our Accelerator Program. 

“Founder Greg Gopman said that his goal is “to be the largest funnel of seed-stage technical talent into incubators and investors around the world,” and he noted that previous AngelHack winners have joined Y Combinator, AngelPad, MassChallenge, TechStars and 500 Startups, and also raised hundreds of thousands of dollars on AngelList.”

http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/angelhack-accelerator/

On Friday, the AngelHack team and 200 of our bay area buddies hopped on a bus (ok, a couple busses and a number of cars) and cruised down to Google HQ in Mountain View to listen to a series of lighting talks about Google’s latest products.

The presentations included a short introduction to Dart, which is Google’s more user friendly answer to Java Script, and graphs showing the increased use of Google Wallet using nyan cats as a unit of measure.

Much to the nerdy excitement of us all, there were more than a few Google Glass sightings during the trip.

Noms and knowledge

Afterwards we were treated to a delicious buffet as each presenter hosted an hour long break out session to give a more in depth look at their product.

We mixed, we mingled, we enjoyed an afternoon away from our desks and to cap it all off Google gave each attendee a code to redeem for $1000 App Engine credits! Basically we got paid to learn about what’s new and hot at Google and eat free food.

I’m more of a Jelly Bean kinda guy

When the breakout sessions wrapped up, Martin Omander, our gracious host for the day, was nice enough to give a number of us a walking tour of the main campus.

Of course no trip to Google is complete without doing something stupid with a giant donut sculpture. 

Thanks to everyone who came along to hang out with us. For those who couldn’t make it, fear not, it’s kind of our job to host awesome tech events. There will be more. 

It’s been about a week since the LAUNCH Hackathon and we’ve returned to business as usual here at AngelHack HQ. Greg, after being back in San Francisco for two days, left us again for SXSW and is probably sneaking in to a panel as I type this sentence. Sabeen is busy coordinating our worldwide team via sketchy google hangout connections. Sam is working her voodoo magic with our sponsors. And Diana and I sit here in our office powering through the work behind the glamor. Life is good.

400 happy hackers

For those of you who were unable to join us at our LAUNCH Hackathon here’s a recap of some of the highlights.

1st Place WizzyWig.io - $100,000 

Partick Conway, Nathan Speller, and Jordan Messina swooped in from Pittsburgh, Pa and created WizzyWig, a website content editing tool that allows users with no coding experience to make real time changes to existing websites. The project was built using Django, file picker, JavaScript, and Python. One of the more visually impressive features of WizzyWig is the ability to make on the fly AB comparisons with a scrolling slider.

The LAUNCH judges were amazed and borderline incredulous as they watched the WizzyWig team pitch Sunday evening on the main stage of the conference in front of a packed house. They almost couldn’t believe this product had been produced in a weekend. That’s the power of the hack.
“Yes, I do feel like a badass.”

In the end WizzyWig walked away with a total of $100k in investment deals, which was $25k more than the original grand prize. Not bad for a weekend’s work.

Sponsor prizes

LAUNCH Hackathon sponsors gave away a ton of free swag and great prizes that included Xboxes from SAP, an iPad mini from Filepicker, and thousands of dollars worth of gift cards and credits for services like AWS and MediaTemple hosting.

Of all the sponsor prizes that were given out though, the best (and weirdest) was the Ostrich Pillow from TokBox. Equal parts awkward and comfort.

Other great ideas that came out of the weekend included:

Gempad: an iOS App that serves as an additional input device. You can program it to give you quick access to commonly performed tasks. Running Makefiles, switching workspaces, or even macros for your favorite games - anything is possible! Gempad uses Firebase to transmit these commands between the phone and your Mac in real-time. Follow them on twitter @GempadApp

SESHCODE: a platform that connects people who are looking for programming help with experts. Once a match is found, the pair can video chat (using WebRTC, no plugins required!) and collaborate on code using the in-browser code editor.

Bridge: One of my personal favorites, an app that transmits data via the flash on your smartphone. The demo was a bit slow using the default webcam on an MacBook Pro but with a cheap piece of hardware, this program could be setup to easily and inexpensively communicate with an Adruino project or whatever else your mad scientist brain can come up with.

Great food

Throughout the weekend we made sure the hackers were well fed. There was delicious mexican food, thai food, indian food, and just to be safe we had about all of the pizza in San Francisco brought in for the overnight hackers. The order we put in now holds the record for the largest ever from the Papa Johns in SF (according to the delivery guy anyway).

The puff truck cares not for your parking laws!

If that wasn’t enough, at midnight on Saturday we called in Pacific Puffs who served up some amazing gourmet cream puffs as everyone hacked into the night.

And to all a good night

In the end even those who didn’t place in the top 12 walked away with a great experience and some new friends. We’re already looking forward to next year. We promise there will be more bean bags, pillows and that we’ll hire a wizard to control the AC and heat in the mezzanine.

Good news everyone (insert your best Farnsworthian voice here)! We just landed an awesome global partnership deal with our friends at PayPal! 

PayPal was our generous host for AngelHack 4 at their headquarters last December, and now we’re partnering up again to bring you the best AngelHack Hackathons yet. 

PayPal is coming out with a brand new API that they’re extremely excited to show off, and we’ll be bringing you more information about it soon. What does this all mean for you, our developers? It means more hackathons, more tools, more swag! 

We’re currently locking down venues and dates for our upcoming events and could use your help. Do you know any new partners we should be working with? You already know we’re going to be in fantastic cities like New York, London, Singapore, and Sydney, but we have a few more surprises that we’ll be unveiling soon. 

There’s a lot going on here at AngelHack HQ and we’re looking forward to bringing you more great news in the coming weeks. Thanks again to PayPal for believing in the AngelHack community and looking forward to a BIG 2013!

-Team HackStrong

By all accounts, the Hearst Fashion Hack was a great success. Not rain, nor sleet, nor white of snow could suppress the enthusiasm and talent brought out by the 175 developers and designers that hacked tirelessly (tiredly?) though the night Saturday to bring their dreams into reality.

Of course it wasn’t all work and no play. During the night, hackers got to blast invaders from space on a classic arcade game cabinet, bend it like Beckham on the foosball table, and feed the endlessly hungry-hungry hippos all while feeding themselves with tons of free food and drink.

All that toil and Redbull produced 42 pitches on Sunday that ranged from Virtual Mannequin, a hack using the Microsoft Kinect that enables users to try on digital outfits, to Apparel Forecast that gives fashion recommendations based on physical location.

Among the over 300 attendees we overheard comments like, “this is the best hackathon that’s ever been held in the city.” Twitter was also full of happy #HearstFashionHack comments all weekend. Flattery will get you everywhere, New York.

Credit: Annemarie Dooling ‏@TravelingAnna

The grand prize of $10,000 and an obnoxiously large check went to Melissa Feudi (a former AngelHack NYC winner), Robby Abaya and the team that created Drobe. Drobe uses a simple swipe interface that allows users to mix and match outfits from their own closet using their smart phone.

Credit: Hearst Corp. @HearstCorp

Credit: Phil Wiser @philwiser

Along with our grand prize winner there were five honorable mentions that included: Zine, Hueknew, Stylust, Hearst Remix, W-Wear. Each of these teams will receive a 30 minute meeting with Hearst executives to talk about how to best utilize their product.

Microsoft, Amazon, Spotify, Gilt, TokBox, Git-Hub, Singly, DocuSign, Third Wave Fashion, and Klout were all on hand as well and gave away thousands of dollars in prizes to the best use of their API’s and to crowd favorites.

A huge thank you goes out to the Hearst Corporation who provided the beautiful venue for the event. Also to all the judges, sponsors, volunteers, and teams who worked so hard to make it all happen. You guys were awesome! 

A huge no thank you goes out to Nemo and nature in general for trying to get up in our business.

Global Demo Day is in the books and we couldn’t be happier with how the weekend turned out. Our 2012 hackathon winners flew in from all over the globe and were treated to the best hospitality San Francisco has to offer (which of course included buckets of free booze). We danced, we drank, we toured both Google and Facebook’s incredible campuses, and most importantly we made sure that our developer teams had plenty of face to face time with the industry leaders who will help turn their passion for coding into successful businesses.

The weekend kicked off on Thursday with the Global Demo Day event held in our brand new office space on Market Street. Guests, investors, and the developer teams were ushered through the Minority Report-esque security system (seriously, the elevators tell you what to do—in the future there is no free will), and we all spent the next few hours listening to each team pitch their projects in front of our panel of judges that included tech evangelist Robert Scoble and Google Venture’s Wesley Chan.

The outstanding projects presented ranged from an addiction support and lifestyle app (Addicaid) to a surfing analytics app with it’s own dedicated surfboard mounted hardware (Surfscore). Each team fielded tough questions from the judges and received useful advice on how to position themselves in an already crowded market.  In the end only three teams could be deemed the best of the best, and after some careful deliberation the judge’s panel chose testlio, airpost.io as the runners up and Osper as the overall champion of the 2012 AngelHack season. And there was much rejoicing.

Bright and early Friday morning we bussed a our merry band of enthusiastic developers down the peninsula for a Q&A with Wesley Chan at Google Ventures in Mountain View.  We were then treated to a tour and lunch at the Google campus. After stuffing ourselves with delicious free food and taking a picture with the giant Android statue we went Zuckerberg hunting at Facebook in Menlo Park.  Did you know they actually have a wall there you can write on?  We taped a picture of a cat on it.

Business aside, the highlight of our weekend was definitely the Start Up Bash held at Roger Dickey’s house (let’s call it a mansion) in the Marina.  The night featured four floors of music pumped out by DJ Rastko, free drinks, and a giant cake shaped like a crown on a pillow in honor of Glorious Leader Greg Gopman’s birthday. From what we remember, it was amazing, though some of us almost lit ourselves on fire by sitting too close to the open fire-pit on the deck.

Again we want to thank everyone who helped us make this weekend a success.  The teams, the judges, and all our friends who went out of their way to host us.  We are eternally grateful. We have a crazy amount of work ahead of us: 22 upcoming events around the world, continuing to build our mentorship program for our winners, and making sure that the service and access we provide is unmatched in the industry.

http://xkcd.com/319/