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Google TV’s First Hackathon Was A Success

Google announced a few weeks ago that they were going to hold the first ever Google TV hackathon. It was a pretty novel concept since smart TVs are still not really that widespread. All the better too...
Google TV’s First Hackathon Was A Success
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  • Google announced a few weeks ago that they were going to hold the first ever Google TV hackathon. It was a pretty novel concept since smart TVs are still not really that widespread. All the better too since this will give developers a head start once smart TVs do begin to take over the living room.

    As you might have been aware, there were two hackathons taking place over the weekend. One was at Google’s HQ in Mountain View, California with the other taking place in London, England. If you combine the developers who showed up to both events, there were over 370 people split into 60 teams hacking the new Google TVs to create everything from games to chat apps.

    Here’s a list of the winners from both locations and the apps they created:

    US:

    Deja: an app on social video channels (Best New App Built from Scratch)

    MyTV+: a media discovery app built around a novel way to aggregate social recommendations (Runner-Up for Best New App Built from Scratch)

    Viki on Google TV: an app to watch shows and movies translated into different languages (Best Ported App)

    Quizinator: a multiplayer quiz game with a very cool user interface (Best Multi-screen App)
    Popular Choice Awards: MyPicasso, PinTV, and Chess

    UK:

    MyTV: a customizable dashboard of news clips, traffic alerts, weather reports, etc. (Best in Show)

    FeedMe: an app that streams a waterfall of images from various personal sources to background music (Best User Experience)

    Remoter: an app that makes the TV your hub for family communication using Google Chat and other APIs (Best Technical Implementation)

    Honorable Mentions: Pongan and I Don’t Know (that’s their name, not our admission of amnesia)

    The winners from both sides of the Atlantic took home equally awesome prizes, but the U.S. winners got the better end of the deal. The winning U.S. teams took home a 55″ Sony Bravia HX729 smart TV and two tickets to Google I/O. The UK winning teams took home the soon-to-be-released Sony Internet Player NSZ-GS7.

    Here’s what the hackathon looked like in London. It looks like everybody had a great time and created some really impressive apps for smart TVs. It’s this kind of stuff that makes me more excited for the future of technology like Google TV.

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