Google isn’t the only company that’s down for some good ol’ hackathons. Facebook loves getting in on the action too. That’s why the company hosted the Mobile Hacks Roadshow, a global hackathon event that focused on mobile app development.
The Roadshow events were held in nine cities over the course of two months. The cities included were New York, Boston, London, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong, Singapore, Seoul and Tokyo. Even more impressive is that these nine events drew over 2,000 attendees. Those attendees spent over 450 hours writing code to create over 200 projects.
Of course, this wasn’t just a regular hackathon for fun and learning. Facebook turned it into a friendly competition of sorts with prizes of high-end mobile devices from Sony and Samsung going to the winners.
There have been 36 winning projects and 12 honorable mentions so far with Mobile Open Graph being the most popular category. Some of the Facebook’s favorite apps included:
Instapeace, Tel Aviv: An app which selects two people from different countries (say, Israel and Iran) based on common Open Graph actions – and then displays their interests and Instagram photos to illustrate individuals’ similarities and help promote peace in the region.
Pass the Smirk, Tel Aviv: A “Hot Potato” meets “Six Degrees” mobile game, where people compete by sending a “Smirk” from one person to another across the globe, accumulating as many transactions and miles as possible in 6 hours. This app received $50k in angel funding from local investors after winning the Hack.
Promised Mind, Seoul: An app that allows users to post personal resolutions to their Timeline and encourage friends ‘Like’ the resolution to participate. Friends share the cost of the award (if the resolution is kept) or receive a penalty coupon (if it fails). Coupons are subsidized by brands as advertising.
Corolin Planet, Tokyo: Our special guest, Mark Zuckerberg, visited the Tokyo Hack and this project took his advice to add an Open Graph implementation to an existing mobile game which allowed users to review their friends’ gameplay.
For a full list of the winners, check out the Facebook page for Mobile Platform Developers. There are pictures of the events and descriptions of all the winning projects. It looks like everybody had a lot of fun and made some great apps while they were at it.