Facebook today announced the winners from its Facebook Developer World HACK competition, a series of events the company hosted during the months of August through September 2012. The roadshow, which involves several day-long events across various cities worldwide, is meant to encourage both new and experienced developers to build apps that take advantage of the Facebook platform in some way. In addition to the hackathon portion of World HACK, Facebook also begins each event with technical sessions focused on things like Open Graph, iOS, Android, mobile web and more.
Facebook staff also offers demos and sample code to help developers get started, and is available throughout the day to offer hands-on support.
This year, the World HACK roadshow hit up Austin, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Berlin, Taipei, Jakarta, Bangalore, Barcelona, Vancouver, Warsaw and Moscow, and saw over 2,000 developers participate in total. By the end of the tour, over 330 demos had been created, representing 16,000+ hours of work. Facebook also announced new meetup groups in several cities during the event, in order to maintain developer momentum even after World HACK wrapped.
The apps built focused on a variety of subjects, including games, music, cooking and philanthropy. Some even included hardware like Arduino and an iron (yes, like the kind you use on clothes!).
Three Grand Prize winners were chosen, whose creators won a trip to Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, where they’ll now get to meet with Facebook engineering team members. These winners include the following (via Facebook’s blog post):
- The Paperclip.io team, from Taipei. Paperclip.io indexes and sorts the things you’ve liked on Facebook and across the web, so you can easily browse your likes by category or by the date you liked them.
- The Chained Story team, from Buenos Aires. Chained Story is a web version of a storytelling game in which players take turns adding a sentence or paragraph to a story. The completed story can be published to a user’s timeline.
- The BoostMate team, from Moscow. BoostMate analyzes your social graph and the connections you have with all your friends, producing a ranking of who you’re closest to, who you interact with least, and whether those interactions were positive.
Facebook also highlighted several of the apps which launched during the competition, which are as follows:
- Moozo, Buenos Aires. Moozo helps restaurants coordinate service by letting diners ask for the check or get service via mobile device.
- Memory Millionaire, Taipei. Select a date range and a group of friends, and the Memory Millionaire game selects a photo or quotation for you to attribute to a friend.
- Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Taipei. Before Sunrise, Before Sunset lets you plan a trip and keep track of people you met. You can also print out iron-on QR codes to remind you of the places you’ve been.
- 100 Seconds, Warsaw. 100 Seconds gives you a daily update of your Facebook feed via phone, complete with soundtrack.
- Tank Siege, Barcelona. Tank Siege is a multiplayer game that lets you challenge your friends to simulated rounds of combat.
- ShareNote, Bangalore. ShareNote is an Android app that enables you to create, share and sync notes with your friends. People can also scan notes with their phone’s camera or play the note aloud.
- Wantering, Vancouver. Wantering lets shoppers quiz themselves to see if they can distinguish steals from splurges.
- Loupe Cards, Vancouver. Make personalized birthday greeting cards for your friends online with Loupe.
- Zwoup, Berlin. Zwoup lets you coordinate your shopping lists with friends, family and roommates.
- BFFQuiz, Moscow. BFFQuiz is a game that asks you questions about your friends, their likes, activities, and habits. Users win points by correctly identifying their friends based on their interests.