QuickActions Wins The Disrupt SF 2015 Hackathon Grand Prize, PitchPal And Harvest Are Runners Up
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It’s been a long night at Pier 70 in San Francisco. Yesterday, hundreds of hackers spent the day in front of their laptops even though it was a beautiful Summer day. That’s because they all took part in my favorite competition — the Disrupt SF Hackathon. Some of them were participating in our event for the first time, while others were regular hackers. Their challenge was to come up with a neat, funny and smart hack in just 24 hours.
We could all feel the excitement in the air when the 167 teams took the stage to present a short one-minute demo to impress fellow hackers and our judges. But only one team could take home the grand prize and $5,000. So, without further ado, meet the Disrupt SF 2015 Hackathon winner.
Winner: QuickActions
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QuickActions is a 3D touch alternative. It’s a virtual button that lets you preview links, use shortcuts and more. For instance, when you hover over LinkedIn, you get actions — “Your Profile, Updates and Compose.” Choosing “Your Profile” opens your profile directly which was otherwise three or four taps away.
The team used Android Overlays and reverse-engineered popular android apps to discover their deep links. It’s pretty neat. Find this app in the Play Store in the coming weeks.
Runner-Up #1: PitchPal
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PitchPal helps you improve your public speaking by accurately recording and transcribing your speech, which is very helpful when you are… pitching a hack at a hackathon. It also helps you fine-tune your delivery of your pitch, speech or presentation by providing helpful analytics and feedback. PitchPal was built using Google’s Speech API.
Runner-Up #2: Harvest
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Harvest is a cheap crop stress detector that cost less than $50 to build. It prevents crop loss caused by water stress. It’s a modified point and shoot camera with the infrared filter removed and a new filter put in. It can fly on a drone, plane, or in our case, a balloon.
Harvest also provides a web app that processes these infrared images and shows “hotspots” and allows you to compare originals with the analyzed images, and compare your crops over time.
Our software also pulls in Landsat imagery, weather, and makes smart suggestions.
Hackathon Judges
Tom Coates
Co-founder, Thington Inc.
Gayle Laakmann McDowell
Founder/CEO of CareerCup.com & Author of Cracking the Coding Interview
Gayle Laakmann McDowell is the founder/CEO of CareerCup.com and the author of Cracking the Coding Interview, Cracking the PM Interview, and Cracking the Tech Career. As a previous software developer and interviewer for Google, Microsoft, and Apple, she now works with tech companies to improve their hiring process and with startups to coach them through acquisition interviews. She is passionate about solving technical problems and helping build excellent technical teams. You can find Gayle on Twitter @gayle.
Christina LaMontagne
General Manager and Founder of Health at NerdWallet
Joshua Schachter
Angel Investor
Zach Supalla
Founder/CEO of Particle
Jeannie Yang
Chief Product and Design Officer, Smule