Cleanweb Hackathon 2011

Sunday, September 11, concluded the inaugural Cleanweb Hackathon. Fourteen teams of developers and engineers gathered together with the goal of integrating information technology and sustainable business through the use of diverse datasets and APIs. The CleanWeb Hackathon this weekend was a grand affair! Spring Ventures , PariSoma and GigaOm provided us with an awesome venue, groovy tunes, tons of great food, beer and other beverages, and we hacked for 36 hours straight.

There were five apps that used our Electricity Pricing APIs to effect some serious change. Tendril mashed into our APIs to create a mobile app called “Energy Wars”. Dynamo Labs hacked into our APIs to ease the agony of switching electricity providers.

Flying Cranes used our data to create Dr. Wattson (winner best UI!).

We were super-impressed with all of the entrants, and with the overall collaborative vibe. All of the 160+ entrants, sponsors, participants and judges were interested, interesting and engaged.

In the end, our own developers (Team TACO) submitted the App that won, a Chrome extension that provides the True Annual Cost of Ownership (‘TACO’) of electronic goods. Super cool, and ‘very useful and game changing’, according to Katie Fehrenbacher.

During the competition hackers and observers alike tweeted their ideas, questions, and excitement of new concepts they were working on creating driving over 1 Million impressions of #Cleanweb.  But coverage of the event was not limited to social media. Presentations from the hackathon and the awards session were also streamed live by GigaOM.

Check out these links to see coverage and read about the participants and the amazing apps they created: Clean Technica, Fast Company, Ecopreneurist, cnet and CNN Money.

Roundup of projects

Our own developers Matt Fong and Michael Ihle came up with the winning hack, a project they call TACO (True Annual Cost of Ownership). Essentially it works like this: Simply install a Google Chrome extension on your browser. When you shop at any online store for appliances (ie. Best Buy or Lowe’s), the TACO extension displays automatically the annual energy cost for the appliance, according to your specific electricity pricing plan. ‘Gamechanging’ according to Katie Fehrenbacher, and the winner of the overall best App at the CleanWeb Hackathon.

The guys at flyingcranes used our APIs to create Dr. Wattson, which took home both the People’s Choice award and the Best Design/UX award at the CleanWeb Hack this past weekend. For bonus points, they mashed in the Twilio APIs to message Energy Efficiency Auditors in your area and schedule an energy audit.

The guys at Dynamo Labs mashed up our APIs to create an app that allows residential consumers to find better electric plans. They used our data from our Calculation and Pricing APIs, and present electricity plans in a unified visual format. You can view of your bill over the course of a year, and the implications of switching to a different plan.