HAPI Hackathon Weekend, May 2011

This past weekend we were thrilled to be part of TokBox’s HAPI hacker’s weekend.  It was Genability’s first time getting in front of developers and we were very impressed with the creative ideas people came up with for using our electricity pricing data.  The winner took home a cool prize of $500 for building a dashboard that mashed up our data along with product specs obtained from Mashery and showed the annual cost of running any appliance in your home would be, based on geographic location and your utility company.  Not bad.

Of course there were some other great apps built not involving our API’s.  Some of the ones that really stood out for me were FourSquare to Go which lets you download FourSquare content to your phone so you can use it offline.  Perfect for traveling.  Another great app (the name slips my mind) used Twilio and governmental information from Factual to set up a simple ‘Dial your Congress person’ site.  And all of this was just in a weekend.

We just want to send out a big, hearty thank you to all the developers and especially to TokBox for hosting the event.  And we hope to see many of you at some future hacker events really soon.

Original annoucement

We’re excited to be participating at the HAPI Hackathon Weekend June 10-12 here in San Francisco.  If you’ve never been to a hackathon it basically works like this:

• Friday, developers brainstorm for ideas and form teams around those

• Saturday, the teams begin hacking away and do so throughout the weekend

• Sunday afternoon, prizes are awarded by each of the participating API companies to the top mashups

We will be giving away at least $250 or an Energy Monitoring Device, winner’s choice, to the best idea we see built around Genability’s APIs.  We’re really looking forward to seeing what creative ideas people come up with. To give the creative juices a kickstart, here are some ways our APIs can be extended:

• give an accurate total cost of ownership for home appliances based on shopper location.  The appliances’ info such as power consumption is available via Best Buy’s APIs

• calculate a utility bill based on a consumer’s actual usage and location.  This can be extended to provide a cost estimate for varying behavior.

• use real time pricing and forecasting to optimize data center traffic across regions.  Think of it as Amazon’s Weighted Round Robin with additional intelligence.  Given the energy expenses at data centers, this has a very tangible benefit.

Over the next few days we’ll be tweeting/writing about ideas for what to do with our APIs.  In the meantime, if you’ve got some coding skills and some creative ideas, stop by HAPI Hack.  The signup is on the link above.  Hope to see you there!