Two UTCS teams made it to the final round of Yahoo!'s Open Hack All Stars event in New York City. The All Stars event was made up of winning teams from Yahoo! Open Hack and HackU events from around the world. A total of 40 hackers competed in this first ever event. Teams were competing for a $10,000 prize and the opportunity to present their hack to VCs, CEOs, and other Yahoo! senior executives and partners.
Easel by Michael Teng, Farhad Abasov, & Michael Akilian is "a hack that allows you to search for photos & videos on YouTube, Netflix, Justin.tv, and Flickr on your iPad, browse the results, and your selection will automatically start playing within the web browser on your TV. Your iPad is now your remote control." Easel was built using Objective-C, Python, JavaScript, and YQL.
Annotate by Gaurav Sanghani, Andy Brown, Aaron Stolarz, Russell Bicknell (a.k.a. “The Real UTCS”) "allows you to comment wherever you want in an online article, and recommends other media based upon your interactions. This hack improves engagement by enabling more intense, focused conversations to happen around content. It could potentially help audience acquisition via more relevant Facebook syndication and could help publishers tell which part of an article are “hot”."
For more information on Yahoo!'s Open Hack event, visit http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2011/09/yahoo-open-hack-all-stars-in-new-york-city/