First ever Yahoo Open Hack Day in SEA

I am just back from Jakarta where we (Y!) conducted our first ever Open Hack Day for the South East Asia region. The event was a big success and we had a very good participation and lots of hacks. The hacks that won were quite impressive in their innovation, customer value and use of latest technologies/APIs available. For a region not known on the world map for technology and software, what we saw should be considered even more impressive. For those who are keen on numbers, they are as follows:

• 250 people turned up in all
• 180 of these were hackers
• 100 of these managed to stay through the 24 hours and attempted their hacks
• 29 submitted hacks, out of which 8 backed out at the demo point leaving 21 presented hacks.
• 5 hacks were awarded with prizes: What's on Today (Rizky Syazuli) for best mashup; PeopleBUZZ (HappyBee) for best social hack; OpenHackSEA Office Kami (Nazrul Kamaruddin) for best productivity hack; TwitterMania (TwitterMania) for best app in local context; ChatPlus (Ksetyadi) for best accessibility and over all best hack. ChatPlus also won the hackers' choice award.

Apart from being a tech-support volunteer and a judge, I spoke on YQL and it was very encouraging to see a lot of hacks using YQL. I am personally very impressed by what YQL can do and have turned into an ambassador and there is no better opportunity than a hack day to express it and no better satisfaction than a set of convinced hackers using it. The Vizu poll on the event page is presently indicating that 37.9% of hackers would have liked to use YQL, highest among all displayed YDN technologies, and the evidence from my notes from judging indicates that 12 out of the 21 presented hacks actually used YQL. Quite impressive indeed.

The presentation for the talk can be found at Jonathan's slideshare account.