We’re here on the ground to cover the India’s largest Hackathon, the Yahoo! Open Hack India 2012 at Sheraton, Bangalore and we’ve been welcomed with a very beautiful weather here!
We’re covering the first half of the event now, and the rest would follow as and when some action happens! We’ve had a terrific show so far, and the hackers are now in place to get their hack out of their brains, and bring out a cool new product in just 24:00:00 hours!
The Kickoff:
Yahoo! opened the floors for the developers and hackers for their fifth annual Open Hack in India here at Bangalore, and we’re currently sharing the floor with more than 800 hackers across 20 different states in India. It was 08:00AM that Yahoo! started off with the registrations, and the event quickly began to kick off soon after the cut off time for the registrations was over.
This is the first time we’re covering the event, and its definitely worth mentioning that the tech crowd here is just amazing! The floor is filled and the crowd is vibrant. If you are a geek, and would love to float around talking about technology, then this is the place for you!
The Sessions:
Murray Rowan kicked off the day with his presentation on “Hacking != Cracking“. Following Murray, Sourabh Sahni, Product Manager at Yahoo! had an interactive session on YQL, where he elaborated about Hacking in Steroids with YQL! . The session went on to talk about how Yahoo! has opened up the data they have to the public in a neat and tidy way, which is accessible by anyone on the internet. Right from Yahoo! Answers, to YUI (Yahoo! User Interface)!
Sourabh also highlighted that the Yahoo! YQL can access more than 1255 APIs that are available on the internet. We were pretty sold out with this presentation at the end. It was also interesting to see that Apple’s iOS’ Weather and Stock app uses Yahoo!’s YQL to fetch the latest information from the server!
FakeSiri makes its first appearance!
And then came the very interesting part. He pulled off the pulses by demoing the FakeSiri, which responds to your requests just like how it works on iOS. The underlying technology was nothing but the Yahoo!’s YQL! You can see FakeSiri working in 55th slide in the presentation here! The amazing FakeSiri was developed (Hacked) by @MarkAndey
Reid Burke
Next up on stage was Reid Burke, who spoke about How to win with Node.js. If you are one of those seeking to get a glimpse of what he spoke about, here’s the presentation he prepared for Yahoo! Open Hack India 2012:
Read Reid Burke’s presentation!
Fabian Frank and Diego Ferreiro
And then came in a tango session by Fabian and Diego, talking about Building for Multiple Devices using a Single Language and Framework. The session was pretty useful for our team to scale the website across multiple devices! Here’s the code and demo for the sample website he made with simple framework! They also introduced Mojito and talked about their experience using it to build Yahoo! Axis.
Praveen P.N
He was handling another interesting session about Web performance, a look inside Yahoo!. Praveen shared some some of best tips for web application performance, including Boomerang, yslow commandline, and WebPageTest.
Sudar Muthu
Sudar made a very crisp and quick presentation about using the Flickr’s APIs and combining them with YQL. You can get a glimpse of his presentation here on Picture perfect hacks with Flickr APIs.
More updates shortly..