Over the past year at Simpleweb we’ve hosted hacknights with some amazing companies like Twilio, TokBox, Pusher and even as part of the BBC 6 Music Festival.
At the hacknights, we challenge developers to create cool apps around a particular theme. They only get 3 hours of coding and it’s always amazing to see what people can make in that time.
Prizes for non-techies
But great apps aren’t just about technology, so at our most recent hacknight, we invited anyone and everyone who fancied having a go at developing an app. The techies made their working prototypes as usual, and the non techies sketched out their apps and made interactive mockups to demonstrate their ideas.
The theme was ‘communities and relationships’ in honour of our sponsor, Lovehoney, the Bath-based ‘sexual happiness people’.
Small cash prizes were given out over 6 categories by winners chosen by Lovehoney co-founder Richard Longhurst, Director of Digital and Regional Innovation at the Marketing Agencies Association, Mette Davis and Simpleweb full-stack developer Adam Butler.
‘Most absurb’ went to Nintender – bracelets that would light up to notify people when they walked past each other. ‘Foodents’ – a nice little interactive mockup of an app for students to pool their resources to cook cheaper, tasty meals, make new friends and try new types of food – was deemed most commercially viable. People’s choice (voted for by attendees) was an app called Chill& which connected people with like-minded people who wanted to Chill & do something else (for example, Chill and go for a picnic).
Habit changing hacks
The most innovative idea – a prize aimed at mockups rather than technical prototypes – was awarded to 21 Days Later, created by entrepreneurs James Eder and Chris Booth and web developer Paul Thomas. As it’s been said that anyone can change a habit by doing something for 21 days in a row, the team decided to create an app that paired users with friends or strangers to help them bust bad habits.
LoveBuzz, created by Coull CTO, Aden Forshaw, won most innovative tech as well as the Lovehoney prize, chosen by Richard. Inspired by Lovehoney’s remote controlled devices, Aden created armbands which couples could use to send each other a little buzz which could mean “let’s get out of here” or just say “I’m thinking of you” for example.
You can find out more detail about the hacks on the Simpleweb blog and do join us on Meetup to be notified of our next event!
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