AngelHack Produces Anti-Hacker, Tron Bike and E-Receipt Apps

Mike Borozdin, December 9th, 2011

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This weekend DocuSign, the company I work for (and a ProgrammableWeb sponsor), was at the first AngelHack hackathon in San Francisco. With nearly 200 people attending (over 150 developers), we were excited to see what applications can be enhanced with the DocuSign API, as well as all the different types of apps developers built.

Congratulations go out to the winners of the first AngelHack:

• 1st place: Swarm Insight, Google Analytics for finding hacker-types on your website.
• 2nd place: Tron, an iPad app that turns your gym bike into a virtual multiplayer Tron game using your facial recognition to make turns and bike vibrations to guestimate speed.
• 3rd place: InstaSign, a DocuSign replacement for receipts.

and PrivaSet built by Alex Gaber. Enjoy your new iPhone 4S.

Dan Reid talked on Saturday about the potential of DocuSign’s API to increase business efficiency and spoke about some of the apps built previously on the DocuSign platform/API, including EZ-Slip and Kindlegraph (shown above) and a petition app.

This weekend we had a number of applications using DocuSign, including:

• PrivaSet: Privacy seems to be playing second fiddle on social sharing sites; PrivaSet wants to make your privacy easy to manage from one interface. DocuSign helps PrivaSet ensure the legality of modifying all your privacy settings.
• InstaSign (the prize-winner): A DocuSign replacement for receipts. Can you imagine how many millions of trees could be saved if receipts were no more?
• FriendsWith: Businesses exchange goods/services for Likes, with contracts signed and displayed with DocuSign

The superbly organized event got started around noon with founder dating, lunch, and a talk with Mafia Wars founder Roger Dickey. Hacking officially commenced at 5pm and everyone was nourished courtesy of Chipotle, Polkadotties cookies, and RedVines. To spice things up, a Skeeball game was trucked in and a tournament created with a Blackberry Playbook as the prize.

The mentors on hand did a great job of helping as many teams as possible with their Ruby/BizDev/Design questions with some teams benefiting tremendously from their insight. From Ruby experts to Adobe Design gurus to Public Speaking coaches there was an assortment of helpful people on hand to give time to any team that wanted it and help polish hacks and presentations. The surprising number of novice programmers used the helping hands to create some pretty interesting apps as well.

It is also encouraging to have people from so many different places at the hackathon. We’ve had representatives from Boston, New York, Iceland, Singapore, and Australia. The beer-drinking team that created GoonBuggy added a lively vibe to the final presentations.

Altogether, an excellent first AngelHack.