Startup @ Berkeley

The Hackathon at Berkeley is an annual event (this was the third) organized by the Berkeley Computer Science Undergraduate Association, ST@B, IEEE, and UPE. This year the event was generously sponsored by Zynga, the social gaming company. Below are descriptions of the winning teams with very low quality video (sorry!).

The 2010 Hackathon winners are:

1. Team 12Inches: Christopher Berner, Z, Andy, Rohan – Video streaming from a server to an Android phone client, and touch relaying from the phone back to the server as clicks, at a rate of up to 20 frames per second. This was the team’s first Android application.
   Video streaming from a server to an Android phone client, and touch
   relaying from the phone back to the server as clicks, at a rate of up
   to 20 frames per second. This was the team’s first Android
   applicati
2. Team SomethingDerogatory: George Deglin, Farz, Okay, Alina - Using OpenCV and OCR, this application automatically translates image mockups of sites to HTML and CSS.
3. Team Borat: Palash, Dmitry, Hunan- This website hack searches streaming music from different sources online, and makes it not only easy to find, but simple to listen to or save to your computer with a slick interface.
4. Slipstream: Arthur Klepchukov- real-time visual filtering of your twitter stream based on your favorites and word frequency.

Zynga Award:

Team TC Gardeners: Willy, Akshay, Pranava- A Wiimote mashup involving Google Street View and a hacked-up Python server to create a group virtual exercise application.

Coding for Good:

Team ClassBerry: Eric, Sridatta, Darshan, Freddie- A slick online replacement for iClicker, accessible via web or via SMS.

Esoteric Language Prize:

1. Ankur Dhar- TI-89 Chess (in BASIC)
2. Hilary Shi-Conway’s Game of Life in Turing

OMGWTFBBQ:

The Jedis: Stewart, Warren, Ryan, Gabor- Controlling a RC car. WITH YOUR MIND. Enough said.

Honorable mention:

1. Team StarShipCuberPrise: Kevin, Jeremy, Darren, Peter- A voice-controlled Rubik’s cube game and 3D curses renderer.
2. Team XtendedBrowser: Tim, Alex, Jonathan, Amber- Share images, videos, and so on over the web, across several computers, as if your monitors were joined.
3. Team Superwhack: Angela, George, Jon, John- Instead of dancing to the music, music to the dance – using OpenCV, this team wrote an app to derive music from one’s movements and clothing.

Thank you to our judges:

Cadir Lee | CTO, Zynga
Scott Dale | VP of Engineering, Zynga
Trevor Blackwell | Partner, Y Combinator
Paul Twohey | Berkeley/CSUA Alum, CTO, Trumpet Technologies
Dave Fetterman | Facebook
Vivek Wadhwa | BusinessWeek, TechCrunch, Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley
Brian Harvey | UC Berkeley

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Presentations have begun!!!!

Here is the order of team presentations, for those not sitting in Woz right now, check out the live stream here: http://www.justin.tv/staberkeley. Teams in grey have already presented.

1. Team MikeyDawgBestDawg: David, Mikey, Chris, Victor

2. Team Baz: Alan, Bing, Zi

3. Team SlipStream: Arthur

4. Team 12Inches: Christopher, Z, Andy, Rohan

5. Team MammasBoys: Edward, Anthony, Wayne

6. Team ClassBerry: Eric, Sridatta, Darshan, Freddie

7. Team LossOfWords: Evan

8. Team SomethingDerogatory: George, Farz, Okay, Alina

9. Team Boince: Gerald, Jeremy

10.Team IDunKnow: Han, Jay (Not presenting)

11. Team Know: Hoa Long, Teddy, Luke

12. Team WikiHunter: Kaushik, Anuj, Nishant

13. Team StarShipCuberPrise: Kevin, Jeremy, Darren, Peter

14. Team JavaScriptTheGathering: Kyle

15. Team Flitter: Mark, Jamin, Sesh

16. Team Borat: Palash, Dmitry, Hunan

17. Team Hydrazine: Peter, Justin, Winston, Andy

18. Team MobilizingHealth: Pooja, Nathan, Andy

19. Team IDontCare: Sean, Bahador, Angie, Joe

20. Team XtendedBrowser: Tim, Alex, Jonathan, Amber

21. Team TC Gardeners: Willy, Akshay, Pranava

22. Team Psyduck: Yiding, Richard, Darren, Christopher

23. Team PizzaHoggers: Dounan, Jeff, Fred, Prashanth

24. Team Triforce Canada: Hilary, Ankur

25. The Jedis: Stewart, Warren, Ryan, Gabor

26. Team Schedulizr: Avik, Jeff, Muller, Anhang

27. Team Red Bull: Albert, Solomon, Tim

28. Team Rootmusic: Curtis, Alex, Nisvenich, Naxi, Jimmy

29. Team SouthSide: Mark Rosetta, Mila Schultz

30. Team Beartracks: Kevin, Jimmy, Ken, Devan

31.  Team SuperWhack: Angela, George, Jon, John

32. Team iVibe- J Mah

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11:20AM, 2/06/2010- 40 minutes left, people are hacking away. 26 teams are signed up to present (yes thats more than we thought existed). The live broadcast will be here: Tell your friends!
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6:55AM, 2/06/2010- The sun is rising at breakfast is on its way. There are about 40 people in the Wozniak lounge, another 8 people here on the 4th floor, and 25 spread out over the rest of the building.  Hacking ends in just over 5 hrs, at our t-3h expect an update on what times are still around.

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3:00AM, 02/06/2010- 19 teams still left and most people are saying they will last the whole night and have something for tomorrow. Stay posted for updates of teams still alive. O yea, and we’re half way through!!!

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11:59PM, 02/5/2010- Sushi has arrived to revive the 21 teams still coding. Here are the projects people are working on (please comment below if I got something wrong):

Something cool with music (Team Lamigra)
Find free food on campus (Baz)
Make programmers feel like Hugh Jackman from Swordfish (Ian)
Real time reviews (Team Hydrazime)
Memory aid and information aggregation (Team Psyduck)
Mom apps (Team MOM)
3d Wikipedia (Team Neil)
Extendable desktop for browsers (Team Awesome)
Social exercise app (N/A)
Change website mockup to HTML/CSS (Team George)
Sms relay for medical professionals to talk to rural doctors (Mobilizing health)
Web Napoleon
Lecture Polls (Team Classberry)
Server side rendering of games (Team Ngo)
Math instant messenger (Mathtalk)
Talk to a Rubik’s cube (Team Cubeboys)
Twitter on facebook (Team Flitter)
Interior design android app / IKEA advert (Team Flying Hellfish)
Something cool in Turing
Ti-89 chess
Making Twitter Relevant (Slipstream)
Convert a Google Wave to wikipedia entry

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9:45PM, 02/5/2010- 60 people in the Woz, 30 more around Soda, just got 80 more red bulls. Stay posted for updates on what people are working on.

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8:15PM, 02/5/2010- The organizing G-ds have ordered me to mention the hackathon rules here: http://tinyurl.com/hackrules.

Happy Hacking!

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8:00PM, 02/5/2010- The number of people hacking away has somehow increased as we have found other groups all over Soda. We estimate the number to be over 90 with groups in the overflow room (405), the mac lab, and scattered around in lobbys. Already, fatigue is setting in as one of the organizers, Jessica, has started talking about her love life (come to the Woz to hear the juicy details).

Stay posted for energy drink-fueled madness as the clock ticks by.

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7:00PM, 02/5/2010- The madness has started and there are about 70 people in the Wozniak Lounge. An overflow room was opened in room 405 to accomodate another 15 people. A few other groups have spread out over Soda and attempts to reconnect with them will begin after things have settled down. About 100 people quickly burned through 25 Zachary’s pizza and reinforcements (of pizza that is) are on the way.

There are exactly 17 hours of hacking left as over 25 teams sprint to win kindles, SSDs, projectors, and other amazing stuff. Stay posted for future updates.

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The annual Hackathon is coming up this weekend. We expect 100 people to show up and spend the night starting at 6pm. The hacking will take place from 6pm on Friday in the Wozniak Lounge at Soda Hall, and end at 12pm on Saturday. Thats 18 hours of hacking craziness followed by presentations from the teams and deliberation by the 9 judges from Zynga, Facebook, Y Combinator, and EECS peeps @ Berkeley.

If you are a hacker, show up at 6pm for a brief description of the rules and Zachary’s Pizza. If you aren’t show up at 12 on Saturday to hear about the projects (or stop by Friday night/Saturday morning to watch the madness). Winners can expect a choice between the Amazon Kindle (which just launched an SDK), pocket projectors, or 80 GB solid state drives. Expect awesome t-shirts for everyone that lasts 18 hours and shaving creme to the head of anyone that doesn’t.

If you can’t make it to the event, expect a live blog here at ST@B and check in regularly to the live stream here to confirm everyone is still alive and coding.

Thanks to Zynga for sponsoring, we like those guys!

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CSUA recently invited DropBox CEO Drew Houston to Berkeley to speak about his experience as a young entrepreneur. Lots of insightful information. Be sure to check it out below:

DropBox eTalk part 1

DropBox eTalk part 2

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About the author: Warren Ng is the co-founder of Napkin Labs, an innovation consultancy that utilizes a crowdsourced approach to innovation to enable breakthrough ideas to bubble up at the intersection of diverse thinking by consumers and experts in all fields.

Entrepreneurs are a rare breed characterized by one incredibly distinguishing variable where when faced with comparable choices, we have a tendency to choose the option with greater returns even if that requires incredible risk.  Some say this proclivity towards risk-reward is in our blood, that it can’t be taught and once we’ve experienced the upside, our addictive and passionate personalities will always hunger for more. And now you have two choices; “you take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”

The Red Pill
Welcome to the real world, the entrepreneurial world where choices are made everyday and the sum of all your choices determines if you make the cover of Inc. Magazine or are a footnote in someone else’s ‘red pill venture’.  As members of ST@B, I see more Inc. Mag covers than footnotes because unlike other entrepreneurs you are doing everything you can to get a leg up.  You attend the mixers, receptions, speakers, etc. and have begun to network yourself into a world.  Even further you’re at Berkeley where experiential learning is highly regarded as the best way to understand, but have you actually taken a ‘ST@B at it?’ (pun very much intended).

Live the Dream; take a ST@B at it!
All the resources are within the organization, namely, other entrepreneurially minded founders with a diverse range of skills and backgrounds. You’ve met these people, but now what? And the answer is ’something is always better than nothing.’  There is much learning even in failure (maybe more).  I hesitate to use the word “failure” because it should be encouraged.  In fact, if you aren’t failing every now and again then you aren’t doing something right or innovative anyway; and if that is the case, chances are your idea isn’t competitively insulated.  Yes, some competition is good; it will motivate you and signal that there is an viable business, but if you aren’t doing anything different, better, you are swallowing the blue-pill.

[click to continue…]

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Thanks to all who attended our Startup School Reception on Saturday! The event drew a large crowd of hackers, entrepreneurs, and students from all over. If you missed the reception, check back soon for information on upcoming events this semester. Thanks again to law firm Dorsey & Witney for sponsoring the event.

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There are some great talks at Y Combinator Startup School here in Wheeler Auditorium at Cal. The last couple talks are coming up with Tony Hsieh (Zappos) and Mark Pincus (Zynga). If you missed the event, it can be watched on justin.tv after the event is over.

Be sure to make the ST@B after party at Haas (5-7:30). We are going to be broadcasting the after party with the original Justin.tv hat cam, so tune in if you can’t make it.

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On October 24th, Y Combinator will be holding their annual Startup School event at Berkeley. The event will feature talks from entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Evan Williams and Biz Stone (Twitter), Tony Hsieh (Zappos), Paul Bucheit (G-mail, Friendfeed), Mark Pincus (Zynga), and others.

The registration for the event has closed, but ST@B is hosting an after-mixer at the Bank of America Forum in the Haas School. That is open to all ST@Bers who can register here.We hope you can make it for food, beer, and fun! Thank you to Dorsey & Witney for sponsoring the event!

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