Back in August the first Photo Hack Day took place at General Assembly, NYC. There were over $10,000 in prizes and lots of interesting companies sponsoring the event including Aviary (who organized the whole thing), Etsy, Face.com, Foursquare, Shutterstock and Bigstock, Twitpic, Imgur, Instagram etc.
After giving it a little bit of thought I decided to join the hackers and see what the fuzz is all about.
After watching all of the introductions and introducing my project, I realized that 1. I thought my project was not something that was fit for this hackathon and 2. I felt that I needed to do something more experimental that others would be exited about. After talking to a bunch of designers and developers I was at a loss since I felt that some projects were trivial and the fin project already had a large team. So I posted a tweet that I was looking for a teammate to do a cool project. And Mason Du replied saying that he did not have a project yet.
Mason Du was looking to do something with education around picture taking. I wanted to do something with location and scraping exif data. After talking we came up with the concept of a picture helper, which we called “The Prettify App” since our philosophy, was that in order to get really cool pictures you need to help the photographer and not the picture. Once the picture is snapped, a computer can only do so much to make it better.
On Saturday night we realize that we needed a name and after realizing that our hack needed more personality, I convinced Mason that the product should be called Photobot and that it should be based around three bot personalities that try to make you a better photographer according to the data we get from the image uploaded. After some thought, Mason agreed Photobot was born!
Photobot was truly the product of Photo Hack Day, two guys scraping code, hacking stuff together to get a prototype of something that no one has ever seen.
The presentation went pretty well and judging by the quality of questions by the judges, we were optimistic.
It was a real surprise to find out that out of 44 projects submitted, Photobot came in at the Winner of the whole enchilada!
This win yielded a lot of geek cred and a lot of prizes. What a great event.
And this Weekend is Photo Hack Day 2!!
