We gathered friday evening at Enerspace Palo Alto and we asked you to develop apps and possibly win a prize — Up to $1000 for best app. Apps could be original or ported to Tizen.  Only two rules, the app had to run on the RD-PQ development phone, and you had to complete it and demo it for the judges by Saturday at six pm.

We kicked off the Friday evening with a quick overview of the SDK and tools with Hod Greeley from Samsung and Raghavendra Reddy from Intel, and then we dove into setting up these development envireonments.  Many versions of MAC OS, Ubuntu, and Windows later we had most people up and running. Windows 8 proved the biggest hurdle, for the vanilla tools. But thanks to some industrious hackers familiar with the Javacheck issue, a new installer  solution was already posted on developer.tizen.org. https://developer.tizen.org/forums/general-support/installing-tizen-sdk-under-windows-8
Over 100 developers joined us and we even had a team of students visiting from France joining in the fun.

Although we closed the doors at midnight Friday, it was fairly evident that some teams were heading off to code all night long, but for the rest of us we opened up again at 9AM on Saturday morning.

A marathon session of upgrading the development phones to the latest OS image was handled admirably by,  and by 11AM we had handed out over eighty devices to the developers

.Most development teams has something running in the SDK when we gave them a development device, and getting an app from the SDK onto the phone is well documented, but despite following these rules for  setting the time and date, creating app signing certificate, and enabling USB debugging, there’s always some issues, even if its just a faulty USB cable.

However by 6pm we had twenty apps to judge, some admittedly a bit more polished than others.  At 3 minute demo time  allocated per app, with changeovers, Q & A  and a beer break it took almost two hours to get all the info to the judges.  
This was a hard competition to judge as we had eight apps all scoring within a point or two of each other, so in the end it came down to having the judges select the three apps they would actually load onto their own phones.

And the winners are.
 

Best App: Carnegie Mellon-Silicon Valley Team 3's virtual mobile assistant app “Big Brother”. This aptly named dual pupose app could be used by an individual to automate your life. Examples they showed included turning on silence mode when you were in a meeting, or sending a tweet when the phone detected a particular SSID. This app could also be used to monitor the user, tweeting a parent when a teen left school, or other tracking/checking options. Is suspect this Orwellian side of the app was the true reason for the Big Brother moniker. The first prize  went to a four-person team made up of Ruchir, Devika, Manuel and Vedant. 

Runner-Up: Walter Lee’s health app “Stroke Signs & Help” This app also had two aspects. The "Help" aspect could be used by a person who suspected they were having a stroke and would send out timestamped messages to friends, relatives or first responders.  Or it could be used by these friends and relatives to help diagnose and check for symptoms using the Stroke Signs part of the App. Walter even included photoshopped photo's of himself, in the app, showing drooping eye or mouth conditions. The app was dedicated to Walter's brother who suffered a major stroke.

Best Ported App: a masterful port of a drawing app “Tizen Draw”

Note for the astute reader: If anyone know where I can find a screenshot please let me know via twitter @intel_stewart
 

This Hackathon was definitely a team effort and special thanks go not only to all the participants but also the judges Samsung‘s Sophia Jeonghwa, SV Entrepreneurs & Startups’ David Cao, appbackr‘s Trevor Cornwell.

Honorable mention to the Tech support from Intel, Raghavendra Reddy and Raghu Kona and Intel's Wesley Osaze, and the team  from BeMyApp who were on hand to register all the teams, gather photos, deliver some awesome food and liquid sustenance, and most of all keep us on target.

LINKS

BeMyApp Blog http://blog.bemyapp.com/two-great-days-in-the-valley/

BeMyApp Flickr Feed http://www.flickr.com/photos/bemyapp/sets/72157636066132923/

David Cao's Blog http://mlogy.net/2013/09/29/big-brother-by-cmu-sudents-won-tizen-hacathon-sponsored-by-samsung-and-intel/

Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley Blog http://www.cmu.edu/silicon-valley/news-events/news/2013/big-brother-tizen-win.html 

Enerspace Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/EnerspacePaloAlto/posts/208577339315631