[angelhack-blog-blog]

Business and Code, APPNATION's Partnership with AngelHack

 If you've ever been to a non-hack focused entrepreneurial meet up in recent times, you'd know that the magic words '**Yes I can code**' set off a buzz in the room quicker than anything else can. Heads turn and people start looking for the face behind those words. And if you're the coder in question, you'd be leaving the event later that evening with a stack of business cards fattening up your wallet.  We at AngelHack however, believe that the recipe for success of every tech startup still lies in its core business practices, as well as an understanding of the market and its customer's needs. It is important for technical co-founders to keep track of current trends, both technological and customer oriented, that will affect what goes into the tech of the product or service that their startup is creating. It is also equally important for business people to play a larger role in the growth of a tech startup and to be well informed of market factors affecting customer acquisition and marketing. _For a great example of a non-coder entering hackathons, read Bassem's blog titled "6 Takeaways from My AngelHack Experience" [here.](http://blog.skillacademy.com/post/60138869853/six-takeaways-from-my-angelhack-experience)_  Therefore, AngelHack is proud to be a partner of [APPNATION V](http://appnationconference.com/an5/), the conference that will keep you up to date on the mobile market, allow you to mingle and network with key figures in the industry, and set you thinking with a full schedule of talks given through the days. Check out the list of speakers below!  We highly encourage our hackers to attend the conference, and we are offering promo codes as part of our partnership. Use them for a free expo pass or for a discount on the full conference! **Free expo pass:** AN5EXPO100 **25% discount on conference pass:** AN5FC25 AngelHack's CEO, Sabeen Ali, will also be giving a talk at APPNATION V titled "The Whole Developer: Commit to Well-Being". She will be discussing what it means to be a "whole developer", the notion that developers should not only focus on their technical education but also keep a keen eye on leadership development and overall health and mental wellness. Be sure to attend her talk and stop by the AngelHack booth while you're there! Visit [APPNATION V](http://appnationconference.com/an5/) for more information on the event.

[angelhack-blog-blog]

Extreme Reality: Welcome to the Future of Portable Motion Control

 **[Motion control](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_control)** ( technology allowing a person to control a device using their own body movements and gestures ) is becoming quite a topic of interest these days in the tech industry. Gaming platforms integrate motion control devices to allow users to play games using their body movements ( like the popular dance games ), and mobile devices and smart tv's now recognize hand gestures from their users, allowing remote control using just hand movements. Its popularity is growing and its almost certain that all devices in the future will have some kind of motion control feature embedded in them. The inherent problem with most motion control technology, however, is that they require very specific hardware in order to be used. In other words, software that is written to use one type of motion control technology will require customers to purchase the required hardware. This, as you can imagine, creates a barrier to customer acquisition for software developers, among other issues, like limited experience-sharing among end users.  Enter [Extreme Reality](http://www.xtr3d.com/), the software development company based in Israel that has been developing motion control technology for the past 8 years. The difference in its tech? Extreme Reality's software utilizes just a standard webcam or laptop camera to capture its users' motions or gestures and does not require the purchase of any additional hardware. There are many different potential uses for their technology, especially in industries not traditionally the focus of such tech, like security for instance. Excited? Well if you're a participant of [AngelHack Silicon Valley](http://www.eventbrite.com/e/angelhack-silicon-valley-fall-2013-tickets-8328341293?aff=eorg) this fall you're in luck!  As partners of AngelHack, Extreme Reality is offering free unlimited access to its Extreme Motion SDK for our hackers at AngelHack Barcelona and Silicon Valley for apps developed at the event. They are also providing exclusive beta access to their Android version of the SDK. Additionally, Extreme Reality is giving away an extra prize of $1,000 for the best “Motionized” game. Teams that integrate motion in their application will be taken into account for this prize. So what can you do with the SDK? Check out what one of the teams at AppHack Barcelona came up last weekend over [here.](http://www.service2media.com/blog/service2media-team-wins-special-prize-and-classifies-for-final-at-angelhack-barcelona/) Their personal trainer app, ['Move!'](http://www.hackathon.io/hotelworkout) guides you through a workout by keeping track of your body movements using Extreme Reality's tech, and even corrects you when you're cheating!  **Want to get your hands on this new exciting technology? Come down to [AngelHack Silicon Valley](http://apphack13sv.eventbrite.com/) in December!** To find out more about Extreme Reality visit them [here.](http://www.xtr3d.com/)

[angelhack-blog-blog]

Six Takeaways From My AngelHack Experience

**Introduction from AngelHack:** Bassem was a participant at a previous AngelHack hackathon in Silicon Valley and he went on to develop his idea for skillacademy.com into a working service after meeting developers who were willing to work with him. As a non-coder he had the skills to refine an idea but didn't have the tools to create a working prototype and had a hard time finding coders who were willing to work with him. But despite being against the odds, things work out for him over time and skillacademy is now in development. We at AngelHack encourage our technical participants at our hackathons to be open to business folk. While time is short at our events and every team wants to churn out code as quickly as possible, it is still the core business functionality of the tech developed that can prove to be critical to the success of the tech and the team. Bassem's original blog post can be found [here.](http://blog.skillacademy.com/post/60138869853/six-takeaways-from-my-angelhack-experience) **Six takeaways from my AngelHack Experience** **1. Have an idea? Act on it** Last November I hopped on a bus leaving UC Berkeley’s campus to Paypal’s headquarters in order to join my first hackathon experience at [AngelHack](http://www.angelhack.com) Silicon Valley and give a push to [skillacademy.com](http://www.skillacademy.com/) (previously eduudle), an idea I had in mind for a couple of weeks. I wasn’t a coder but heck with that, I was sure I could still learn something.  **2. A culture shock:** I’m originally from Egypt, not the bay area, and was on exchange at UC Berkeley. The idea of a hackathon was pretty alien to me and that triggered me to experiment. I was shocked to find myself joining 300+ other people who are super excited to build their own thing - all in the same hall. It felt like I was surrounded with the outliers, some crazy people who actually believe they’re building the next big thing. It felt amazing. It felt like the ideal home - maybe a little bit more familiar than home!  **3. Shit gets done:** At 12:00 pm 70 people pitched their one-minute idea to convince other people to join their team. At around 2:00 pm 60 teams were built while mingling over lunch. And then everyone started hacking till next day 4:00 pm. The lazy ones including myself took a power nap after midnight. I did that under a sponsor table because the place was all lit up. More or less, the 60 teams built their product demos and pitched in three parallel sessions, each with an amazing judging panel comprising investors, entrepreneurs and tech bloggers. Four teams won $25,000 to uplift their product demo to a startup. The momentum of the event was unprecedented and got me wondering about how so much was accomplished in so little time. That’s the idea of a hackathon done right. 300 people, 60 teams, 60 product demos, 4 winners with some seed money.     **4. A biz dev hacking AngelHack:** failed badly to attract other tech members to join me in building a working prototype for SkillAcademy.com because I wasn’t a coder - and everyone wanted to get things done - so they were looking for other developers to join. And to be honest, I was a bit taken by the hype and wasn’t sure what I need to do. After lunch, I started hacking “powerpoint” (yes the .ppt thing!) to build a mock-up of the user experience in a slideshow format. Then I went around to do my market research asking people randomly about their search experience for online courses and showing them the mock-up: “if you’re using something like kayak.com for online courses which filters would you like to see” and started to get a lot of valuable feedback from real people. I worked on a second iteration and developed an online survey to send out via twitter and get more feedback from more people. The best part is that people really help out each other. At the end of the hackathon, I had a pitch deck with a revised product demo mimicking kayak.com but for online courses - more like the Dropbox approach to a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) - in my case, I like to call a “Minimum Viable Pitch” - more on that later.   **5. When persistence meets luck:** In the judging panel was Tomio Geron, a tech writer at Forbes, and Niko Bonatsos, an investor at General Catalyst partners, one of the first investors in Kayak.com (pitching kayak.com for online courses)!!!! Both asked really valuable questions focused on user acquisition, monetization, and access to standardized data across different course platforms. Niko was really interested in education and the demo. He particularly applauded the attempt to conduct market research during the hackathon and it’s obvious why - because coders just ignore customers all together, especially at a hackathon, let alone that market research is actually very hard. I got their contact details and have been updating them since then with progress via Skype and Linkedin when possible. **6. Progress:** I later joined two other important events, Startup Weekend London Edu and MITArab Startup Competition which I’ll blog about later. More importantly, I condensed the MBA in a way to have more time for the startup. Now we’re a team of four and growing. We pivoted a couple of months ago to what we’re now: helping organizations solve the world’s toughest challenges by developing their people effectively and efficiently with MOOCs offered by the best universities in the world for free. How does it work? With SkillAcademy, organizations can simply plug-N-play a university-size e-learning platform with 10,000 existing free online courses in less than a minute and for free. You can read about our motivation in our [foundation note](http://blog.skillacademy.com/post/59527963459/the-foundation-note). Our next step is to get organizations to join our by-invitation [100Partners Program](http://www.skillacademy.com/100partners) (more on that later). Still anyone can simply discover and search for online courses or “bootcamps” (a tailored selection of courses focused on a skill-set) developed by SkillAcademy.  **Key takeaways:** 1. You have an idea? act on it and screw the business plan 2. [AngelHack](http://www.angelhack.com/) is pretty awesome and going global - join an event when you can 3. Be ready to hustle and work hard non-stop a.k.a. #HackStrong 4. Everyone has an opportunity to shine in a hackathon - even non-coders 5. Luck will find you if you’re persistent 6. Take your cool product demo from a hackathon to something really meaningful - at least to you **Bassem** | [On Twitter](https://twitter.com/brfayek) | [On LinkedIn](http://www.linkedin.com/in/bassemfayek) Chief Alchemist, Cofounder For the record, PITME, an organization that aims to turbo-charge the Middle Eastern startup eco-system by providing access to Silicon Valley resources is helping AngelHack setup their local Middle East Chapters. So make sure to join PITME to stay connected.

[angelhack-blog-blog]

$1,000,000 Grand Prize at Dreamforce Hackathon in San Francisco

 So you think you have an idea for a world changing mobile app. How about a million dollars to prove it? That is the challenge set by Salesforce, the company behind the mega hackathon with a million dollar grand prize held at their Dreamforce conference this year. Thousands of participants will be competing in teams, each hoping to impress the judges to claim the prize money; but even teams that fall short of the final spot will not be disappointed with an additional $90,000 prize to be split among four runner ups.  Participants will have to design an app around the Salesforce platform and judging will be based on use of the platform as well as the business value of the app. Think you have what it takes? If you've signed up for Dreamforce, you can register yourself and your team with no hassle. **If not, you can still get a FREE pass to the hackathon, if you sign up before 5pm on November 14th!** To find out more and to sign up, visit [this link.](http://events.developerforce.com/dreamforce/hackathon) You don't want to miss this one!

[angelhack-blog-blog]

Team Behind Green Technology "Driblet" Begins Crowdfunding Campaign

 AngelHack's hackathons produce some of the most innovative technology we've come across and at the end of every season, we are proud to see what our hackers have come up with and the companies that the teams have formed as a result of our weekend events. One of those teams are the people behind Driblet, a green device that monitors water usage and encourages people and enterprises utilizing their devices to save water. Driblet runs entirely on self-sustainable energy provided by running water and introduces gamification to saving water via its companion application. In the face of the many problems that trouble our environmental future, Driblet has a larger goal of encouraging sustainability in our way of life and has partnered with multi-national water conservation NGO's and private companies to donate water to areas that need it the most. At the same time, these organizations along with municipalities and governments will start using Driblet's technology in water conservation initiatives. Driblet is still undergoing constant development and the team has started a crowdfunding campaign to fuel efforts into make their device more affordable for the masses. Their crowdfunding page can be found [here. ](http://www.dragoninnovation.com/projects/29-driblet) More information on Driblet's technology and its team can also be found on their official site [here.](http://driblet.co/) 

[angelhack-blog-blog]

Techweek Los Angeles x AngelHack

AngelHack is proud to be a partner of Techweek Los Angeles! From speaker presentations to the FashionTECH runway show, its the place to be for all things tech! Follow AngelHack on Facebook and Twitter for discount promo codes. To find out more about Techweek LA, click on the badge below!

[angelhack-blog-blog]

AngelHack Paris Fall 2013 Recap

Paris, the city of romance... But no one has time for that nonsense when you have a weekend long hackathon to attend! AngelHack’s Paris AppHack kicked off the first weekend of the series on October 19th and 20th, and it was an awesome start to what will be a 7 week-long run in almost 30 cities across the globe. This event had many surprises up its sleeve and tons of fun.

The event was held at Deezer. Located on the Rue de Athenes, the venue did not disappoint. Sleek, hip, hackathon ready with beanbags, couches, a fooseball table, even guitars. Black and white walls, large windows, private rooms, and an outside foyer provided the perfect atmosphere and work space for those in attendance. Did we mention the food? As attendees arrived, fresh baked croissants, pain de chocolat, fruits and more lined the banquet table to greet eager and hungry hackers.

Things didn’t start getting crazy until after hours. When the beer had been flowing thanks for the happy hour hosted by Braintree, and hackers began looking for some distractions. A coo was being talked about on a fellow hackathon 500 meters down the rue, and after a couple hours of planning and plotting the plan was in full effect. A team had assembled, NerfGuns in tow, and we we’re en route to the Cliteo hackahon for a sneak attack. The only thing that almost got in our way was an impromptu photo op with what turned out to be a famous french humorist sitting in a nearby cafe, but we took our pictures, gathered our troops, and quickly resumed our mission.

See video.

We even made a date to hangout with our Warsaw buddies. Minutes before, a technical mishap which caused the lights and power to shut off occurred. Hacking in the dark! It’s all the rage. This didn’t seem to deter the hackers at their work posts in the slightest. I’m still not certain they’re aware it happened. The power came back on moments later. We may have been late for our date, but it was cool to see that around 11pm on Saturday we had dedicated hackers, heads down, clacking away on their keyboards all for the same purpose miles and miles away. It made us feel connected! As the night wore on, many stayed, and the comfortable areas that provided solace from the streaming glare of computer screens were spoken for.

The MOMENT. Judging began at 2pm the next day. It was hard to pry the masses from the droves of hot piping pizza boxes that arrived only minutes before, but we managed. Team after team presented their demos. There was no shortage of awesome ideas and stellar hacks that came from the 24 hours leading up to it. Judges deliberated. Tick tock, tick tock. Teams waited in the main area eager to hear the results. The final decision was not an easy one. ListMyApp took home the AngelHack Grand Prize! DotFi was the runner-up. Geezer also walked away with a sponsor prize from Deezer.

The winners had been crowned! The last of the beers were spoken for and everyone celebrated and hung-out to soak up the energy and relish in the company that turned out for such an event.

A special thanks and shout out to our sponsors who made out event a success: MailJet and Braintree. We are also indebted to our panel of judges who were present to see our demos and carefully consider the winner of AngelHack AppHack 2013! Thanks to: Julie Knibbe, James Olver, Didier Tranchier, et Antoine Porte. Merci beaucoup, ladies and gents!

[angelhack-blog-blog]

AngelHack Sydney Fall 2013 Recap

AngelHack Fall 2013 hackathon came back to Sydney the second time this year with mobile theme in October 26 & 27 with the name AppHack. Like last time, the event took place at Fishburners in Sydney, Australia. Fishburners is a biggest tech startup hub in town and is a home to more than 200 startups.  Our special feature this time was a series of interview clips from Vimily which is an affordable video for business, brand exposure, lead generation and competition. Some of attendees were lucky to be filmed by Vimily crew about their ideas, sharing, feelings and experience over the weekend. Check them out here. http://bit.ly/17OVE01   The panel of judge this time ranged from VC to tech entrepreneurs and female entrepreneurs. They included Andrey Shirben at Syd Ventures, Benjamin Chong at Right Click Capital, Rui Rodrigues at Tank Steam Ventures, Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin at BlueChilli and Omar Khan at Yo Yo Button. Our female judges are Rebekah Campbell at Posse, Katrin Suess at Vimily and Nikki at Freelancer.   We would like to thank all of the judges who invested their valuable time in the hackathon. With the variety of backgrounds and characteristics, teams received intellectual feedback, advice and tech knowledge from their experiences. You can check out the interview of all judges and mentors in the event here https://www.vimily.com/share/MJI4TS9GXkD  Besides bootcamps on hybrid, iOS and Android apps, all 10 teams this time were very fortunate to be mentored by 5 experienced entrepreneurs from Android, iOS to UX, payment, mobile marketing and business strategy to. They are Tom Horn from goCatch, Taylor Luk from Issue.by, Tyson Hackwood from Braintree, Matthew Ho from Native Tongue and Dan Draper from CodeHire.  The winning team is Bowser which is an app to find the nearest petrol station for vehicle owners and provides special deals after check-in, payment and sharing experience. The team includes Ben Song, Michael Almario and Daniel Myasnikov. Andrey commented “Good team, interesting concept, interesting to see how the service works in conjunction with Coles/Woolworth fuel discount coupons.”   The runner-up team is HappyHou.se which makes shared living easy, splitting bills, paying your share, allocating chores, roommate messaging and a platform to monitor it all. Christopher Michaelides, Theo Lampert, John Trengrove and Bastien Seiffert. Sebastien shared “Good potential, strong logo, good design, nice work on the responsive aspect. Check your competitors and key differentiators. Good work in building a working prototype in 24 hours.”  Organizers include Albert Mai and Sarah Maloof with the help from Dan Draper as a MC and our volunteers Rainbow Chan, Dennis Ong, Tomas Kutaj and Nhat Bui. AppHack Sydney was supported by BlueChilli, Braintree, Freelancer, Fishburners, General Assembly, Yo Yo Button and Vimily. p.s. Don’t forget to see all videos of the weekends by Vimily [The projects developed can be viewed on Hackathon IO here!](http://www.hackathon.io/apphack15/projects)  Albert Mai is a product and growth hacking enthusiast. He has worked in many startups from Vietnam to Singapore to Sydney including Ticketbox.vn, Pollenizer Singapore, ZeroMail and IMWT. In his free time, he blogs at Startupof.me and TechInAsia.

[angelhack-blog-blog]

Fall 2013 AngelHack SF Recap

It was an amazing weekend at AngelHack San Francisco and once again we had a big turn out for the hackathon. Everything ran smoothly thanks to everybody involved with the event: the sponsors, the AngelHack team, Parisoma, judges, volunteers, and hackers! All of you have been part of the success of our Fall 2013 AngelHack San Francisco hackathon.

It all began on Saturday morning, where the organisers were a little concerned because the registrations through Eventbrite had exceeded the maximum capacity of 150 people for Parisoma. Thankfully, everything worked out just fine and we could get all our participants in without hassle.

Everybody got into the swing of things quickly and the atmosphere was great. We had our sweet sponsor faces sitting behind the tables and our little team was putting breakfast together and making sure everything would go well for our hackers.

The AngelHack team started things off with a series of quizzes and gave out prizes to the winners. Prizes included t-shirts, helicopters and nerf guns! After the quizzes, anybody with an idea they were interested in getting developed were invited to give a one minute pitch to the audience, after which the teams formed up and got to work.

We had over 30 teams that weekend conducting a friendly and geeky battle. Not only did they have to compete to wow the judges with their app, they also had to dodge the nerf gun bullets that were quickly proving to be quite a pleasant distraction.

For dinner that evening we had healthy food served up from our new caterer, and the food disappeared rapidly with people wanting more after it had all been demolished. The food was just delicious. Well done SpoonRocket! And then it was back to coding and design with late night pizza and snacks. Our hackers love pizza but we do try to feed them with healthier options!

Then came the late night party bus and some people took a little time off to network and have fun before the hardest part of the event which was the overnight crunch. At least 30% of the teams stayed up through the night, working hard on their apps and once again dodging nerf gun bullets.

The next morning, the sun rose, all came back to life, breakfast was delivered, and the room was filled again with hackers sleep deprived from the overnight effort, but brimming with excitement with the fruit of their labour.

I want to highlight something in particular that happened that morning. The winning team LockR was about to give up their app submission just 2 hours before the deadline due to a serial port drive issue. One of their members approached our volunteer team from HackerLab for help, and thanks to the teams working together they resolved the issue in time. It is this spirit of community that makes hackathons one of the most rewarding events to attend!

And so at 2pm it was time to judge the team's submissions, and it was the difficult moment for all of us. The teams had to present their app demo in front of the audience, and the judges gave their criticism and constructive feedback. The winners were chosen to much celebration, and sponsors and AngelHack staff awarded the teams with their prizes.

The event was nearly over then. Handshakes and hugs were given around from the winning teams which the audience always loves. And everybody helped tidy the entire space while the judges deliberated over a decision for the event winner, a runner up and a lucky third. And so all our participants left the hackathon with a great memory of this October's weekend spent building a product, gaining new friendships, making connections and hopefully earning a lot of self gratification.

Once again a big thanks to everybody and we hope to see you again in San Francisco!

The projects developed can be viewed on Hackathon IO here!

A huge thank you to our sponsors: TM Forum, PayPal, Ark, Amazon Kindle, Lob.com, 99 designs, moo, and Facebook Parse!

Thank you to our amazing judges for spending your Sunday afternoon with us: Meg Nakamura, Jonathan Cobb, Blake Commmagere, Jenny Belotserkovsky, Ayori Selassie, Jeremy Conrad, and Eros Resmini!

And we love our amazing volunteers: Daniel Harrigan, George Michel, Alan Ware and Pero Petricevic.

We'll see you at our next AngelHack San Francisco!

Pierre Wahl is an entrepreneur and tech lover. He is a graduate from the University of Edinburgh with a degree in Electronics and Electrical Engineering. He loves to travel. This year, he served as AngelHack Ambassador in San Francisco.

[angelhack-blog-blog]

Spring 2013 AngelHack Moscow Winners and HACKcelerator Alums, Alerter, Are Now on iTunes!

If you've listened to music on your iPhone, iPad or iPod, you probably bought some tracks and loaded them from iTunes. How do you know when those artists are releasing a new single? Or a new album?

Alerter solves this iTunes problem.

How does it work? The Alerter app scans your media library and then suggests your favorite artists you should subscribe to. As soon as new albums and singles appear in iTunes, Alerter will send you full information about the new release with a link to purchase via push notifications.

In addition, you can search multiple stores at once. For example, my main store is American, but I want to follow and get notifications about new singles of Russian and Ukrainian stores too. Alerter allows you to do that.

Here's a brief history of how Alerter became a small startup:

In May we developed a prototype from scratch and won the biggest international hackathon, AngelHack Moscow.

In June, Hopes&Fears selected us as "top 3 most interesting and young startups."

From June to August we created our MVP, launched beta-testing and reached 30 testers.

In September, we participated in the HACKcelerator and presented our product at Global Demo Day in the Silicon Valley

On October 19th our app was approved and became available for download on iTunes. Yahooo! :)

You can check it out here!

Some of the features on the current version of the Alerter app:

– Discover new interesting artists and their music

– Subscribe to the updates of your favorite ones via push notification

– Download or buy any item on iTunes

– Share music via Twitter, Facebook and popular messengers

Be sure to check us out on our website, on Facebook, and on Twitter!

[angelhack-blog-blog]

Fall 2013 AngelHack Hong Kong Recap

With much anticipation from developers, designers and startup entrepreneurs, AngelHack has finally arrived to Hong Kong on the 18th - 19th of October, the kick-off weekend of Fall 2013 AppHACK. Saturday morning started with people pouring in from around the city and in no time over 230 hackers checked-in at Cyberport for the big event.

Many were keen to share their great ideas in the opening pitches, and even more were eager to get their hands on the ironman masks and sideburns that were handed out. (Halloween was just around the corner!)

Bootcamps with topics ranging from user experience design (UX) to web coding fundamentals were held in the fully packed training rooms. Our hackers were also blessed with other kinds of support such as done-within-2-hours logo design services from LogoDesignCreation, and great smartwatches for our developers to hack with provided by Omate.

Developers showed what it is like to live up to the Hong Kong work spirit by coding restlessly into the night and morning, with a great supply of Redbull and Club-Mate. Their ways of taking a break from the stress were by playing our helicopters and checking out the stray kitten that decided to come visit us at midnight.

When the deadline was approaching the next day, everyone was working so hard that almost no one left their seats for lunch! Finally 26 teams submitted their ideas and 8 of them stood out from the fierce competition, entering the final stage.

Check out this Hackathon.io page for more information on the apps created.

After interesting demos, amazing speeches and some funny moments, all final teams pitched their hacks. VoiceOut, an app that allows users to voice out their concerns on heated issues, got the most votes from everyone and won the audience choice award.

The very first AngelHack Hong Kong winner went to Boutir, the 1-page shopping site making app. Boutir made the process of building an online shop and listing your product into something extremely easy and simple, like using Instagram. Congratulations to the hackers B Chen Ka Kit and Ng Ka Ka!

We're excited for the Boutir team to join us next year in the HACKcelerator program!

Huge thank you's to all our judges and mentors who took their time to join us, including David Chung, Raiyo Nariman, Casey Lau, John Lo, Josh Slayton, Cyril Ebersweiler, Thomas Yao, Deepak Madnani, Theodore Lo and Chris Wilcock. Your insightful feedback made the event a great learning experience for our teams!

We would also like to thank you our lovely sponsors Amazon Kindle, Ark, Paperclip, General Assembly, Lob.com, 99 design, moo, Facebook Parse and our venue provider Cyberport for making this event happen!

With this event as a great start, we wish to see more great innovations in Hong Kong in the coming future. Hope to meet you all again in the next AngelHackHK!

And last but not least, a huge thank you to Steffi Au, our photographer and blogger at AngelHack Hong Kong!

Steffi Au is a technology and design enthusiast. She has experience from working in the global advertising agency BBDO to fast growing startups in Hong Kong, and is currently aspired to be a UX designer or product manager. In her free time she loves doing graphic design, learning coding and participating in hacker community events.

[angelhack-blog-blog]

AngelHack at Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) 2013

Last week, Sarena and Greg were lucky enough to attend GMIC, the worlds leading Asia<>SF Mobile Conference, after GMIC sponsored our AngelHack San Francisco hackathon that happened the previous weekend. Greg was even a speaker!

The conference started with a VIP dinner on Tuesday night, which set the stage for some power networking. Right away we were meeting writers for qq.com (China's largest tech publication) and David Cao, one of Silicon Valley's top developer influencers. Apparently the founder of Xiaomi was there too, but we weren't fortunate enough to meet him.

Later that day Greg had two conference speaking sessions. Both were fun. One panel was next to Gregg Alpert who AngelHack has worked with for years and Eugene Zhang, the president of Innospring, who are our new partners in Shanghai. That was cool!

Next came lunch with Pavel Durov, CEO of VK.com, essentially the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia. We spoke about growing companies in Russia and his top tier engineering team that he recruits through intensive country wide coding challenges, wow! They operate the Facebook of Russia with only 30 people! Talk about top coders.

Someone slid us an invite to go see Yuri Milner speak in a closed session and we snuck away to it. We sat front and center and it was awesome! This guy is going to go down as the best investor of all time. Of his 10 big investments, at least 8 will IPO including Facebook, Groupon, Twitter, AliBaba, Xiaome, Spotify, Zynga, and 23andMe.

The day ended with a great meeting with the head of innovation of Vodaphone. Who knew they were the 25th largest company out there and 2nd largest telco worldwide? A great conversation with an amazing global corporation.

Last but not least, we're so proud of our AngelHack San Francisco finalists who pitched onstage at GMIC.

They are: Ping.Me as the honorable mention, Scout as the runner up, and Lockr, the winner of AppHACK SF.

Congratulations to those three teams, and we look forward to hosting Lockr in the HACKcelerator next year!

A big thank you to GMIC for hosting us at their conference and sponsoring AngelHack San Francisco this year. It was a pleasure working with you guys!

The AngelHack Team

[angelhack-blog-blog]

Announcing the HP Anywhere Meetup & Hackathon

You’ve got the skills. Now put them to good use.

At Mobile Enterprise Hack: Shaping the Future Workplace, you and more than 120 other developers will leverage the HP Anywhere platform to design prototype mobile apps for the workplace of the future.

HP Anywhere is an innovative mobile app development platform for the enterprise that combines the open standards of HTML5 and JavaScript, with capabilities for predictive collaboration, system integration, and enterprise security. Utilizing HP Anywhere, you’ll solve issues including: human interaction, work/life balance, and resource management.

What better place to hack the future of the workplace than one of San Francisco's most innovative and awesome coworking spaces, Parisoma?

If you're looking to get the inside scoop on how HP Anywhere works and how to build the best hacks using it, don't miss the FREE pre-hackathon meetup on Wednesday, October 9th at Parisoma. Beer and pizza included!

Register for the meetup here!

By the end of the weekend, there will be $25,000+ in prizes and giveaways!

Grand Prize Incubation/mentorship with HP Anywhere team Present at the HPA Developer conference running alongside Apps World 2014 $5000 of HP Public Cloud. To be used within one year. $5000 in AMEX gift cards for the team to split 1 Slate7 for each team member

1st Runner up $5000 of HP Public Cloud. To be used within one year. $3000 in AMEX gift cards for the team to split 1 Slate7 for each team member

2nd Runner up $5000 of HP Public Cloud. To be used within one year. $2000 in AMEX gift cards for the team to split

Register for the hackathon now!

Use discount code "AngelHackFans" for free tickets!

[angelhack-blog-blog]

Greg Goes to Hong Kong!

Through my AngelHack travels, I've had the pleasure of meeting most of the tech communities in Asia. Some more than others, but the one overall feeling you get is that these communities are booming and there's growth opportunities to be had by anyone with the right knowledge.

This past week, Blackberry flew me out to Hong Kong and I got my first taste of startups in Hong Kong. Blackberry had their annual developer conference there and through our global partnership, the top 10 APAC Blackberry AngelHackers got to pitch their apps. Our AngelHack teams keynoted the 1st day and in my mind, stole the show with apps like Frienemy, an app for playing memory games with your Facebook friends, and ARKick, an augmented reality and reviewing app out of Bangalore.

After the conference, I spent a lot of time exploring Hong Kong's startup community. So close to China, Hong Kong has access to so many developers from nearby colleges. There are massive transit systems connecting all these towns and tech hubs built by the HK government to incubate, fund, and provide co-work space to startups for free.

Overall, Hong Kong has a lot to offer and I was pretty impressed with the quality caliber of people I met in different industries. From Ivy Shrum's SME to Casey Lau's StartupsHK, to kickstarter star, Kevin Leung, and the new Mr. Incubator, Jung Lee, the HK startup scene has some solid people.

I'm excited to come back and start the Fall AngelHack season here on October 19th.

Tickets to our 1st hackathon in Hong Kong can be found here.

Greg Gopman, Co-Founder & CEO of AngelHack

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We've Moved: The New AngelHack HQ House!

If you didn't already know, we at AngelHack used to find our home at NextSpace coworking near Union Square in San Francisco. We had a great time there, and ended up growing our team to be over 10 members while we were there. We took over the place!

We loved working at NextSpace because they have 9 locations (Venice Beach, Culver City, 3 in SF, Santa Cruz, San Jose, Berkeley, and Chicago) and if you're a member at one, you're a member at them all. For an early stage startup trying to take over the world, that was so crucial.

They also have fun weekly events to get the community together. The staff really focus on getting to know members, their needs, and helping them make connections. It's really amazing to know you work alongside such talented individuals from all different industries.

Now, our team is bit smaller - we miss our summer interns, Robin, Will, Billy, and Erica! - but we've made a big upgrade:

We got our own live/work apartment.

It's a 3 story loft in SoMa, that houses 2 of our team members on our operations team and allows all of our other team member to work together from a common space, whenever we want and however we want.

In true hacker style, the entire 1st floor is dedicated to 24/7 working hours. The main floor is pretty normal office hours. We have giant windows with one giant AngelHack poster covering it.

If you're ever around SoMa, keep a heads up, you might just see that giant AngelHack poster in the window. That's us!

Waving from SoMA, The AngelHack Team

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AngelHack to Attend World's Largest Student Run Hackathon, MHacks

This weekend, AngelHack is proud to be supporting MHacks, the University of Michigan hackathon vying for the world record title, largest student run hackathon.

Held in the giant Michigan Stadium which can accomodate more than 100,000+ attendees from Friday to Sunday (36 hours), this hackathon is going to be epic. The MHacks team anticipates 1,000+ hackers from over 100 universities. They're giving away $40,000+ in prizes and providing all 6 meals.

If you didn't already know, they provide a $200 travel stipend so you can get in on the action. Be sure to put it on your calendar for next year, because this year is SOLD OUT.

Our very own Co-Founder and CEO, Greg Gopman, will be attending to see what we at AngelHack can learn from these amazing student hackers, to see if there's any way we can help and support the MHacks team, and maybe even to give out some AngelHack schwag.

Keep a look out for Greg in our bright red AngelHack hoodies, we'd love to meet you at MHacks! Happy hacking!

Learn more about MHacks on Forbes, Mashable, and TechBeat!

[angelhack-blog-blog]

Announcing The 1st Ever Google Glass And Wearable Platform Business Conference and Hackathon

Glazed Conference and Hackathon is a 3 day Google Glass and wearable technology event including a weekend hackathon put on by Stained Glass Labs and AngelHack and a 1 day Glazed Conference, culminating in the Digital Fall Tech Fashion Show co-produced by Ubergizmo and Stained Glass Labs.

The hackathon will be held at Pivotal Labs, where the industry's best developers will compete for prizes and giveaways from Pebble, GreenQloud, Metaio, and others, plus the opportunity to win a demo table and tickets to the Glazed Conference and Digital Fall Fashion Show.

Grand prize winners will get the opportunity to demo in front of 900+ investors, press, and industry leaders during the Digital Fall Tech Fashion Show.

Register for the hackathon here!

Held at the historic San Francisco venue, The Old Mint, the Glazed Conference will seek to bring all the major players into the discussion about wearable devices including:

● Top Tier Press and Editors from VentureBeat, ReadWrite, All Things D, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, TechCrunch, TechZulu, Ubergizmo, Examiner among others

● Over $20 billion funding on stage from Blue Chip Investors like Mayfield, Samsung Ventures, Rising Tide Ventures, DN Capital, KPCB, Quallcom Ventures, Spark Capital, Bloomberg Capital and Softtech VC

● The Top Google Glass-focused entrepreneurs from around the world

● Industry Experts in mobile, weighing in and interpreting how to design, build, and monetize for success

● Large corporate “hack teams” looking to develop cool applications on wearable technologies

The focus of the weekend is to foster conversation with the Silicon Valley and the world's top tier investors, press, developers and entrepreneurs around wearable technology. We will gather with the goal of defining market potential, penetration points and acceleration opportunities for the ecosystem.

Use promo code "glazed_25" for 25% off the ticket price!

Register for the conference here!

Learn more about Glazed Conference and Hackathon on VentureBeat.

Media Contacts Redg Snodgrass - [email protected]

Sponsorship Information

Sponsorship of the Glazed Hackathon, Glazed Conference and the Digital Fall Tech Fashion Show range from $5,000 to $75,000.

Full details on sponsorship packages and information are available upon request. For sponsorship details, please contact [email protected].