The 2014 Greylock Hackfest kicked off on July 19, 2014 at the Medium headquarters building in San Francisco, California, and brilliant minds showcased their new technologies to a panel of five judges. The judges were Pooja Sankar (founder and CEO of Piazza), Gerald Fong (he has two Greylock Hackfest wins under his belt), David Sze, Daniel Clancy (VP of engineering and product design at Nextdoor), and Josh McFarland (the CEO of TellApart).
Image obtained with thanks from Dave Fontenot.
The top ten technologies showcased at the 2014 Greylock Hackfest were:
- Wizzy: This app adds a random song to each video you record. You won’t know which song was added until you share the video.
- Copycat: This automatically plays songs you refer to on Spotify.
- Tabspace: This can render a 2D graph of the tabs you are browsing in.
- LangYouTalk: This can translate phone conversations to other languages in real time.
- Standby: This can automatically preload popular content from some of your favourite websites including reddit and more, so that you can browse them offline when you’re travelling or in a remote region.
- MDFS: A cloud management system that automatically converts and uploads your files to multiple cloud services to safeguard them against data loss.
- WhenDo.io: A plug and play hardware development system aimed at making hardware development easier.
- Hyperink: This will stream video of you drawing, and hide your hand (as well as everything else in the background).
- Cumulonimbus: This is a distributed cloud file system that stores your data over multiple cloud services. It enables you and others to edit them, but stay in sync.
- Sense.js: This enables websites to take advantage of devices’ accelerometer, motion, and gesture data, a major step forward for website functionality.
My personal favourites were LangYouTalk, Sense.js, and Standby. If LangYouTalk is accurate, it would be a tremendous breakthrough as people currently must have a person translate for them during voice conversations. Sense.js enables websites to achieve functionality which I have never seen. This may enable websites to adjust their layouts to fit screens based on whether they are in landscape or portrait mode, to play games using gestures, and much more!
The Winners Of Greylock Hackfest 2014
The winners of the 2014 Greylock Hackfest were:
- First place: Copycat. The grand prize winner gets to play the Hacker Cash-omatic game,collect as many $100 USD bills as they can, and meet Ev Williams, David Sze and Josh Elman.
- Second place:WhenDo.io. The second prize is a Phantom 2 Vision Quadcopter.
- Third place: MDFS. The third price is a GoPro HERO3+ Black Edition, a waterproof camera designed for sports enthusiasts.
Source: Dave Fontenot, the founder of Hackmatch’s live report of the event.
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