On Saturday 19th January, we hosted our first HERE Maps API hackathon here in Berlin. The weather (several degrees below freezing) meant a few no-shows but those came had a fun and productive day.

Hacks developed on the day included:

Cutting edge technologies

In between running around helping everybody else with their hacks, Max found the time to integrate the just-landed-in-webkit Web Speech API with a map. This means you can now speak to your computer and ask it to "Find me a restaurant". Also: "Find me monkeys. Lots of Monkeys". I kinda used that a lot while testing it out. In fact, I didn't use anything else while testing it, just that.

The source is available on GitHub

Where is the news?

There were two projects that involved analysing the content of tweets and RSS from various news sources to determine areas around the world where the news is happening.

Here's NewsMap.

Lunchtime

I squeezed in a short hack to help people find somewhere that they can walk to, eat in and walk back from in a lunch break:

http://thingsinjars.com/lab/map/lunchtime.html

Windows Phone

The majority of projects used the Web APIs but there was one team who developed a Windows Phone application. Using the concept of the 'Fog of War' from the classic Age of Empires, they brought together map exploration and POI discovery into a gamified location experience. This project was so thoroughly developed with consideration to future marketing potential that it was the overall winner for the day.

We might aim for another hackathon in the Summer so if you're anywhere near Berlin and fancy spending a day hacking on Geo API stuff, drop me a line.