Inspired by Yelp, Twitter, and Fred Wilson, we had our first annual Active.com (internal) hackathon last week.  Through prodding, coaxing and bribery, we ended up with 20 teams vying for the title of "Best Hack".  Teams could consist of no more than two, in part because I couldn't allocate the grand prize, a trip to the Web 2.0 Expo, to more than two.  UX people paired with hardcore engineers.  Web App Developers paired with Web App Developers.  And some just went it alone.

The rules were strict.  All code written had to be produced during the hackathon, which started at 12am PST on 16 December and ended at 9:45am PST on the 17th.  Hackers were, however, allowed to use Active.com or open source libraries.  Two very inventive teams, however, incorporated devices such as the Arduino into their hacks.  This was a pleasantly unexpected outcome.  And also to my surprise, many teams hacked for over 24 hours making good use of the time alloted.

As the clock winded down I prepared the meeting room for hackathon demos.  I'd assembled a team of 6 high-ranking judges from various disciplines - VP of Technology, Vice President of my division, Senior Director of IT Operations, etc.  This team would be responsible for determining the overall winner, as well as the winner of each category, which were Most Original, Best Execution, Most Business Potential, and Best Demo.

Each team had three minutes to demo, along with a 2 minute question/answer/transition session.  Teams from China had begun hacking on their 16th of December and submitted screencasts for me to play during the demo.  They, unfortunately, didn't get a question/answer session.  The meeting room was packed with geeks and business folks alike.  Our COO would later comment to me that he noticed a lot of laughter during the demos, but that people weren't laughing because what they were seeing was funny.  They were laughing because what they were seeing was blowing them away.

At a minimum people walked away from this experience with a realization of just how creative software engineers can be.  As one colleague puts it, in many ways, engineers are like artists.  But instead of having a canvas, they have an IDE.  And two of the ideas have already been inserted into our roadmap for next year, which is an awesome outcome.

Best Hack (Overall Winner)

Team Me - Rob Cameron

Rob created an RFID checkin system to get around the issue of a user needing a smartphone to check in to venues or events.

Best Demo

SF Here We Come - Marc Villanueva, Chris Ferguson

Marc and Chris created an RV route finder that uses Google Maps and the Active.com Camping API to show where you might park your RV on your cross country trip.  They also integrated into the Yelp API to pull up a list of REIs along the route but hit their quota limit before doing the demo.

Best Execution

Team Tunes - Eugene Correia

Eugene integrated the last.fm API into our Active Trainer Beta to produce a song list for training plans.

Most Business Potential

Real Deal - Airey Baringer, Chris Smith

Airey and Chris built a prototype that showed how we might port Active.com event listings into Facebook in order to reach a broader audience in a more social way.

Most Original

Team Sweden - Hakan Lindestaf

Hakan integrated a realtime notification service into an LED display for Active Golf.

And honorable mentions go to Krispy Kreme, Team Crystal, and Team Photos.

I was fortunate enough to be asked by Mashery to speak at BAPI New York and BAPI San Francisco this year.  I gave a quick presentation on the reasons why we need to endeavor to understand the impact our API has on our business.  Check out the presentation I gave in San Francisco:

Here were some of my other favorites:

• API Super Hero by Danny Boice
• Netflix API Program by Michael Hart
• Klout Case Study by Matthew Thomson

We're conducting an internal hackathon at the end of the year.  The aim is to give developers a chance to show off their programming skills and turn an idea into something concrete and demoable.  Companies are increasingly adopting hackathons to change company culture and fuel innovation, and I think this would be a welcome and refreshing way to end the year.  My feeling is we will be delighted by what our developers will come up with.

I was inspired by what other companies are doing:

• Twitter’s new policy: http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/22/twitter-hack-week/
• Thoughts from a VC: http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/03/the-awesomeness-of-a-hackathon.html
• Hackathons and Innovation: http://sweetspotstrategy.com/is-innovation-in-short-supply-at-your-company-hold-a-hackathon

Here are the rules:

1. The Hackathon starts at 12am PST on Thursday, 16 December.
2. The Hackathon is also open to M+M China developers, who will hack on their 16th and 17th of December.
3. "Pre-hacking"  is not allowed.  All code must be written during the Hackathon with one  exception -- open source and active network code libraries not  explicitly developed for the Hackathon may be used in prototypes.
4. Hackers  may form into teams of no more than 2.  This allows for designers to  pair up with developers or for developers who may not have an idea to  nonetheless participate. 
5. The Hackathon ends at 10am PST on Friday, 17 December.
6. Demos begin at 10:15am PST on Friday, 17 December.
7. Each team is given 3 minutes to demo their application to a panel of judges.
8. China-based hackers must submit a screencast of their demo to me by 10:15am on Friday, 17 December Beijing time (GMT + 8).  We will then  play the screencasts in front of the judges during the demo session in  San Diego (10:15am GMT - 8).
9. Judges will use a point scoring system to determine the winner.  The criteria are:
   1. Originality
   2. Potential Business Impact
   3. Execution
   4. Demo Quality
10. The winning team will win a free trip to the Web 2.0 Expo (March 28 - 31 2011) in San Francisco with all expenses paid.  If the  winning team is China-based, Jean Su will be providing International  tickets and visas.

Food and drink will be provided in the San Diego office during the Hackathon.

I sent two developers, Jonathan Spooner and Brian Levine, to the Techcrunch Disrupt Hackathon to hack at the Mashery booth yesterday.  I wanted them to spend time networking, writing some code and having fun.  I sent them a few text messages of encouragement last night as they worked for 20 hours straight creating an app.

I woke up this morning and watched their presentation live on ustream.  They'd created an iPhone app for runners to use to play a virtual game of pacman.  Runners have to avoid virtual ghosts and eat virtual power pellets while running in the real world.

During the demo, Jonathan ran around the building with the app running on his phone, and Brian narrated it.  I thought they did a great job.  And so did the judges!  We won the "Best Demo" award, which is analagous to a podium finish!

Shoot me an email at jeremy dot thomas at active.com if you're interested in helping us out with a top secret initiative targeting the Bay Area:

You’re an adventurer.  You love camping.  You’re upset when you miss one of your six planned workouts for the week.  You love talking to others who are also passionate about their fitness lifestyle.  You prefer to buy your running shoes from that specialty shop down the street instead of the national chain in the shopping mall – there’s just something about the authenticity of the people who work there that draws you in.

Most importantly, you’re excited by technology.  Maybe you’ve taken a couple programming classes.  Or maybe you’ve simply started your own blog to share your ideas with others.  Either way, you love fusing technology with your active lifestyle, and you’re eager to learn more about both.

Job Tasks:

You will join the Active.com team to roll out a new, Beta product in the Bay Area.  In exchange for school credit, you will act as an extension of the product development team to raise awareness of the product in that region.  You will first attend a two day training session where you will be armed with all of the information you need to accomplish your tasks.  Primarily, you will be contacting Bay Area specialty retailers (bike shops, running shoe stores, martial arts studios) in person.  Your job is to be genuine and get them excited about the new Beta product and to deliver feedback to the product development team.  As such, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the direction of the product roadmap.

You will learn about the role of research in the software development process.  And you will learn about the challenges of creating demand for a brand new product

Skill Requirements:

• Actively pursuing a Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree.
• Demonstrated understanding cutting edge web technology.
• Demonstrated passion for the active lifestyle.
• Excellent written and spoken English

Additional Requirements:

1. Send us a critique of active.com.

Within M+M we've deployed myriad products to Amazon Web Services, including photos.active.com, advantage.active.com, ihoops.com, mobileapps.active.com, widgets.active.com, realtime.active.com, search.eteamz.com and labs.active.com.  We've found that, with each product, we have to run through the same checklist of items to ensure continual up-time.  Some of these items are related to application architecture, while others are related to infrastructure:

Cloud Checklist

1. Caching - Serving pre-compiled content is always the best way to reduce I/O and have a fast website.  Memcached and Apache's mod_cache are frameworks we commonly use.
2. Load Balance Across Availability Zones -- AWS has a 99.95% uptime SLA, but only if applications are deployed across multiple availability zones.  As such, nodes in a pool should run in two or more availability zones.  And, as if it needs to be said, applications should be load balanced.
3. Data Backup - The cloud doesn't magically solve data retention issues (but it does help).  Amazon's RDS offering is a great option when not wanting to deal with setting up backup policies.  Otherwise, these must be put in place just like they would in any given data center.
4. VIP Monitoring - Like most companies with products in the cloud, we run some of our products in a proprietary data center, and others on Amazon.  But our monitoring system acts as a central repository reporting status on all systems.  As such, monitoring must be setup on VIPs (i.e. www.ihoops.com) and nodes, with alerting configured should anything act up.  Node monitoring is enabled by allowing traffic through from the source ip address of the monitoring system through Amazon's security group configuration.
5. CPU and Memory Monitoring -  CPU and memory utlization should also be monitored.  UDP port 161 should be opened to the monitoring system to record SNMP traps.
6. Human Support Process - When something goes wrong, somebody's gotta get paged.

The Active.com Realtime website has now been collecting data for several months.  This is the first time we've looked at site usage with respect to a user's location, and it presents the opportunity to do some insightful data analysis.

For example, did you know on average San Diegans register for events within 3 weeks of the start date, and they tend not to travel very far.  When they do travel they tend to go to Los Angeles. ; But, people from the east coast often travel farther.  For example, when registrants from Philadelphia travel for an event,  they often go to Salt Lake City.  The trend of  east coast people traveling further than west coast might be explained by the weather; the west coast simply has weather more consistently suited for endurance events, and a greater number of events taking place.  How do people in the middle of the country fare?  Using Las Vegas as an example, top destinations are split between Sacramento, Atlanta and Jacksonville, showing a wide variability in destination.

We also looked at the most popular time of day registrations were completed.  For almost all of cities, the morning hours between 8 and 11 were most popular, with an additional spike in activity around 8pm.  Evening registrations were especially prevalent in the city of Seattle; could it be all the coffee?

Finally, the registration sport was detailed per city.  Running and walking events were found at the top, with cycling and triathlon trailing close behind.  Other sports such as swimming, fitness and adventure racing also ranked among the top.