I agree, although no truly great product is made in one night, hackathons can lay the foundations or the idea for something great to be elaborated on. Very few times do people get together, outside work time to build something, just for the sake of building something. Its important to give this time.
I think this is spot on, I doubt the actual code written at the event gets much use afterwards but the connections made and the teams formed can go a long way.
Our startup (www.stylegauge.com) began at London Startup Weekend 2011 and is now a few weeks away from launching trials. The codebase has changed completely and the ideas evolved a lot but it was the hackathon which got it going.
Good idea. I've been part of a development team working on a similar space. Instead of medical conditions and topics, it was research progress in specific areas - feeds on most recent articles, cutting edge results, methods and procedures that have seen results. I think we are going to be seeing a lot more this in the near future.
Thanks! This idea came out of the fact that we built an enterprise Radian6-like platform specifically for the health vertical and realized this would be a useful tool for consumers as well.
That and people send so much time searching for this stuff anyways, we might as well help them out.
Its about time to distribute a radical new way of ads. We've had the same version of the fossil like "in your face" campaigns for the past 80 years. No matter how you try to tweak it, it will always end of being the same version of a very ineffective form of brand recognition. There are very early stage solutions to this problem with the start of social ads and and recommendations. We need to make greater strides to precisely expose users to the products that they need, at the same time removing the clutter. This benefiting both the distributer and the receiver (from shooting themselves in the face). :)
it is true stats don't lie. but there is no replacement for the human judgment of personality and dedication. if it was all about stats, allen iverson would have lead the 76ers to multiple championships. THAT'S the importance of personality! thats the importance of showing up for practice. :)
Actually, a point guard led team winning a championship is rare. It's the reason people watch Rose[Bulls] with suspect. The last time it was done was with Piston during the Bad Boy's era[late 80s, early 90s]. So, although individual accolades accompany Iverson, I doubt anyone would predict him to win multiple championships without significant help[well except the media].
