The Hackathon Award for Best API Mashup Goes to…

Competitive programming competitions, commonly referred to as Hackathons, offer a great opportunity for new talent to show what they can do. Much like professional sports, industry leaders send recruiters to scout out the top performers. With high stakes on the line and limited resources, getting noticed as a hackathon winner not only looks good on your resume – but also has potential to send some quality work your way. And of course, the prize pot value tends to increase as the event grows in popularity.

Although some real-world businesses were born as a hackathon project, those tend to be the exception rather than the rule. The goal is to create a clear, functional proof of concept that stretches conventional wisdom enough to get noticed.

On March 31st 2017, Webz.io will be among the sponsors of ColmanHack – the hackathon programming competition hosted by the College of Management. We’re super excited to see what contestants come up with, and look forward to giving back to the developers who’ve contributed to the remarkable growth of the Webz.io service.

Define Your API Mashup

Rather than create something from scratch, hackathon winners tend to take advantage of existing services and then connect them in counter-intuitive ways. The growing variety of APIs – many of them free to use as a trial – means a talented team can produce some very powerful software in a short time.

Using the Webz.io API for Your Hackathon Project

We’ve received some amazing feedback about our web data feed APIs. Still, many talented coders are new to the concept of an API and how to integrate it into an existing framework. That’s why we put together a few simple demos to demonstrate what’s possible. Unfortunately, since we’re so busy making our service as awesome as possible, we don’t have much time to create demos (much like a Hackathon situation).

So here are a few examples to get your creative juices flowing. Over time, we have no doubt the Webz.io developer community will out-perform our very cool (though sometimes useless) demos:

1. RSS-to-email mashup tutorial combining Webz.io and Mailchimp
2. Extremely cool (but arguably useless) US presidential candidate entity graph
3. Big Data web visualization
4. MIT Digital Humanities Student project
5. NewzCheck news verification chrome extension
6. Machine learning model for sentiment classification using online review ratings
7. Cybersecurity & Machine Learning PhD project to expose credit card fraud

We’re always on the lookout for interesting (and preferably useful!) projects that make use of the Webz.io API. We strongly encourage students, teachers, and academic researchers to do amazing things – and often support projects that show promise.

Contact us today to learn more about how you can provide Webz.io as a free resource for your academic research or competitive coding programs!