Hacks/Hackers NYC Demo Day 3 Recap
At the third Hacks/Hackers NYC Demo Day, six speakers whizzed through their presentations covering several topics, from real-time data collection to content management systems.
Here’s a rundown (in order of appearance):
Chris van der Walt kicked off the session with his project HunchWorks. The social media platform is part of the Global Pulse initiative, the United Nations effort to find new ways to collect real-time data and create platforms to connect people worldwide. The United Nations is one of the most reliable sources for data on vulnerable communities around the world but their biggest problem is that the data is 2 to 5 years old by the time it is published. Van der Walt and his colleagues are trying to solve that problem through Hunchworks. They developed a virtual networking platform through which people can submit stories, data and anecdotes — in other words people around the globe can record “early signals” of distress within vulnerable communities through this network. Though unstructured, this data could then assist NGOs and other organizations with their work.
Ever wanted to put together a graph for your blog but don’t want to bother with Excel or Illustrator? David Joerg of Data Collective has a tool for you. He gave Hacks/Hackers a sneak preview of his collective’s interactive chart widget which you can use to produce what they call the “next generation chart for the web.” It’s a chart that’s shareable via embed code or through social media.
Erik Hinton dissected the front page CMS Baroque, which he custom-built for Talking Points Memo. It was his attempt to fix what he said are “broken” content management systems. In pre-Baroque times, users had to insert text and photographs into forms and then hit publish for them to magically appear on a front page. But Baroque enables editors and reporters to drag and drop onto a preview of their front page. Hinton’s currently working on an open-source version of his WYSIWYG approach to content management systems.
Using news as a conversation-starter, Michael Bernstein‘s PenPal News connects students across the globe to discuss stories in their home countries and abroad. Bernstein hopes that the social network would help young folks stay informed while making friends across the world.
Through WhatFailed.Us, Ray Wu wants to offer insights from startup failure, by collecting stories from his site’s users. He wants to refine the way users access this trove of stories by allowing folks to tag stories and thereby create more customized story feeds.
Nicola Hughes from ScraperWiki spoke about their data scraping services. ScraperWiki boasts a large online community of coders dedicated to collecting and cleaning data that is spread on the net. It’s also a portal that allows journalists to request data and pairs them up with coders who can develop screen scrapers to help extract information.
Read some of the attendee reactions to the event.
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