New Site!

Visit the new ST@B at http://startup.berkeley.edu

Hackathon Post-Mortem

As both one of the organizers and participants, I have to admit I’m glad it’s over. The Hackathon was one of the most grueling 18 hours (and weeks leading into) of my life.

It was also a tremendous success.

The combined efforts of IEEE, UPE, the CSUA and St@B this year brought in record attendance – more than double last year’s finishing entrants.

Our judging panel was par none. I watched in mixed horror and admiration as students defended their design choices against the constructive interrogation of Professor Brian Harvey and the representatives from Y-Combinator, Kinfo, Palantir, and Facebook.

But more important, perhaps, was the personal experience of being a participant.

Me, post 5 RedBulls and 7 Mountain Dews

I am not actually a terribly experienced programmer, and this was the first time I tried to pit my nascent abilities against the challenge of creating something completely novel, original, and mine. I’ll admit it here – my project never worked. What did work was the instigation to try, and the fact that even my failure gave me enough experience that I’m going to get this 3-dimensional computer vision control problem working if it kills me.

The camaraderie wasn’t bad either. Struggling with everything you have while simultaneously fighting off 36 hours sans sleep is an experience that can’t be compared. It brings you closer to your teammates. Makes you laugh at very silly things. Sometimes mildly hallucinate…

Finally, and of greatest impact I think, was seeing some of the pretty tremendous achievements Cal students are capable of. Whether it was the winning web-based remote application toolkit, 3D news visualization, or the whimsical defense-of-stack in missile command – the intelligence and possibility crammed into one room was palpable. I have to say it was a pretty great feeling to be associated, even loosely, with the creative process taking place.

Recap: Hackathon 2009

85 hackers on 27 teams sat down at 6:00PM on Friday night to hack for 18 hours straight. At 12PM the next day only 23 teams and 63 students were able to cross the finish line. There were games, chat tools, web applications, and other random hacks. At 12:00PM on Saturday the 65 participants and 50 guests got together with over 700 viewers on Justin.tv to watch project presentations. At 2PM, the winners were announced:

1st Place- The Hiro Protagonist- Chase Shimmin, Jacob Howard

Chase and Jacob described their project as “an application framework that allows GUI applications to be rendered and interacted with from both a user’s desktop environment as well as via a web server, where they applications are rendered using XHTML/CSS/JavaScript. The application state is managed by an application server, which interacts with the local application interface through wxwidgets and with the web-based interface through AJAX callbacks.”

2nd Place- News Kaiser- Yiding Jia,Jeremy Cowles

Yiding and Jeremey described their project as a 3D news vizualization program.

3rd Place- Kaplan Killers- Upinder Malhi, Edward Lin

Upinder and Edward built a simple yet useful SAT helper. Their firefox extension highlights SAT words and shows the user a dashboard of words learned.

Honorable Mention- Ani Mani- Anhang Zhu, Muller Zhang, Jeff Yan, Avik Das

Team Ani Mani built an Adobe Flash analogue that produces scripted SVG, in compliance with open standards supported in several browsers.

In their own words: “We made an SVG-based animation framework, consisting of a GUI to specify animations and a Javascript framework to render the animation in a standards-compliant browser. Only well-accepted web standards are used and the both the tool and the resulting output are lightweight and easily accessible to enterprising hackers.”

Honorable Mention- Purple Skittles- Ian Henderson, Charles Ahn

Ian and Charles built a missile command game, where you literally defend program stacks from corruption.

We would like to thank our sponsors Palantir Technologies, Lockheed Martin, Alsop Louie Partners, and Kinfo!

Also congratulations to event co-sponsors CSUA, IEEE, and UPE.

Hackathon 2009 Live

We are going to be live blogging from the 2009 Hackathon by ST@B, CSUA, IEEE, HKN, and UPE.

**Updated at 2:30PM Saturday**

Congrats to winners!

1. The Hiro Protagonist
2. News Kaiser
3. Kaplan Killers
Honorable Mention- Ani Mani
Honorable Mention- Purple Skittles

Check out descriptions here.

Check out the justin.tv feed of the project presentations

Entrepreneurship Resources

Contrary to popular belief there is a large support system for Berkeley entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, not everyone knows about it. We have a page on our blog and some links along the right side, but we wanted to highlight particular campus organizations, resources, and events that should be helpful for all Berkeley entrepreneurs. This may be an overwhelming amount of information, but each of these organizations could be the key that helps Berkeley students, alumni, or faculty create the next Apple Computer (Steve Wozniak, 1976), SUN Microsystems (Bill Joy, 1982), or Inktomi (Eric Brewer, Faculty).

Berkeley on Rails

What is your university doing to foster entrepreneurship? For most people, academia is about research. Sometimes it seems like industry only cares about academia when they need to profit from bleeding edge research and academics care about industry only when they need funding. I’m proud to say that that’s not the whole story at Berkeley.

I’m at the end of my third semester as head TA of Berkeley’s Ruby on Rails class (currently CS 194, formerly CS 198). I’ve been with it since the inaugural class in Spring 2007. The class has evolved from being loosely organized, pass or fail, and taught in the main lobby of the RAD Lab (who sponsors it) to this semester’s full fledged, letter graded, “Software as a Service” powerhouse with almost 50 students enrolled. What hasn’t changed is the end result of every term: groups of students building great web apps with Ruby on Rails. In my opinion, it’s the core of the class and why I’ve stayed involved for so long. Fall 2008 was no different; we had some great apps!

Ruby on Rails Presentations (CS194)

For the past two years, the Berkeley CS department has offered a Ruby on Rails class (CS194, formerly CS198, for those of you that are interested). It’s taught by Armando Fox, Will Sobel, and Dave Patterson. Students have an opportunity to build a project over the course of the semester. TA Hubert Wong liveblogged the final presentations today.

More details coming soon.

Berkeley rated fourth university for entrepreneurship…in the world!

YouNoodle has published a list of Top University Startup Communities, and Berkeley is ranked fourth. “YouNoodle develops innovative ways to bring together the information, people and technology that help startups succeed.” Basically, it is a platform for the top entrepreneurship clubs and competitions to communicate, follow members’ startups, and predict their success.   

Be sure to make a profile, add your startup, and join ST@B.

Here is the list of top universities rated by Younoodle:

1.       Stanford

2.       MIT

3.       University of Cambridge

4.       UC Berkeley

5.       IIT India

6.       University of Oxford

7.       NUS, Singapore

8.       University of Copenhagen

9.       Stockholm University

10.     UC Davis

Startup Profile: InternshipIN

This week’s company profile is InternshipIN, founded by Berkeley undergrads Arielle Scott, Jessica Mah, and Andy Su. You may have read about them already on TechCrunch (you can also see an article about them on Inc.).

InternshipIN tackles (obviously) the internship market. No other company is directly targeting this area, which is surprising given that so many college students are constantly on the hunt for an internship. They aim to focus on smaller companies, beginning with startups and eventually spreading to the non-profit sector – basically any company without the resources to recruit interns like the bigger players do.

InternshipIN was bootstrapped with only $500 and will soon be making money. They plan on charging a monthly fee to companies and allowing them to contact a certain number of students. The service will be free for students.

This is a great tool for startups as well as students. It’s difficult for a small company with little money to spend the time and manpower to recruit interns the traditional way, via expensive career fairs or recruitment dinners. Using a site like InternshipIN saves time, money, and allows startups to escape competition with big companies and their perks.

If you have or work for a startup around Berkeley and would like us to profile you, let us know!

Startup Profile: Life360

We’re going to start a profile series on Berkeley-affiliated startups, beginning with Life360. If you would like to be featured, contact us!

I spoke with Chris and Jake of Life360 (winner of the Android Developer Challenge), both Berkeley alumni. They are part of the Lester Center Incubator. The team is comprised of 8 full-time and 5 part-time employees, mostly Cal alums.  They have half a million dollars in angel funding and are on track to officially launch in March 2009.

The company is founded on the idea that in an emergency, you want to know where your family is. Their solution is all-encompassing: voice, text, and web channels; a hardware device, and an identification card or wristband for kids or the elderly (non-cell phone generations).

Current features include: GPS tracker and curfew timer (for teenagers), emergency messaging, and a ‘panic button’ that alerts family members with one click if you’re in trouble. They have a mobile application, but their software is designed to work from any phone with SMS, regardless of data capability. There is also a hotline, which of course can be dialed from any phone.

They plan on expanding with an API for third-party developers, a medical record repository, and an emergency planner (with more features coming soon!).

Revenue is based on a subscription model. Families can sign up for monthly subscriptions and enable the features they want, suiting the specific needs of every family.

Life360 is looking for engineering interns, particularly if you’re familiar with PHP, Java, Objective-C, the standard LAMP stack, or the cakePHP framework. If you’re interested, contact Chris.