Yahoo! Hack USA Has Interesting Winners: AirLeap, Foldr, Note, Quest, FlickrPedia

Yahoo! Hack USA, which drew about 300 down to the Yahoo! Developers Group-produced event in Sunnyvale, was held last weekend, and without the controversy that plagued the TechCrunch Hackathon (where a group made an app insulting to women and gentlemen). Instead, what the two day event produced was a good set of startups with fascinating products.

Here’s the list and their descriptions, courtesy of Yahoo!’s Julie Shin Choi:

Grand Prize: AirLeap

The best overall hack of Yahoo Hack USA, AirLeap wowed our judges and audience as the team controlled a Nodecopter by simple hand motions and beautiful corresponding visuals on their laptop.

Best Technical Hack – Foldr

Folder impressed by converting a regular MacOS folder into a live Flickr interface. Using Folder, the user could upload photos by exporting from any image editor and use them as desktop pictures or screen savers.

Most Creative Idea – _Note

Awarded for uniqueness, innovation, creativity and novelty, _Note created a playlist of images and music that users could create from Tumblr data. _Note also allowed for playlists to be shared with friends.

Best Potential Product – Quest

Chosen by hackers to most likely to launch as a successful product, Quest could be a powerful tool for recruiters, which identified developers’ top skills by analyzing code from Github, Stackoverflow, and Google Developers.

Best Use of Yahoo! Technology or Product – FlickrPedia

Awarded to Team of Five (plus one on the way), FlickrPedia was built to let people explore Wikipedia via Flickr and view pictures with context and spruce up “walls of text” on Wikipedia with beautiful images from Flickr.

There were more winners, like “Hackers Choice” Mark, which allows you to take content from other online platforms like YouTube and assemble them on a page, then send out that page to share over social media.

Try Marx for yourself, it’s really useful, if rather buggy. For example, the “Save” button for the page you make tends to come and go. If I install new content, the “Save” button didn’t show. Then, when I hit a link button to go and change my password, then pressed the “Back” button, the page I made was gone!

Well, try Marx: http://marx.herokuapp.com

Stay tuned.