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Hackmatch - Getting Creative in Jumptap's Hackton

One of the best events at Jumptap (now Millennial Media) is a quartely hackton. Teams have "24 hours to build something. There are no constraints, other than the fact that you must demo what you have built at the end. The office stays open all night with pizza, snacks and drinks (including a traveling beer cart). In the morning, the company reconvenes and the groups participating demo theirs ‘hacks’. The audience then votes on a winner using pre-determined criteria, and the winning group receives gift cards and bragging rights." (source Dave Cecere on http://www.techblog.jumptap.com/?p=114). 

Each Hackmatch raises the bar in hack innovation and in showmanship. The main event now includes a panel of judges acting as Simon Cowell, Randy Jackson and  Nicki Minaj. And increasingly hacks are making it into production as real features used by our customers and account managers. 
Ad Wall - 2013 Spring Hackaton

In spring 2013 Hackmatch, my team built an ad wall. The wall is a full size interstitial ad made of smaller ad tiles. Our advertiser dashboard displayed statistics for each tile seperatly and also for the combined wall. In fall 2013 we are buiding a profile viewer. Jumptap carries user profiles which we use to display targeted advertising based on a user intrests and brand preferences. In our hack, a user can enter their email address and see how well we know them. Much like BlueKei's registry or Acxiom's about the data.


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