Hack The Midwest Winners (Part II) Include A Children’s Literacy App

Mark Schuh, presenting "Booky Book" on behalf of his team from Barkley

Today, we’re excited to present the remaining category winners!

Stay tuned for continued coverage of Hack The Midwest, as we’ll post updates about the teams who won prizes based on best use of our partner APIs.

Best Large Team

Corey Light, Alan Thomas, Chris Bartak and Mark Schuh built Booky Book, which won Best Large Team award. The team, comprised of Barkley employees, took home a Kindle Fire.

About Booky Book:

Booky book is an engaging youth literacy companion. It simply encourages its users, children, to read.

It is a tool for not only children but parents, teachers, and guardians to inject a social element into tracking literacy progression. The application is a collaborative platform to advocate reading as a mode of exceptional entertainment and stimulation.

Users will not be bound to a certain platform or physicality of reading using the application, and will therefore be able to “carry” it with them as the future of reading and literary discussion shifts with use of technology. Booky book currently has an open API, is device-agnostic, and is classified as a non-profit application.

Best Multi-API App (2+)

The best multi-API App (2+) went to Igor Kantor, Matt Packer, John Rosenbaum and Trent Lo…who built commuticate. The prize for this category was an Apple TV!

About Commuticate:

We take an active approach to providing you with the most up to date traffic information when you need it most.
Fill out a simple form, tell us your name, contact info and a little bit about your commute. At the time you configure, we will send you an email, SMS, or both with warnings about incidents on your way to work.
No need to fire up GPS or wait for the news to tell you what’s going on.

Best LOL App

The best LOL app had some tough competition! The team from VML (Casey Justus, Caleb Kniffen and Will Pracht) ended up taking the bragging rights of this category + a HTC Evo View 4g for Cyrano.

About Cyrano:

SMS meets Cyrano de Bourgerac.
Users select text messages as part of a conversation and submit them. Other users can add comments to these conversations. These comments are suggestions as to what the submitter should say next in their actual conversation.

The first user will later be able to pull up the submitted conversation on the mobile app, browse through the top suggestions (as voted on by users of the desktop site and eventually mobile app) and send the comment of their choosing via SMS right from the app.

Best Small Team

The Best Small Team award went to a team of…. one. Travis Stoll took home a Kindle Fire for his app, named ShareSpot.me.

About ShareSpot.me

Simple location sharing: send realtime info via sms or email.

A practical use might be notifying a loved one when you arrive at your destination, rather than calling. Another might be for kids to check in with parents periodically via sms or email.

Next up…

Don’t forget, this is our first in a series of posts about the remaining winners of Hack The Midwest , so stay tuned!