20 geeks. 12 hours. 10 apps. – India’s first Beacon app hack day was sure a phenomenal success!

I am sure you have all been waiting with bated breath to know how India’s first Beacon App Hack Day turned out.

Well, true to all the anticipation and hype surrounding it, the hackathon was truly a huge success! With a 100% turnout (to be honest, even we didn’t expect this!), most developers walking in before time and all teams successfully submitting their apps on time – the energy was palpable.

A lot of great pictures can be found on our Google+  album too.

For the uninitiated, the Hack Day called for iOS developers to register for the event, free of cost, and from the first 100 developers who requested an invite, 20 developers were chosen to participate in the Hackathon.

The much eagerly awaited Saturday started with a two-hour hands-on training session that included:

–Introduction to iBeacon technology by Ravi Pratap, CTO & Co-Founder, MobStac

-A session on Beacons & iOS Core Location framework by Kshitij Deo, Lead iOS developer, MobStac

-A Walkthrough of Beaconstac iOS SDK by Garima Batra, Core platform engineer, MobStac

Nagaraj Nagabushanam, Director, Product management at MobStac announced the rules of the hack day and thus began an invigorating, 7-hour marathon hack session. Once the participating developers were confident about creating beacon-enabled apps using Beaconstac, a beacon-agnostic platform that enables beacon-triggered proximity messaging and analytics based on user behaviour in mobile apps, we were ready to roll! All participants received Estimote beacons and were also offered an invite to use the Beaconstac platform.

And here it is! Excited by the possibilities. Great #BeaconHackDay by @mobstac. pic.twitter.com/jg7fqTXSo7 — Param Aggarwal (@paramaggarwal) November 8, 2014

Kudos to the highly enthusiastic developers who kept their spirited and intense fight – to create the best app – on till the last minute. They were all quite excited to get their hands on real beacons and build apps using them.

Great initiative by @mobstac #BeaconHackDay A lot needs to go in for Proximity Aware Programming — Dunty Vinay Raj (@DuntyVinayRaj) November 8, 2014

Don’t know where to start with your #iBeacon app? There’s a cool repo from @paramaggarwal using Estimote and @mobstac http://t.co/W3VExvxHXo

— Estimote, Inc. (@Estimote) November 10, 2014

#Developers learn to work with beacons & core location framework.Join @mobstac #BeaconHackDay this Saturday! #iOSdev http://t.co/U0uhoGcRvt

— Eventz.IO (@EventzIO) November 6, 2014

After 168 tweets (#BeaconHackDay) and 10 hours of coding,  10 apps were showcased on Saturday night and we were left flabbergasted!

There were so many great presentations, that choosing the best 2 proved to be quite difficult and I am too glad I wasn’t part of the judging team that had to select the winners.

We, at Mobstac, want to extend our hearty thanks to the fantastic participants from various parts of the country for all their hard work, positive energy, and creativity.

We will write in detail about all the teams and the apps they built over the course of this week. So watch this space for more details.