Year One Labs

Last Saturday, roughly 55 people spent the day at RPM, where we’re based, building applications. While a couple of participants had prepared in advance, most of the projects were thought up, designed, and presented within twelve hours. Google’s Sean Lynch, as well as some of his colleagues from Google’s Montreal office, were on hand to steer people through the intricacies of Google’s developer stack.

It was an amazing day, with a ton of effort and some really inventive new applications. In the end, we built eighteen apps. Judges, including Sean Lynch, Ray Luk, the Montreal Gazette’s Jason Magder, podcaster and event organizer Bob Goyetche, and Band of Coders’ Brydon Gilliss, had a tough job ahead of them. But they prevailed, awarding books and T-Shirts for a variety of achievements.

• Evotune, where users vote for computer-generated snippets of music they like best, and genetic algorithms try to evolve the next great loop from the results. It’s live for you to try, and won the coveted “most rhythm” award.
• Incidental Traveller, which picks a random destination for you and tells you about it.
• My First Email, a really simple e-mail for tech luddites. This won the “largest font” award.
• Wallpaper of the Week, which crowdsources desktop designs
• Local Nose, using Google Earth to ask questions about a location (and reminding Y1L startup Localmind that competitors are always just a step behind you!)
• Interpretdreamz, which shows and tells you the meaning of your dreams. Won the “unfortunately viral” prize, partly because the pictures it chooses to match the words in your dreams aren’t always easy to look at.
• Stalk your Customers, helping local businesses better understand their clients and competitors. Built in a day by Localmind’s Lenny Rachitsky with the help of Briac Guibert, this won the “most easily monetizable” prize. Plus, it’s live and running.
• Cabnearme, which helps you find the closest cab, fast. Also live.
• Twitfinance, an experiment to see if Twitter chatter and stock prices are related.
• Himalaya, a front-end for Google Analytics to make it easier to see who’s sending traffic to your site.
• eeSenter, which uses tree views and App Engine to structure lists of data like bookmarks.
• GTacts, which mimics etacts functionality within GMail to track and update contacts automatically. Built by folks who are about to become new residents of Year One Labs (stay tuned!) Tons of interest in using this to fix contacts from all of the participants, too.
• GDocs Mail, a search tool to find and preview documents quickly across GMail and Google Docs. Built by the Dokdok team, who are residents of the RPM co-working space and recentl additions to the Real Ventures portfolio.
• Cupid-meter, an experiment in sentiment analysis trying to show whether Montreal or Toronto is more romantic.
• P2P Library, a way to scan, track, and share your things with your friends in a lending library. This team of brothers won the “we would use that” award.
• Phrasealign, a tool for disambiguating formal translation.
• Pocketcomics, like an RSS reader for online comics that crops and sizes them to mobile phone formats.
• Nudgely, an email tool to generate lists of tasks and remind you about them in the future.

The event succeeded far beyond what we’d hoped, with dozens of people contributing time, money, and travel to make it possible. We’re already fielding calls about doing another one in the coming months, this time focusing on Big Data. We’d also like to thank Leila Boujnane and the rest of the crew who ran the #HackMtl event here a few months ago, for showing us how to put one of these together so smoothly; and Pete Taylor and Liesl Barrell for devoting their weekend to coordinating, feeding, and entertaining us.

(More shots of the event, in full size, are available on Flickr.)