I stopped by the hackathon in its final hours this Sunday to ask Paul Carff, senior developer advocate for Google TV, why Google was interested in sponsoring a giant sleepover for developers: I expected one or two reasons, but he had many. First off, it’s an opportunity to engage Google Developer Groups, the third-party enthusiasts developing apps for the Google TV and YouTube APIs.

It also proves to be a good testing ground for the APIs, giving the developer relations team an opportunity to see how easy or difficult it might be for developers to work with the code and documentation. It can even be an opportunity for fixing errors: This weekend, one participant caught a bug in an app — the team was able to pass it along for fixing.

Also, it was an opportunity to see what people might come up with, given the opportunity to work hands-on with the APIs. Of the people who attended this weekend’s hackathon, Carff estimated that 40 percent called themselves developers, while 20-25 percent volunteered themselves as designers and the rest claimed to be business development-types. “Which is cool, because you need all those people to fill in all the blanks,” he said.

Carff, as one of the judges, said that the criteria they would be using to judge the winning videos would include the level of completeness the developers were able to achieve in just two days, as well as the way in which they used the APIs and a certain “Wow” Factor.

The winning apps from this weekend’s hackathon included Vid Social, a timeline for comments on both live-streamed and hosted video and Giggle, which uses the SongKick app to generate playlists of music videos from bands that will be performing in your area soon. TVUS, which enables users to overlay any video (including Hangouts) over any Google TV screen, took home the grand prize.

So what will come of the projects developed this weekend? As the point wasn’t to complete an app, but to instead create enough of it for demo purposes, it’s still unsure. But there’s a track record for hackathons resulting in completed projects, such as Viki, an app curating Korean entertainment for Google TV.

Not only did the developers of that app conceive of it initially at the Mountain View headquarters hackathon, but because they had the opportunity to connect with the Google TV team, they were able to get featured on Google Play.

But that’s not the only reason people take part. And it’s not why Google employees volunteer their weekends to help. The biggest reason that people participate? Carff put it like this: “My first time, I wondered, who’s going to come in? Especially if they’ve been coding all weekend. But I was floored. The energy you get when people are excited about a new idea — it’s really invigorating.”

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Thus the hackathon at the Open Compute Summit on Wednesday. While most hackathons focus on coding, Facebook and Open Compute are hoping to use tools from companies such as UpVerter and GrabCAD to help make the collaborative problem-solving that occurs so easily around code, happen in hardware. These companies offer web-based collaboration software with UpVerter letting engineers share circuit designs and libraries and GrabCAD performing a similar service for mechanical designs.

After keynote speakers talked up the importance of collaborating to advance cloud-computing infrastructure at the event in Santa Clara, Calif., about 25 people formed seven groups and discussed ways to implement hardware concepts they had brainstormed in a matter of hours.

One group cooked up plans for a device with an LED that can plug into an Open Compute server and display debugging information. Another group threw around visions of a strip of thermometers that can go inside a server rack — useful for telling data center operators how hot their machines were running. And another drew up a prototype for a server rack that could accommodate the larger Open Compute servers and more traditional 19″ servers.

“There will be some very significant designs over the next six or eight hours,” said John Kenevey, the technical evangelist for Open Compute and a program manager at Facebook.

Similar events could play out at colleges and universities if Kenevey has his way.

Over the next year or so, Kenevey will flesh out the details of a higher-education Open Compute hackathon model — known for now as OCPU, short for Open Compute Project University — and approach schools about it.

The challenge is to make on-campus Open Compute hackathons appeal to students who often participate in hackathons. Perhaps students could receive course credits for teasing out Open Compute ideas, he said.

Such events wouldn’t be the first link between the Open Compute Foundation and academia. As my colleague Stacey Higginbotham wrote in November, an Open Compute Project contest is underway at Purdue, where students will try to design an Open Compute server chassis that’s biodegradable. Purdue students setting out on the project stopped by to witness the beginning of Wednesday’s hackathon which is set to last 12 hours.

This story was corrected on Thursday, Jan. 24, with the correct description of a device developed at the Open Compute hackathon.

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The Facebook blog post is here, and details all the hacks, which make for fun reading. But what I thought was especially worthwhile was that in at least two cases the hacks resulted in a real product that was later rolled out to users, such as the new full screen photo view or the improved events calendar. Others like putting hot servers in mineral oil to dissipate heat or building a light-up dash board using an Arduino board and a connection to Facebook’s spam monitoring service are already in use elsewhere, but could still benefit the company down the line.

Facebook’s map of where football fans live.

I don’t know what percent of Facebook’s hack projects result in real-world improvements to its product or to the backend infrastructure, but in this batch four out of the top eight fell into that category, which seems to indicate that the hacker way Facebook’s CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg preaches is still in effect. And I especially liked how three of the projects dealt with data visualization, with two of those taking the visualizations into the real world: one by printing a 3-D globe that showed Facebook usage in the world using three different topographical details and the aforementioned light-up message board for visualizing spam alerts.

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There are reasons beyond animal welfare to find meat alternatives, though. If the rest of the world’s rapidly increasing population went through meat at the rate we Americans do (we consumed 92.3 billion lbs. from 9 billion animals in 2011 alone), we’d soon run out of animals to butcher — or at least the space and the feed to raise them. There are also big environmental and health concerns in industrial meat production, from the run-off and greenhouse gases emanating from toxic manure to the antibiotics used to keep livestock upright.

Creating an in-vitro meat supply might seem like the answer to all those problems, but we’re still years away from seeing viable, affordable artificial meat – and probably many more years from convincing the public to eat it. But what if we could use technology in other ways to cut our dependence on natural meat?

In New York this weekend, a gaggle of tech entrepreneurs, software developers, butchers, farmers, food industry executives and health policy wonks are gathering to brainstorm the issue of meat. Held by the blog Food+Tech Connect and called Hack//Meat, the hackathon’s goal is to come up with technological answer to the problems of meat supply, processing, distribution, health and ultimately consumption. One of big problems the group will tackle is how — simply put — to get people to eat less meat.

One of the more interesting proposals to come out of Hack//Meat is from Foodpairing, a food industry research company and app developer. Foodpairing has broken down flavor to its molecular components and has compiled databases that can match the flavor of those ingredients against other completely different ingredients. By compiling “foodpairing trees” its technology can identify vegetable or seafood ingredients that reinforce the flavor of different meats, or in some cases, can act as a substitute for a meat entirely. AS Foodpairing co-owner Bernard Lahousse wrote on Food+Tech Connect:

The flavor molecules of an ingredient are not unique to that specific ingredient. Basil doesn’t taste like basil because there is only one basil flavor, but because there is a blend of flavor molecules, many of which you can also find in other ingredients. The same is true for meats like chicken. The flavor of chicken contains about 20 important flavor molecules, some of them you can find in coffee, bread, potato, mushroom, etc.

While these kind of techniques have been applied in haute cuisine’s molecular gastronomy for awhile, Lahousse is proposing that they can be applied on a mass market scale, and not in the sense of just substituting a vegetable patty for a beef patty or tofu for a chicken strip. By adjusting recipes and cooking techniques to include ingredients that reinforce the meat flavors we love, we can enjoy the same cuisine while minimizing — if not eliminating entirely — the actual amount of meat used.

Meat structure image courtesy of Georgia Institute or Technology

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But an app idea developed this weekend at Dwolla and Etsy’s first eCommerce Hack Day in New York offers a compelling solution. Miss Nev (as in “never miss a package,” not “Miss Nevada”), the winning hack of the weekend, wants to recruit local business to receive packages for neighboring residents and in return get more store traffic, agreements to make minimum purchases, or payments.

For now, the Miss Nev app, which was created in 24 hours, only includes two businesses and a barebones website. (The team tried for NeverMiss.com but the URL was taken.) But the developers — students who have been learning to program at venture collaboration group The Hatchery for just seven weeks — say they plan to build it out and raise money to turn it into a real service.

“The idea came about because there’s this store where I live that takes packages for people in the neighborhood for goodwill,” said Regina Chen, one of the five team members. “It’s a wine store, so whenever people pick up a bottle of wine they would pick up packages. So I thought, huh, that’s a pretty good business model.”

The app is definitely in its most nascent stages and needs to be fleshed out quite a bit, but I still think it addresses a growing need and would love to see it (or something like it) become a real service. We have more ways than ever before to order products straight to our doors. But making sure we can actually sign for the packages is a headache for many of us.

Over the past several months, Amazon has been slowly rolling out a locker system that turns local 7-Elevens and grocery stores into pick-up stations for customers who can’t be home to receive their shipments. The program first drew headlines last fall and, according to Amazon’s website, has expanded to Seattle, New York, the Washington, DC area and London. Last week, TechCrunch reported that it has added Silicon Valley as well.

The Miss Nev concept is similar but would work for shipments from any e-commerce company and could give local merchants new opportunities for developing relationships with nearby residents. The group acknowledged that liability could be an issue, but said a ratings system (similar to eBay’s or Airbnb’s) could help give users a way of gauging reliability. Another concern could be ensuring that merchants don’t receive more packages than they can actually fit in their space, but the Miss Nev team said testing a solution is in their plans.

Of the team members, only Mike De’Shazer, the class’s teacher, builds apps for a living (with product development and consulting firm 140 Ventures). Chen works in product development, David Ho has a background in finance, Karla Colon is a former lawyer, Costas Kollias is a designer and Jared Mermey works in business development. Other members of the Hatchery Dev Shop class, including an actor and a geneticist, contributed to the hack over the course of the weekend, and De’Shazer attributes their success to the diversity of the team.

“Everyone here has a completely different background that they brought into this app, unlike most apps which are built by engineers or business development teams,” he said. “We were able to think more like the customer and that led to us coming up with a more viable product and better user experience.”

The eCommerce Hack Day, which took place at the co-working space The Alley, included about 225 participants who made 37 hacks. The judges, who included Union Square Ventures managing Albert Wenger, Softbank Capital principal Nikhil Kalghatgi and others, gave the team behind MissNev the $6,000 top prize, but also recognized ShopPapaya (a price trends analytics tool) and Dollarly (an app developed by Voyurl founder Adam Leibsohn), which won second and third place prizes, respectively.

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At least that’s the theory. Bed Battles is one of many projects coming out of this weekend’s Hack & Jill hackathon in New York. The project was still in development when I stumbled across it on Twitter Saturday afternoon, so I couldn’t really test it in action yet. But the concept alone sounded too much fun to not at least mention here: Gamification as a way to make something as unpleasant as getting up early less of a drag? Count me in.

Hack and Jill by the way has an interesting concept. From its website:

“Hack’n Jill brings together equal numbers of men and women for a day of hacking. Our theme is #HackYourSummer. Think about what makes summer great — from going out and being active to chilling at home with friends — and be inspired to make it even better.”

Check out all of the Hack and Jill projects here.

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According to him, they’re run by opportunists looking to cash in on the eagerness of young talent for their own purposes:

The problem is that articles like This City Never Sleeps, and Neither do the Hackers and job posts that mention hacker mansions are starting to appear everywhere.

It’s a joke and I’m tired of it. Developers aren’t monkeys in a cage who can’t wait to do the next “hackathon”. They’ve got families, bills to pay and every other pressure that normal people do. They don’t want to drink Red Bull all night and sleep under their desks.

Next time someone asks if you want to crash at their hacker mansion for the summer (which has a ppol, BBQ and pool table!) or team up for a 24-hour hackathon, think twice. They’re probably just trying to cash in on your youth and optimism.

Does he have a point?

I’ve certainly seen the number of them multiply massively over the past few years, which means the quality and intent now varies wildly. Some are good, some are bad. But the general underlying cultural trend definitely seems to be there — the idea that you can (and should) convince a few hackers to develop things in their spare time using a mixture of Red Bull, pizza and some vague dream about building The Next Big Thing.

Sometimes these are great community events that bring people together to do fun stuff; sometimes they feel exploitative — and involvement can certainly be tricky for those who don’t want to buy into macho coder culture.

Over on Hacker News the post has generated some pushback (as you might expect, given that it’s a hangout for people who generally subscribe to this sort of ethos). Butit’s important, of course, to remember that there is no concerted effort here to undermine, and plenty of people happily engage in hack events of all stripes. There is no great Hackathon Authority arranging all of these events, depriving ordinary working stiffs of their weekends. It is simply a confluence of different people all seeing benefits in the same thing.

Is it just a case of calling out the bad seeds?

Photograph of Ryan Carson used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user jeffkward

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1: The social aspect is big

Many participants, and they varied from undergrads to folks in their 40s and 50s, came to see what others are up to, and to network.

Marsh Sutherland, CEO and co-founder of Referral Bonus, loves hackathons because, he said, they make his “brain tingle and adrenaline pump,” and he bonds with new friends. And, he said, “I help create something I’m proud of.”

Andres Douglas, a Boston-based developer who has participated in Facebook hackathons, Music Hack Day and TechCrunch Disrupt events, agreed that it’s all about the people. “It’s great getting to work with new people. It’s kind of like dating. We came with two [team members] and added two here,” he said.

Aaron Roth, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, said he loves the enforced focus of the event.  ”You’re working with a team to create something new and great, in a short period of time, and work continuously through the night,” he said.

2: Don’t underestimate the thrill of adventure

There is huge appeal in trying out new things.  ”If you’re a developer, this may mean learning a new language, using a new set of APIs or building a product that’s different from your ‘day-job,’” said Jeffrey Peden, founder and CEO of CraveLabs, a Cambridge,Mass.-based maker of social network marketing tools. The same motivation holds with marketers and sales people, he said. They all want to try something new.

Cheryl Tom, whose day job is as a Montreal-based director of front-end development for CrowdTwist.com, said she welcomes the opportunity to hone her skillset and add new expertise. This weekend she learned Facebook and Twilio APIs.

3: They’re great talent pools

Several attendees that are already in established businesses use hackathons to check out prospective programmers and developers. Said Peden: “There is no better way to evaluate folks than to see how they go through a 30-hour, start-to-finish marathon of trying to build something — and it’s not something you can just show up at the end to discover.”

Several attendees said they’d received feelers from prospective employers.

4: They’re addictive

Nearly every AngelHack attendee seemed to be a hackathon veteran.  Sutherland has participated in several Boston Startup Weekends and is helping to build a similar event in Spokane, Wash.

Patrick Leahy, a business student at Penn’s Wharton School, may be an extreme example. On January 13, he was in the 48-hour PennApps 2012 hackathon. On February 27 it was the 72-hour paid hackathon for Wharton MBAs. This weekend was AngelHack. And Tuesday he’ll be aboard the StartupBus Boston for a 73-hour traveling hackathon to South by Southwest.

5: People like prizes

For all the talk of camaraderie and collaboration, free pizza, Red Bull and beer — there are also prizes. Teams get cash money for the best use of APIs from sponsors — Microsoft Bing, Box, Viximo, Twilio — and others.  There’s a free Geeks on a Plane trip. And tickets to the upcoming GigaOM Structure:Data conference.

Asked if the prizes mattered, Penn’s Roth said: “Oh, yeah. Big time.”

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Over the weekend, the Cleanweb hackers created applications like NYC BLDGS, a web data base of the energy consumption of buildings in New York that pits the best and worst buildings against each other in friendly competition. Econofy, a web site created over the weekend that enables consumers to compare the energy consumption of appliances, won both the audience choice award and the judges’ award for best overall hack.

The first Cleanweb Hackathon was held in San Francisco in September of last year, and the New York event this weekend was a slightly more high-profile affair. Judges of the hacks included investor Fred Wilson and Rachel Sterne, New York City’s chief digital officer. United States Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra made an appearance as a special guest.

The event is the latest sign the ecosystem around clean technology is changing. As investors look back at the mistakes that have been made and money lost in capital-intensive investments like next-gen solar, biofuels and electric cars, some investors are taking a different route and looking to make cleantech investing look a lot more like web and mobile investing — literally. Paul’s firm Spring Ventures invests in Cleanweb companies like Solar Mosaic.

The Cleanweb is an attractive way to attack the problem of climate change and resource management for an age of 9 billion people. Information technologies are available now — compared to the science experiments in biofuels and parts of clean power — and thanks to Moore’s Law they are cheap, and will get increasingly cheaper. Now it’s time to tap into the innovation of the developer community to try to create new ways to leverage IT to solve the world’s problems.

Check out the video of the event below and Paul’s explanation of the Cleanweb at our Green:Net 2011 event:

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The Cleanweb Hackathon NYC will kick off this Friday night (Jan. 20) at the Tisch School of the Arts Interactive, starting off with developers, UI experts and business folks coming together to make teams around hack ideas. Over the weekend. the teams will create their mobile or web innovation — complete with pizza and beer of course. We won’t be live streaming all that, but on Sunday afternoon, the teams will pitch their ideas to a panel of judges, and we’ll bring you live video from the pitches and judges.

Judges for the event include Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, and NYC Chief Digital Officer Rachel Stern. A special guest will include United States Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra (who just kicked off the Green Button initiative in the Valley).

Check out all the APIs and datasets they’ve pulled together for you aspiring do-gooder developers. And here’s the wrapup and video from the first event.

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