Give Go Dominates at AngelHack Hackathon

Coders, designers, developers and programmers from across the country took part in this weekend’s AngelHack, a two day long event with hackathons taking place in Palo Alto, New York, Boston and Seattle.

The Palo Alto leg of the hackathon was held at the AOL Offices on Page Mill Road, the same location that will host the AngelHack finals in July. At the finals, the top teams from each of this weekend’s events will be judged by Microsoft VP Scott Guthrie, Right Side Capital’s David Lambert, and TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha and face off for two $25,000 grand prizes in seed funding.

This weekend, about 1,000 developers and designers took part in the qualifying rounds of AngelHack nationwide, which were judged by entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and technology journalists.

The hackathons themselves lasted 24 hours, each starting at 2 p.m. on Saturday and going through the night until final presentations on Sunday evening.

Teams, consisting of anywhere from one to five contestants, used the 24 hours to freshly code a project, whether it be an app that lets friends suggest products for you to buy or one that sends you a notification when your table at a restaurant is ready. Both of these projects were debuted this year.

According to AngelHack founder Gregory Gopman, “AngelHack’s mission is to create a global launch pad where tech entrepreneurs can collaborate, find mentorship, and secure investment for new startup ideas.”

Palo Alto’s round featured 34 projects, each of which was given two minutes to present followed by a minute for questions from the judges.

The judges’ eventual winner was Give Go, a site that “helps you raise money for your favorite charity any day of the week.” Give Go, a team of five, consisted of Max Schultz, Cyrus Stoller, Greg Keeney, BC Broussard and Augustin Bralley. The site wanted to take the idea of a “charity walk” and expand it to everyday walking, jogging or biking, so you can raise money for your favorite charities just for walking to work instead of driving.

“Basically Give Go lets your family, your friends, colleagues, or anyone else that might be interested pledge a dollar amount for every mile you run, walk or ride,” Schultz said. “We [want] people that ride everyday already that might as well be raising money for a charity but its also for people that need that kick in the pants.”

Also moving on to the finals are Synco De Mayo (for helping with explaining and giving directions for websites), Major Tom (“connecting users with developers to help make apps do well”), FlyIO (an app that lets you control a computer mouse with your eyes), Humans++ (“for those of you with a horrible sense of direction,” WishBoard (a crowd-sourced wish fulfillment platform) and XMit (a simplified file sharing program).

“It was a very tough decision,” Dom Sagolla, one of the judges known for being one of the creators of Twitter, said.

In addition to the finals qualifications, smaller, sponsored prizes were given to a handful of projects. Wordflare, a vocabulary-learning app, for example, won $2,500 from Facebook while XMit won a new Retina MacBook Pro from Singly.

“[XMit] used Singly to do something really cool and make it really simple to share files,” the Singly team said while presenting the prize.

The seven teams selected to move on by the judging panel will now get three weeks to strengthen their projects before returning to the AOL offices on July 12 for the final round of AngelHack.

You can watch all of the final presentations, as well as judges comments, from the Palo Alto event here.