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YACKATHON: Yelp’s First Community Hackathon



  Yackathon-communityblog
 
Yelp’s Very First Community Hackathon has wrapped after 48hrs of hard work and delicious local bites and beers at Notman House in Montreal. With over 120 attendees, 50 participants, 11 final submissions, 4 winning teams, and 1 grand prize winner, we are pretty thrilled with the results of this experiment. 
 
 
 
After coming together during a game of Musical Projects that had participants and Yackathon mentors both grooving and discussing the 2 dozen+ project ideas that had been submitted online, Montreal Yackathon teams dug into the Yelp API and the vast Yelp Dataset to make their amazing submissions, all of which you can check out here
 
We awarded prizes in 3 categories, the same 3 attributes we look for in every Yelp review: Is it Funny? Is it Useful? Is it Cool?
 
Our winners were all of this and more! 
 
Winner for Funniest Hack: Lil Paws. Relieve stress by looking at dogs! 
 
Lilpaws
 
 

Chloe Pou-Prom | Jacob Frackson

 
Winner for Most Useful Hack: Yelp Moods maps the city for you! 
 
Yelpmoods
 
 

Anas Alkhatib | Alistair Douglas | Christian@Jebiga

 
Runner Up for Best Overall and Awarded Coolest Hack: FeedMe Montreal! Swipe right for deliciousness.
 
Feedme
Lianna Yang | Samuel Cauchon | Raluca Niti | Amie Watson
 
And our Grand Prize Winners, the Coolest Yacks of all: Team Catz!! Who Inferred Housing Prices from Yelp Review Activity. They were able to use Yelp's data to reveal hidden information: a great example of the magic in data.
 
Yackwinners
 
"Looking at real estate data provided in the US for cities where yelp data is available, we attempted to predict real estate pricing per neighborhood for Montreal, where currently real estate market pricing data isn't available."
 
Inferringhousingprices
 
Marek Zaluski | Samantha Bickell | Vaughn Dimarco
 
Every single Yackathon participant was a friendly inspiration throughout the weekend and we were so glad to get to spend this time with them.
 
The YACKATHON was also made possible by an inspiring set of local partners. All of our judges were also mentors who helped with the formation of Yackathon teams, and then proudly watched their amazing presentations and helped pick the winners. You can check out a series of features we did on our partners here
 
Yackathonjudges
 
Special Partner Thanks go to: Notman House | Provender | Real Ventures | E-180 | Ajah | Ladies Learning Code | District3 | Montreal Girl Geeks 
 
Extra thanks to Yelp folks who worked across departments to support this creative data experiment: Soups Ranjan, Connie Sardo, Alison Uyehara, Tiffany Neislanik, Molly Finkle and especially Fred Hatfull and Garrett Jacobson from Yelp Engineering who travelled from San Francisco to Montreal in February to spend the entire weekend hanging out with Yackathon teams, answering questions, giving talks, staying up all night doing their actual jobs, plus lugging cases of beer in 6 feet of snow for that authentic taste of the Community Manager life.
 
The Yackathon would have been nothing without them. 
 
Fregandgarrett
 
 
And of course, it would not have been a Yelp event without delicious healthy and locally-made food and drink, and prize packs full of local products:
 
 
Yackeats
 
And bonus thanks go to the amazing designers at Dix2 who made our Yackathon Champion Medallions, and to Jean-Michael Seminaro who took all our gorgeous photos. 
 
From the bottom of my heart I want to thank every volunteer, participant, partner and friend who attended Yelp’s first Yackathon and made it such a FUC’ing (Funny, Useful, Cool!) success.
 
You are each part of the sparkly diversity that makes our community so delicious. I hope you will keep adding your voices to make this great free resource richer so Yelp will be even more full of fun data for us to play with next time!
 
Please check out all the amazing photos from Day 1Day 2, and Day 3 and stay tuned for news of the next Yackathon!
 
Thanks again, SYOY!
Risa D, Yelp MTL Community Director
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