Saturday was the second Video Hackday, once again organized by Susan and Oliver from Ziggeo. What I like a lot about the format is that it is a single day without an overnight. While that may seem like very little time it does make it much less daunting and Video Hackday attracted a very diverse group of participants (including many first timers) as a result. All the engineers there from sponsors including Clarifai, Twilio, Embed.ly and JW Player were super friendly and helpful.

I gave a brief presentation at the beginning about why video has become such an engine for growth. Video provides for more emotional engagement than any other form of content. Our brain has evolved to react deeply to moving images, in particular when it comes to the activation of mirror neurons. Here’s the deck:

Of course it included two videos (which did not upload to slideshare). The first is this segment of AC45s racing and the second was a clip from Video Killed the Radio Star.

Hackdays are fun for me to participate in. It has become pretty much the only time that I write code these days which I still enjoy tremendously. It is also a good opportunity for me to check in on the APIs of companies (how easy to use? how well documented? etc). I used Ziggeo to automatically capture 10 second video clips, which I then submitted to Clarifai to detect presence of people, using Twilio to send an SMS with a link to the clip. Voila a security camera in just a few lines of code!

Finally Cindy Gallop and I judged the hacks. There were a lot of fun ways to use video but two stood out to us. First price went to a group that built a beautiful looking video product review site. The runner up was a project for reaction videos to movie trailers created by a first time hackday participant! Both cases felt like the perfect use of video for conveying authentic emotional responses.