It was geeks' day out in City

Facebook beckoned Bangalore’s hackers on Monday, and the City’s young, vibrant developer community responded in style and substance.

Conjuring up web and mobile applications from the scratch, challenging the world’s very best to design a new ultra cool game, the tech wizards proved their mettle. “World HACK Series,” the social networking giant’s first Hacker foray into the Indian territory, had just made a dramatic mark of innovation.

Glued to their laptop screens, crunching loads of codes, the hackers were up to the challenge right away. Competing in teams of two, three and six, the developers, mostly in their teens and eager 20s, had only eight hours to dream up, develop and deliver the apps.

Racing against time was this team of six, designing a Social Debate app. “If you had an argument over iPhone5, you could comment and start a debate, logged into Facebook, through this app,” explained Snehil Modani, as his team synched their brains and fingers to work out the codes. The team had been to Hackathons before, but this was their first time with Facebook.

For Facebook, Bangalore was the only Indian city on its global “World HACK Series.” Fresh from the success of its “Mobile HACK Roadshow” in March and the “f8” event last year, Facebook has now hit the road again, covering 12 cities worldwide. Kicking off in Austin, United States, on August 23, the series has already enthused application developers in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Berlin, Taipei and Bangalore. From here, the series will head to Barcelona, Vancouver and Warsaw, before the finale in Moscow on October 1.  
The event was open to coders of every type. It didn’t matter whether they had developed an app with Facebook before or not. Brimming with ideas, the developers with an existing app could also distribute it on Facebook. As they designed, Facebook had its Developer Advocate, Bear Douglas, and 12 other engineers to assist them, link them to the networking site’s user base, and show them samples. The idea was to get the hackers work with Facebook in quick time.

The winners had a Facebook prize to win, a trip to San Francisco, a meeting with Facebook’s top team and a walk through the campus, all for the best team from each continent.