Cxense ASA : We came. We learned. We hacked.

Last week, 60 Cxense developers from five of our offices around the world met up in Oslo for a week packed with knowledge exchange, presentations and a hackathon. Ten teams competed to create the most innovative solution using the Cxense platform. Read on to find out what they came up with (and who won).

Cxense developers in hacking mode.

A day of hacking

Developers from five Cxense development offices were represented in last week's hackathon: Oslo, Stockholm, Samara, Melbourne and Boston. We mixed and mashed them into ten teams and turned them loose for a full day of intense collaboration. And they came up with some really cool stuff!

Influencer detection and scoring

Team 1 came up with a solution to identify social influencers by detecting patterns in pageview events and using PageRank to calculate influencer scores.

Adbot!

Team 2 wanted to make ad servers friendlier, so they created an adbot: a built-in personal assistant. Users can ask the adbot about last changes to campaigns and ads on their ad server, or configurations in Cxense Insight and DMP, and the bot will reply with helpful answers.

Dynamic articles

Why stop personalization on the homepage? Team 3 created a solution to personalize the content within the article itself based on audience segments in the Cxense DMP. Perfect for a site the covers both sides of a debate!

Clicker game

Team 4 used Cxense technology to createa clicker game. The goal of the game is simply to click repeatedly on articles to earn currency that can be used to buy upgrades, like Cxense Content to earn more pageviews or Cxense Advertising to get better ad performance.

Real-time video object recognition

Team 5 used NeuralTalk, an open source project that describes images with sentences, to analyze videos and use that data to provide analytics, search and content recommendations with the Cxense platform.

Dynamic data center catalog

Team 6 created a solution to provide up-to-date information dynamically about Cxense servers and data centers and present it in a structured way. This makes it easier to monitor the network and predict outages before they happen.

Writer's block breaker for journalists

Cxense developers always have the needs of our users in mind. It's no surprise that Team 7 came up with a simple solution to a common problem: writer's block!

Free wifi search and map

Ever hunted for free wifi? Team 8's solution makes it easier with an Android app that gathers data on wifi networks and location and sends it to Cxense Insight. The data is then analyzed and presented as a heatmap, so the user can get a quicker wifi fix.

Ad serving, optimized

Team 9 appliedtransporation theoryto optimize the delivery of ad campaigns to users across multiple segments. They were able to find the optimal number of impressions to show each segment to reach campaign budget with maximum clicks.

Weather-influenced ads

We can't control the weather (yet), but Team 10 figured out a way to target ads to users based on the current weather at their location. Imagine ads for snowblowers in a blizzard, cold drinks in a heat wave, or beach vacations in Norway.

And the winner is…

Our esteemed jury (well, actually the participating developers voted amongst themselves) had a hard time choosing a winner from all the innovative entries, but after long deliberations, chose Team 5 and their solution for real-time video object recognition. The winning team earned themselves some shiny trophies and the glory of victory. Congratulations!

The winning team!

Real-time video object recognition in action.

Be sure to watch this space to find out if any of our hackathon projects make it into the Cxense platform.