Hackathon: Compete for the ReadWriteWeb Data Visualization Award at Cloudstock

ReadWriteWeb has a data visualization challenge and three prizes to give away to developers at the Cloudstock hackathon tomorrow in San Francisco. The winners will receive a profile and their work featured in ReadWriteWeb.

The goal: Use Twitter data to provide deeper insights about whom is attending Dreamforce, the annual conference for Salesforce.com users. Cloudstock is kicking off the Dreamforce event. It’s billed as an event for cloud developers. We are part of a partner group that includes Google, Adobe, Twilio and OnLive, the online gaming service platform.

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We’re looking for ways developers may help us dig into the Twitter stream about Dreamforce and Salesforce.com. We want to showcase data visualizations about the people, the events and the issues and topics being discussed. We’d like to pool as much data as possible and see what we can learn about the issues that are driving 30,000 people to attend.

Here is a simple example of data visualization using Research.ly, the new Twitter search service. I did a search for Dreamforce.

We’ll pick three winners. Each will be profiled in ReadWriteWeb. We’ll feature their data visualizations in the posts we write over the span of the Dreamforce event.

We’ll look at how developers created the visualizations, the tools they used and the data they aggregated. Did the data come from a source beside Twitter? Were third party APIs integrated? What does the data show?

I will be at Cloudstock Monday morning to answer questions and discuss what is being created.

Cloudstock

Cloudstock looks like a coming out party for Salesforce.com’s new API. We hear of integrations with third parties. The event will have 68 sessions. And some of them look awesome. Have you ever heard John Musser of Programmable Web give his state of the API market? He’ll be there.

We’re excited to get into the hackathon as a participant. We’re not judges for this one. We are part of the contest and pretty psyched to see what people do. We look forward most of all to learning about creating data visualization apps and talking with developers about their work.

Thanks to Shanley Kane at Apigee who made the the introductions and helped us be a part of the Cloudstock event.

Shanley put it this way:

“Alex is especially interested in doing data visualization and analysis of the Tweetstream from the conference and hackathon – and were thinking it might be really cool to have a mini-contest for hackathon developers to create the coolest data visualization – as the reward for the best one, Alex could do a profile in ReadWriteWeb that highlights the developer and what they do.

Though it is a bit last minute there could be a really cool opportunity here to get some cool hacks and developer interest around Dreamforce and Cloudstock! What do you think?”

We could not have said it any better ourselves.

See you at Cloudstock.

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