Over the weekend of the 19th and 20th of September 2009, over 100 developers gathered at the PayPal offices in Richmond to take part in the first ever PayPal charity hack. Within 24 hours they had to use PayPal’s new adaptive payment APIs with brand new ones from MissionFish and JustGiving to create new ways for charities to promote their causes. On offer: a grand prize trip to Innovate 09 but what really motivated this group to give up their sleep and their time to hack for charity?
At the end of the 24 hours, the applications varied from mobile uses to online games. It was a glimpse into how these new applications could be used by developers to make payment and donation giving even easier for the consumer. The big winners were:
- Silliest hack – comparetheduck.com, by Alistair MacDonald and Michael Heap allowed you to compare rubber ducks and build your own top trumps cards. It was suggested that a charity could use the system with a more appropriate theme.
- Breast Cancer Campaign challenge – Pinkify. This facebook application allows you to select a friends photo and make them “wear it pink”. This ap has a huge potential to go viral as well getting the “wear it pink” message over to the facebook generation. The winners included Cristiano Betta and Melinda Seckington.
- Best Mobile hack – GetGiving was based on allowing you to make a spontaneous donation to charity on seeing a poster or paper/tube advert. This allowed you to either use an iphone ap/ text message or a mobile website.
- Best Social Media based hack- Sponsor Me. This facebook application allows you to set up a cause and donate the proceeds directly to a charity via Missionfish and PayPal. This app allows you to pick a charity and therefore has great potential on the world biggest social network. The winning team included Wakari founder, Mat Clayton.
- The winning hack was CharityFrag by a team of 5 including Tim Nash , Dom Hodgson , Kevin Prince , Leeky and Tom Morris. This amazing application connected an opensource first person shooter game up with PayPal’s adaptive payments. Judges picked this one not only as it used very innovative technologies, but it addressed the issue of engaging a younger generation in the donation process.
LINKS:
Find out about the history of hacking
Read more about Innovate 09 on PayPal’s developer network
Coverage of the event by Cambridge New Media Services
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