Last week, the AddThis team dropped what they were doing, and signed up to work on different projects in our latest 24-hour hackathon!
Over 30 projects were submitted, and lots of cool things came about as a result. Here are some highlights of how the day went.
Here’s the Virginia team gathered to kick off the hackathon in AddThis style!
For Wednesday night’s NoVA UX meetup I moderated a panel discussion about how two local retailers — CustomInk and ThinkGeek — approach user experience design in an e-commerce setting.
Both companies use comprehensive testing strategies, and multiple analytics tools like Google Analytics, Omniture, and Adobe’s Test and Target, to optimize conversions and revenue. Continue →
Today, the Washington Business Journal named AddThis as one of the greatest places to work in the Greater Washington area. It’s an honor to be mentioned among the few selected from thousands of companies who competed!
Hi! I’m Ifdy, and I just joined the AddThis team. I’ll be your new community manager, and my job is to be here for you.
I’ll be behind the scenes on our AddThis social pages, and all the best platforms and forums to communicate with you. My job is to engage in a conversation with you—our amazing users.
(Blog title: Shakespeare reference, Olsen Twins movie, or Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban score track #5? You decide.)
AddThis has offices in Washington, DC and New York City, both of which were hit by now infamous Hurricane Sandy this week. While NYC is still in the dark (and we’re thinking about them every day!) that didn’t stop some A-Teamers here at AddThis HQ from getting in the Halloween spirit yesterday, as well as some members in our LA office and other remote locales.
Our 2nd Annual Halloween costume contest saw a variety of crazy characters. Three of the “best dressed” won prizes in the following categories:
AND THE WINNERS ARE …
Jeannie in LA won Funniest with her hilarious Stewie outfit:
Will in LA won Scariest with his impersonation of Tony Montana from Scarface:
And Leiser from AT:HQ won Most Creative with her interpretation of a “data dump”:
Congratulations to you all!
And in the name of honorable mentions, here are some more photos of the wacky Wednesday wear:
Tiffany as Janet Jackson in the Control era, Kori as Penny Lane from Almost Famous, Collin as an AddThis “adult publisher” and there’s that data dump lady again!
Stephen as Magnum PI!
Paul as Superman and his superdog!
Joe, from our NYC office, is Frankenstorm/NYC reporter. Sandy can’t mess with our sense of humor!
Tracy was a cowgirl and her horse.
Natalija as a “Roman” Goddess … every other day she’s just a regular goddess. 
Does this look like fun?! If so, check out our open positions! If it’s not your cup of tea, don’t worry, it’s not mandatory to dress up on Halloween.
AlwaysOn announced their 6th annual OnHollywood 100 winners today, and we’re thrilled to be named in the Advertising and Marketing category! The list identifies global innovators that are developing game-changing technologies and “disrupting the Hollywood establishment and creating viable business models for the digital entertainment marketplace.”
We love helping connect movie studios and Hollywood entertainers with the audiences that will love them most. And, on the heels of being named the most innovative company in advertising data by DataWeek in August, it’s gratifying to have our media solutions for brands acknowledged again.
For more information, our press release is here and more details on the award are here. As always, thanks for being great, thoughtful partners.
Another successful AddThis Hackathon is in the books! We measure the success of a Hackathon in a few different ways:
For those not familiar with hackathons, they are our 24-hour sprints of innovation. A-Teamers group up, or work alone, on a new project outside of what they are currently working on in their day-to-day. The energy surrounding a hackathon is always fun and familial. They are a very important part of the AddThis culture.
WINNER: Telepresence Roomba Robot
The winning project of this installment of all-night coding was quite impressive. The team went out to solve a common challenge we face at AddThis. Since we have multiple offices across the country, sometimes communicating and collaborating requires extra effort. So, the team created a telepresence robot using a Roomba, a MacBook Air, foamcore and a rocket launcher. And the entire thing was controlled from a Google Hangout! See it in action:
Congratulations to the winning team! It was well deserved.
Honorable Mention: AddThis Garden
The unofficial “runners-up” also deserve Earth Day Award 2012. “AddThis Plant” went on a mission to “green” our new HQ office in Virginia. It is an extensive project of plant growing, caring and loving with the end goal to have a nice array of beautiful oxygen-producing decorations for our work space. Check them out:
And those are just the official winners! There were many other brilliant and noteworthy projects that did not go unnoticed or under-appreciated. Some of which will be used to make everyday AddThis processes more efficient — a win all by itself!
Like this? Check out more posts about AddThis Engineering.
Last week, I visited London for OMMA Display Europe, AdTrading Summit (ATS) and AdTech as AddThis announced the official launch of our data business for the International markets. What an exciting week! It was standing room only at ATS. Mike Nolet, Appnexus Founder and CTO, and Frank Addante, Founder and CEO of Rubicon, were excited about the energy from the EU digital media community around RTB and audience targeting. Mike called it the “second wave” of RTB that the EU was now jumping into feet first.
After over 40 meetings in 4 days with the leading companies in our space, these things were clear:
AddThis is excited about the opportunity to partner with our current US partners who are now fully entrenched in their International expansion as well as many new International companies that we met with during our trip.
We see over 1B unique users across the AddThis platform, and we see them over 140 times each month. That allows us to deliver micro targeted segments at massive scale worldwide. We’ve seen success in the States and can’t wait for similar results over seas.
Thanks to everyone who spent time with Art McKinely and me last week. We had a great time and enjoyed the great city of London… and of course the pubs! Let us know if you have any questions about our audiences or modeling capabilities domestically or globally. We’re always happy to help!
This past weekend Matt Keesan and I traveled down to Philadelphia for PennApps, America’s largest student-run hackathon. 48 hours, 91 teams, 320 hackers, $10K+ in prizes–any way you look at it, the event was huge. So before getting into some of our favorite hacks of the weekend, congratulations to the whole PennApps team, including frontman Pulak Mittal, for keeping the wifi, food, and energy flowing all weekend. AddThis was a proud sponsor and we’re looking forward to next semester!
Solo-hacker and UPenn freshman Vivek Panyam won the “most delicious UI” award for Facebook for Grandma, a pared-down Facebook app offering a compelling subset of features in an even more compelling package. Seriously, your grandmother just got 30 clicks closer to your photos; you’ve been warned.
PennApps veterans Devon Peticulas and Dan Mundy won big style points for scoping out and executing on a deceptively simple tamagotchi-inspired pet. Get your own at bbcat.co, then share it with your significant other to either test his or prove your own commitment. What impressed me most about the duo is that at the 11th-hour, when most teams were tracing syntax errors, Devon and Dan were sitting pretty, chatting about node.js design patterns and that perfect shade of beige found on the Atari 800. What’s more, they are coordinating HackRU at Rutgers next month. Maybe they’ll throw us dog-lovers a bone.
Were there an award for the most roguish team at PennApps, the entire UMich contingent would have had to split it. Instead, we gave our own “Most Viral” award to BuddyHack, the only project that was developed, deployed, HackerNews’d, and banned before the demos even began! Luckily the team is prolific and their BuddyMeme project is still up from the Michigan Facebook Hackathon held this March. By creating a dead-simple meme generator (open-sourced, by the way) and leveraging the tight-knit nature of Facebook’s network, BuddyMeme allows memes to thrive within small social groups.
There were too many cool projects for me to list. AddThis was super happy to share the weekend with so many talented developers.
Joe Sullivan and I are headed down to Philadelphia today for Penn Apps 2012, an awesome bi-annual 48-hour hackathon for university students, run by Penn students themselves. There’s thousands of dollars in prizes, not to mention mentors from sponsors like us, Facebook, Google, Dropbox, Mongo, Mozilla, the New York Times, Quora, Zappos, and more. They’ll even reimburse your bus fare (which is extra rad since the price of a ticket from New York has risen substantially from the $5 I paid as an undergrad).
This session is already completely full, but there’s a waiting list for student hackers, and the next PennApps is just six months away. (All developers in the area are invited to come by to help advise teams in their areas of expertise.)
If you’re a student looking for help, or live in Philly and just want to meet your friendly local AddThis developers, please drop me a line or send a tweet (@itsjoesullivan or @keesan)! We’re excited to be sponsoring our first university hackathon.
