Outbrain Hackathon: Hacking Tomorrow’s Content Experience

You’re probably familiar with some of the films and TV shows that have accurately predicted the future.

The Truman Show predicted a future obsession with reality TV. The Simpsons predicted we’d talk to our watches, video chat through our phones, and even a certain businessman’s candidature. And Back To The Future II gave an eerily accurate view of what 2015 would look like.

At this point, we’re just waiting for the hover-boards.

Until then, Outbrain is inviting you to come make your own predictions – about content and the way we read, watch, and engage with it in the digital age – and turn it into reality.

Outbrain powers the largest content recommendation service across the web on major publisher sites like CNN, ESPN, and TIME. Through behavioral targeting, we recommend related articles and other content to readers that they’ll find interesting.

On July 20th, we’ll be hosting the annual Outbrain Hackathon, at both our headquarters in New York and our office in Netanya, Israel, with this year’s focus on “Tomorrow’s Content Experience.” Teams will plan, build, and present an original product or innovation around the question: what will the content experience of the future look like?

Last year, we brought together over 20 teams from 10 partners who, along with Outbrainers, developed projects using the Outbrain Amplify and Sphere APIs. Teams created projects on content recommendations within messaging apps, voice recommendations for drivers in commute, and monitoring systems for our API clients campaigns and many more.

This year, we’re focusing on those from our own personal networks: Outbrain friends, professional peers, classmates, or any developers looking to come collaborate with us for a day. You don’t need to have experience in ad-tech or content discovery, we welcome, and in fact encourage, developers from different industries and areas of expertise.

Similarly, if you don’t have your own idea for the future of digital content, worry not. While some teams are formed in advance, others will be created on the day of the event, pairing up Outbrain employees with other developers and friends.

The Outbrain Hackathon is a 24-hour event. Each team has five minutes to share their creation with Outbrain’s entire international staff via webcast. Winners are selected based on a voting system, as well as input from a panel of judges. Every member of the winning team will receive a GoPro Hero, and second place team members will each receive a drone.

While the primary focus is in creation and innovation over a short period of time, we also try to make our hackathon a more casual, friendly experience. Our goal is to get out of our comfort zone and collaborate with those we typically don’t work with, all with some food, drinks, and laughs.

Update: After 24 hours, we got to 15 live demos. Choosing the winners was tough but here’s a look at the amazing atmosphere!