Iron.io @ HackTheMidwest → Half Empty App Wins Iron.io API Prize
The Hack the Midwest hackathon was this past weekend (June 15-16th) in Kansas City. The theme was "Build Something Epic" and from the looks of the projects the 30+ teams put together, that certainly proved true.
Among the many deserving winners was Half Empty? – which won the winner of the Iron.io API Prize (a GoPro camera). The team consisted of Joseph Andaverde and Scott Smerchek. For such a small team, they certain did some big things. You can check out their application here.
Half Empty? – Winner of the Iron.io API Prize at HackTheMidwest 2013 |
Here's a description of the app:
Tweets We Like to See |
Analyze a persons tweets to find out if they are a negative nancy or a positive polly in public. Extract information about tweets to see what kinds of topics the person talks about. The application shows a trend over time of a person's negativeness / positiveness.
How It Works (excerpted from their about page)
- An IronWorker is queued to analyze a user's tweets.
Results Page for @getiron in Half Empty? App - That worker will pull around 1000 of a user's most recent tweets.
- Each of those tweets get analyzed by the AlchemyAPI for sentiment (whether that text is considered positive, negative, or neutral)
- The tweets and their sentiments are stored in the key/value store, IronCache
- Once the worker is finished, we pull in some additional information from Klout and PeerIndex.
- With all of the data in hand, we calculate the final score using a custom algorithm and display the results!
APIs Used
Another great hackathon from the Kansas City IT Professionals and Michael Gelphman (star hackathon/tech event producer.)
And an impressive showing from Team Half Empty. Well played, devs, well played.
Scott Smerchek (left) and Micheal Schonfeld from Dwolla (right) |