Evernote sponsored the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon on September 8 and 9. It was a cool event: Hundreds of developers, dozens of platform sponsors, and 24 hours to build new apps. We went to chat up the developers, get inspired by their ideas, and to give a prize to the most innovative and interesting use of the Evernote API.

We gave the prize, a trip to Le Web in Paris with us in December, to the team from Memstash. They’re building a tool to help you remember things that are important to you.  In your actual brain, the one inside your head.

They do this by using the spaced repetition technique. When you create an item to remember, like the name of someone you’ve just met, or a fact you know you’re going to be tested on, Memstash will send you a text or email alert with the fact after 10 minutes, then again after 24 hours, and again after seven days. According to theory, spacing out the memorization cues like this is the best way to get a random factoid to stick in your head.

The product is simple, but it’s a useful tool, and the hackathon implementation was slick and functional, impressive for 24 hours of work. Users can create items either through a bookmarklet or just by typing them in.

And, of course, users can save items to Evernote, for remembering much later — or forever.

In the future, according to team leader Sina Khanifar, you may be able to flag a note in Evernote item as something you want to memorize, and doing so will trigger the Memstash spaced repetition events.

Evernote was built to be an external brain for its users. It helps you remember and find and correlate items you might otherwise forget. Memstash is smart take on computer-aided memory: It helps you get more use out of your internal brain.

Read more on TechCrunch: Hackathon Project Memstash Helps You Memorize Anything.