Hosted at Media Technology Labs in Ginza, 50 engineers, designers, and product managers gathered to create apps that work on the Evernote platform. The Hackathon was attended by 20 teams that took their ideas from concept to planning to a finished product in just 24 hours. For this hackathon, we had an automotive theme: create an application or service related to cars that enriches everyday life.

Sponsors included Toyota Info. Technolgy Center, Gurunavi (a restaurant search site), and Mashup Awards. Entries were judged based on the technical difficulty involved in creating the app, as well as a final presentation by each team.

The Winners

The Best Hack Prize went to Infinite Route by Shuhei Iizuka and Naofumi Wakabayashi. Instead of showing the quickest car route to a destination, like standard car navigation systems do, Infinite Route focuses on the most enjoyable route, suggesting fun detours based on the users’ taste. That route is then saved to Evernote, making it easy to relive your trip inside of Evernote.

The Best Concept Prize went to Kobito Note by Eruma Maruhashi, Noriaki Saito, and Taku Fukada. When a user creates a note in Evernote, Kobito finds related information from other websites, and adds it to the note. Kobito guesses what would be useful, and makes it available to the user.

The Toyota ITC Prize went to Memory Ever, by Kunshiro Murayama, Yusuke Yasuo, and Tomoaki Hosomi. Their app documents events inside and outside of a car simultaneously while traveling. The idea is to mount your smartphone in the car, then the app will automatically take images using both the primary and secondary camera so you get two perspectives on any given moment. Particularly useful for family excursions, users can save and remember the fun inside the car and the scenery outside in Evernote, providing a more complete picture of the experience.

Participants told us that the Hackathon inspired everyone to push their technical skills to come up with some truly unique final products. On the judging side, the sponsors were impressed with the high quality Hackathon apps that were created.

We look forward to hosting more hackathons and developer events in the new year. If you are a developer or designer who is interested in building apps and features that work with Evernote, make sure to check out our Evernote developer website to get started, and visit the Evernote Trunk to browse our entire collection of apps and products that help you do more with Evernote.

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.

We’re excited to announce our second annual worldwide developer competition: the Evernote Devcup! Devcup challenges software developers and designers to create awesome products that help over 25 million users do more with Evernote. We’ll be awarding over $100,000 in prizes and giving finalists the chance to present their work to the attendees of this year’s Evernote Trunk Conference in San Francisco.

Here’s what we’re giving away:

• Gold – $20,000 cash prize
• Silver – $15,000 cash prize
• Bronze – $5,000 cash prize
• 6 finalists – $10,000 cash prize, and airfare and lodging to attend ETC 2012

What are we hoping to see?

Great apps combine captivating functionality with beautiful, intuitive design. The entries that we select as Devcup finalists will be apps that we expect tens of thousands of people to use every day to capture and recall the important things in their lives. We can’t possibly enumerate every good idea that we’ve ever heard, but here are some general themes to help you get started thinking about what to build:

• Evernote Food and Evernote Hello are mobile applications that provide users with a dedicated experience for a specific Evernote use case. What other use cases could benefit from a customized application, and what type of rich, structured information would they contribute to a user’s Evernote account? What about a movie app that manages the list of movies that you want to see and your thoughts on those that you’ve seen, and combines that information with outside data from your Netflix queue and Rotten Tomatoes?
• Products like Nike+ and Fitbit have brought Quantified Self and lifelogging into the mainstream. These products generate an immense amount of data about us. How can Evernote fit in? What type of data could such products store in Evernote, and how could you incorporate all of the other information in a user’s Evernote account to enrich their life log?
• One of last year’s finalists noted that there are two types of notes that we create in Evernote. Some, such as shopping lists, start out being important but diminish in value over time. Others, such as records of great meals, aren’t that valuable in the short term, but become wonderful memories later. Dividing the world of Evernote notes into these two categories, what types of application could be built to focus on one area or the other?
• Evernote’s products are used by tens of millions of people around the world. Only a third of our users are in the United States, and about a third are in non-Western countries. We design products that we think have universal appeal and utility, but there are probably also opportunities for apps that serve the needs of a specific national or cultural group. What app would you build for users in your country that isn’t necessarily as obvious to an outsider?
• Evernote users love to learn about our products. Books, blogs and videos that help users get started with Evernote or get more out of it are extremely popular – there are currently 33 printed books about Evernote in Japan alone! What can you build to teach Evernote or guide great Evernote habits?

These themes barely scratch the surface of the opportunities that are available. Whether or not you plan to participate in Devcup, we want to hear what apps you’d like to see built for this year’s competition. Join the discussion at devcup.evernote.com or attend one of our worldwide meetups.

A look back

Last year, nearly 1,000 developers from around the world participated in the developer competition. Many were from the US, but almost a quarter were from Asia, another quarter were from Europe, and we had meaningful participation in South and Central America. All six of the finalist teams attended ETC and presented their submissions. You can watch their presentations at evernote.com/about/etc. Last year’s Grand Prize winner was Touchanote, an Android app that allows you to associate real life objects with your Evernote notes using NFC. Another one of the finalists, Notable Meals, formed the basis of Evernote Food. A third, Colorstache, allowed you to search your Evernote notes by color.

The details  

Any piece of software that integrates with an Evernote API is eligible for Devcup. You can build for desktop, mobile or the web. Here are the key dates:

• Now through July 2nd - Form a team, come up with an idea, build an app!
• July 2nd – Submission deadline (11pm PDT)
• July 23rd - 6 finalists announced
• Late summer - Finalists present their entries at the Evernote Trunk Conference; the Grand Prize winner and runners up are chosen

Devcup meetups around the world!

To help you get started, we’re holding a number of meetups around the world. These are a great place to brainstorm and discuss the feasibility of an idea with our developer relations staff, connect with others who are participating in Devcup, and learn more about Evernote. We’ll also be holding webinars if you’re unable to attend in person. For a list of events, and to find all of the information that you need about Devcup, join the conversation at devcup.evernote.com.

View the Evernote Developer site »

The Evernote Developer Community

Currently, there are thousands of developers who are building apps and services that integrate with the Evernote API. Using our SDK and code walkthroughs, developers have already built an impressive collection of apps and products that let you do more with your Evernote account. These integrations allow our users to manage their expenses, go paperless, transcribe audio notes, connect real-life objects with their notes, and more. You can find the growing collection of these services and products in the Evernote Trunk.

Since the Evernote Trunk Conference, we have been in constant contact with our developers, discussing ways we could improve our API tools. In the last year alone, we have tripled the size of our developer relations team, organized several international hackathons, and reworked our technical documentation from the ground up to make developing on the Evernote API and building the next great Evernote-integrated app more straightforward than ever before.

Our new developer site will better arm developers with the information and tools they need to get started and to reach millions of Evernote users with products that make their everyday lives better.

Here are the core sections you will find in the new dev.evernote.com:

Documentation

The technical section of the site is aimed at providing a solid overview of the Evernote service along with information about how to start building right away. This is where developers will find chapters on authentication, note creation, and many more areas to review.

News

With the launch of the new developer site, we have also created multiple ways of staying involved in the community. Our Twitter account, @evernote_dev, allows us to share updates that are relevant to Evernote’s developer community. In addition, developers can stay updated via our email newsletter, active developer forum, and by following the Evernote TechBlog.

Developer Support

We have streamlined the steps involved in building an application that integrates with Evernote. From the support page, you can review recent developer forum posts, register for an API key, check the API status, and contact the developer support team for solutions.

Videos

From recent conferences to workshops, we are collecting material for the Evernote Developer Community.

Developer Showcase

A section we are very excited about is the developer showcase. This is an area where we display solid examples of Evernote integrations and how they approached building their apps.

Take a minute to check out our new dev site. We look forward to helping our developer community in every way we can!