The second Yipit Hackathon was a success in every way. Besides being a blast, it brought our team closer together, generated impactful ideas, and featured cool prizes like Romo.

Teams consisting of both developers and business people were given 36 hours to complete their objective: build something useful for Yipit that is awesome enough to win the votes of the other teams. Most of the teams did so well that their projects are either being rolled out, split tested or used internally. Check them out below.

Fortune Teller | Vinicius Vacanti
At Yipit, we use in-house technology to track and analyze key metrics in real time. Vinicius Vacanti, one of our founders, built a tool to give a daily forecast and track progress for each metric.

Deal Machine | Steve Pulec and Dave Tomback
“The No Whammies” built a deal machine that packages deals for a fun day based on where you are and what you want to do. The team integrated with Stripe to handle payments and even offered a package discount.

Deal Voting | Fabio Costa and Gabriel Falcao
Yipit curates deals by providing Yelp reviews, a feature that grew out of the first hackathon. Team “Os-tripaseca” expanded on this concept by allowing users to upvote deals they like and downvote deals they dislike for collaborative filtering.

Democratic Lunch | Jim Moran and Nistha Tripathi
“Yipit’s Winning Ways” built an email-based voting system for electing the two restaurants to order from on an aggregation of Seamless, GrubHub and Delivery.com.

Remote Collaboration | Adam Nelson and Lincoln de Sousa
Up until recently, some of our developers were working remotely. In an effort to facilitate collaboration, Team “World do Mondo” built a technology to share screens and terminals to code simultaneously.

Getting to Know You | Mingwei Gu and David Sinsky
The Yipit family is always growing, and keeping startup culture alive is both important and challenging. Team “Step by Step” built a game that increases and tests your knowledge of your coworkers’ interests and tastes.

3rd Place | Web UI Revisited | Nitya Oberoi and Ben Plesser
Team “Bet-ya” re-envisioned our web interface with better navigation and grouping deals by popularity. Many of the concepts they came up with are now being used across our different products.

2nd Place | Automated Split Testing | Alice Li and Zach Smith
We are scientists. We constantly split test our ideas. Team “A to Z” built a system to automatically launch, track and rollout our experiments. All of our features, including many of these hackathon projects, are being split tested using this system!

1st Place | Dynamic Deal Recommendation | Suneel Chakravorty and Henry Xie
“The Sick Bros” won the hackathon by building a machine learning algorithm that further personalizes our deal recommendation system by adapting to user behavior.

With no strings attached, developers are empowered to take on more ambitious challenges. Many other companies, such as 37signals, are experimenting with making Hackathons a part of their regular process. So are we.