Seedcamp announce winners of SeedHack 4.0

Seedcamp is known as ‘the Harvard of Startup Accelerators’, and widely regarded as the top Accelerator in Europe. On top of their regular activities, they also run Seedhack a hackathon (where coders, designers and other startup-y types get together and ‘hack’ cool products together over a weekend). Last weekend was Seedhack 4.0, with the theme of ‘remixing content’. They worked to get a lot of data providers at the event, and we were spoilt for choice! From the BBC’s realtime news data hose, through to Nokia’s music service and lots of image providers (including Getty, the photo source for all newspapers), we had it covered! The mostly Imperial team, comprised of Ben Miles, Florian Rathgeber, Aeneas Wiener and Thomas Lim joined forces with three other entrants. Our work with Imperial Create Lab and ICSaaS meant we have the creative and technical skills to execute on a cool idea. The concept of balanced news is one which we liked; there are always two sides to a story, but when reading articles on the internet, it is all too easy to get an unbalanced view. Our hack pulled in realtime news stories from the BBC News Labs experimental ‘Juicer’ API. We analysed the content with sentiment analysis to figure out which ‘side’ of the story it was about. Articles are augmented with various associations to people, places, oganisations, events etc., which we used to query for related articles. With more sentiment analysis, we could work out the article with views most different to the first one analysed. At this point, we analysed any Tweets which had been shared with the URL to the article in it. We measured the sentiment (both for positivity or negativity, and strength of view) of all tweets, and the aggregate scores were factored in to how we displayed articles on the page. We named it Oppozeit, as we combined the zeitgeist nature of many news aggregation tools, whilst showing the opposing sides of an argument. Articles were rendered side by side (the two ‘opposing’ articles in question), with the proportion of the page given to each one being based on which articles were getting the most vocal support on Twitter. The background colour was based on how strong opinion and language was in the article itself, with a darker shade indicating strong language. The image backdrop was pulled from Getty, with the articles ‘key words’ (also provided by the BBC ‘Juicer’ service) being provided as search terms. All in all, we felt it was an impressive hack considering the time frame! We were delighted that Seedcamp decided to announce us as winners of Seedhack 4.0! Some hackathons have impressive prizes– over £1000 in cash, a trip to the US are some we’ve come across (but sadly not won) recently. Seedhack tops it all though– a Star Trek Enterprise Pizza cutter. The Enterprise does of course represent the cutting edge of Innovation, so what better way to cut pizza at hackathons and when working at a startup? We look forward to our next Hackathon, but in the mean time check out our live demo: oppozeit.me and stay tuned as we develop our hack!