Inca award

WOW - that where some insane last few hours monday night, but big fun!
monday at midnight was the deadline for the Inca award

I first heard about it at barcamp and immediately thought "Hey! that's my cup of tea"!
After all, creating small(-ish) fun web apps is something I do to ease my mind :-)
The competition was open for about a month and you had to build a new application.

I entered 3 apps (yes THREE - that's a bit insane ...)

• Inca - the game (that was just for fun - not very useful in a social way but VERY cool :-) )
• Lopend Vuur: an application to quickly reach the relevant group of people in case of a logistic emergency with your kids (together with Beate from e-zen who came up with the idea)
• Wamm: which was an idea of Pieter Theuns. it's a fun way of nailing an "agreement" between two people for small favours (like borrowing a book etc...)

More on that later, I'm especially fond of my solution to handle the SMS traffic of both Lopend Vuur and Wamm: instead of setting up an expensive external 2-way sms gateway, everything is running from a small GSM modem that's sitting at my home: just plug in a SIM card with heaps of cheap (or even free) SMS credits and you're good to go.
The only drawback is that the throughput is rather small - it can only send 1 SMS each 4 seconds or something - but for most projects that's more then fast enough.

I really liked the Inca contest. Not for the contest itself, but it really created some vibes in the Belgian developers "scene" with lot's of people building stuff just for the fun of it - or to show of - or to build something useful ... but mainly, because they WANTED so, not because a big paying customer (or a big nasty boss) wanted them to.
That "bottom up" approach is exactly the type of thinking Inca was designed to stimulate, and I think they succeeded very nicely: 35 applications where submitted and amongst them some real gems.

My favorites (apart from my own of course):

• Twoddler (cool!)
• Verdwaald vuil (looks absolutely gorgeous)
• TVtweets (good idea)
• Mijn lucht (brilliant in its simplicity)
• Hupskadee (excels in about everything: both design and technical implementation is fabulous: /me jealous!  I think they are heading for the number one spot in the competition)

Again - it's notable how ubiquitous Twitter is ... 7 applications have something to do with twitter in some way, that's 20% !

Anyway ... I'm also glad it's over :-) (back to more sane working hours)
I'm hoping to meet some of the teams at the iMinds conference, 12th of may