This coming Saturday and Sunday, Aviary and General Assembly are hosting the second installment of their baller photo hackathon, often touted as "the world's largest photo hack day," though we're not sure there's that much competition. At last year's event more than 175 developers produced 40+ hacks, a number of which were built using Face.com's futuristic facial recognition technology.

More than  200 developers have already signed up for the second go-round, officially known as Photo Hack Day 2 (Twitter hashtag #PHD2), so you can expect even more hacked-together photo goodness. Like Aviary's photo editing suite itself, the emphasis now is on mobile development rather than the web. "Sunday demo tickets completely sold out a full week and a half before the event, so we’re anticipating a good, curious crowd," said Alex Taub, Aviary's head of business development and partnerships.

Aviary and GA have already announced an impressive roster of speakers for a fireside chat moderated by Aviary CEO Avi Muchnick, including Tumblr's David Karp, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, and Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh. But today they're ready to talk about the good stuff: prize$$$.

There will be $10,000 up for grabs in prize money, spread out across 1st, 2nd, 3rd place, plus People’s Choice. Nokia, the hackathon's headline sponsor, will also be offering up  eight Lumia 800s for the top two hacks on Windows phones, which will also  receive marketing support when the apps are published in the Microsoft Marketplace.  Hackers can expect a number of other goodies as well, including: an Xbox and Kinect, a dSLR, a Lytro camera, a GoPro camera, an iPad 2, and a Blackberry Playbook.

But the biggest reveal may be an unexpected global perspective. The coders at General Assembly will be simultaneously hacking with another photo hack day happening in Berlin (the first such event in Europe). Both hackathons will be livestreamed for mutual, real-time exposure. Aviary and GA are also facilitating cross-pollination of fireside chats; Berlin's is a Q&A with Twitter. Looking to stretch your hackathon legs even farther? Aviary is working with Skylines, an Amsterdam-based photo startup, to bring the first Photo Hack Day to Amsterdam after SXSW. We would like to perpetuate stereotypes by wondering if that means you're allowed to show up high.

The new Flickr photo view, slated to roll out 2/28/2012.

Markus Spiering has, as they say, a good eye. Most of his resume was in mobile before he became a senior product manager for Flickr. In March 2011, he slipped into the head product role, lording over Flickr's 45 or so employees. ""I have the pleasure to run product management for one of the most exciting web sites in the world: Flickr," he says on his website. He's in town for the Photo Hack Day hackathon this weekend, the first small sign of what could be the company's reinvigorated interest in its audience.

Mr. Spiering is very happy to be making extensive changes to the Flickr interface, the first of which will roll out next week, as he explained in a meeting with Betabeat, Yahoo's Jason Khoury, and Flickr.com, looking pretty on Mr. Spiering's Macbook Air.

Mr. Spiering moused over the current photo view. "This is very typical of Flickr," he said. "Lots of white space, small photos, lots of information around."

He then opened a new tab to show the spread, completely revamped. Suddenly the photos look more than four times their current size and lie neatly justified on the page, somehow jigsawing together without cropping or changing the order in which they appear.

The new photo view will hit on Feb. 28, Mr. Spiering said, and with it comes a new upload interface. Flickr's uploading page now looks more like an app than a website. Goodbye, retro blue links. Hello, swoopy drag-and-drop.

Betabeat came away from the conversation with the impression that Yahoo is not sleeping on Flickr, as some users and former employees have suggested. Last month, a small housecleaning booted at least five employees in customer service in order to "centralize" Flickr's support with other Yahoo customer support, making it available 24 hours a day across the globe and making it more scaleable, Mr. Spiering said.

Outcry arose among Flickr devotees who have been calling for Yahoo to cut the cord. Former Flickr engineer Nolan Caudill wrote a blog post denouncing Yahoo's "major mistake," suggesting the move was another example of Flickr's neglect under its corporate parent. Betabeat ran a thought experiment: "Wherefore Flickr? Ideas for the Beloved Photo Site’s Escape From Yahoo."

Mr. Spiering. (twitter.com)

"Seems like taking it private a la StumbleUpon would be great if Yahoo were willing to do it," one source very familiar with Flickr speculated in an email.

At the time, power user Thomas Hawk—never one to shy away from criticizing Flickr—was actually optimistic. "It could really honestly be Markus Spiering (who now runs flickr) and Yahoo staff cleaning house," he wrote in an email. "The culture at flickr has been rotten for a long time."

Community management had been "an absolute disaster," in his opinion. "It could be that flickr is retooling and actually in a weird way going to try and re-engage their customers," he wrote.

Yahoo has been paying attention to Flickr all along, Mr. Spiering insisted, and has made a lot of improvements since it bought the site in 2005. "We didn't communicate as much as we should have," he said.

He pointed out that the photo page was redesigned as recently as the summer of 2010, and that Yahoo has started integrating Flickr across its products. For example, the Yahoo weather app displays user photos that match the location and weather in the background of the forecast. Flickr will also be integrated into Yahoo Mail soon, he said.

Flickr also changed its pricing structure in January, adding a new Flickr Pro option for $6.95 for three months and dropping the price for a two-year subscription by $5. The lower price points suggests an eye toward user acquisition. (Flickr's traffic is down since the launch of Google+, according to the notoriously unreliable Compete.com.)

Flickr's upload page, 2/21/2012.

Flickr missed its chance to be Instagram before Instagram was Instagram; it also faces fierce competition from Google+ and Picasa, which is siphoning off some of the social photographers who make up one of Flickr's core user bases. (Mr. Spiering declined to name who he thinks Flickr's top competitors are. "It's very hard to tell," he said. "People use it in different ways." Some upload thousands of photos and never leave a comment; others use the site as a photo database; and others exclusively comment but never upload.)

But Flickr is reorienting according to Yahoo's "mobile first" strategy and the design is thoughtful and forward-looking. The Flickr API is still one of the most popular public APIs, the company says, although two years ago it was the most popular (damn you, Facebook). Flickr actually has an API for almost every function on the site, Mr. Spiering said, although not all are public. He said more than 3.5 million photos are uploaded to Flickr via PC and mobile devices a day.

Flickr's upload page, slated to roll out 2/28/2012 late March 2012.

Flickr will continue to make major changes in waves in 2012, Mr. Spiering said, but there will be no New Flickr campaign. "It is not as if we close the curtain and all of a sudden say, 'ta da, it's different!'" he said. It does seem as if Flickr has had an attitude readjustment, at the least.

Photo by Maya Baratz

The joy of a hack day is the time constraint, the 24-hour crunch that forces coders to get creative and make hard decisions about how much they can really accomplish. At Aviary's photo hack day yesterday, a very well-attended event that produced over 40 hacks and oodles of prizes, the most used API was from Face.com, an Israeli start-up working on facial recognition.

Connecting to their API allowed a hack to identify Facebook friends and even chart their faces across five emotions (happy, sad, angry surprised, neutral), adding emotional and social depth to projects built on short notice. 

The winner of the event was Photobot, a service that analyzed users pictures and gave the suggestions for how to improve. Honey Badger, which took second place, used the Face.com API. But the most interesting projects to come out of the event were Emotional Breakdown and Facialytics, which the judges passed over because they were suspicious something so robust could have been built in 24 hours.

Emotional Breakdown used the face.com API to scan through news feeds from sites like The Guardian and break down the emotions in photographs. While the overall paper was a mix of all emotions for example, looking at coverage from of the London riots showed most people were angry and sad, with almost no one happy. While that example seems pretty obvious, the technology could certainly be used to find some interesting patterns if used at scale and over time.

Facialytics had clearest path to a real business. The team took infrared footage of audiences watching films (mostly grabbed off YouTube) and spliced them up into single frames. Then they ran that through the face.com API to get an emotional register. "We found, surprisingly, the API was actually more effective at capturing emotion in infrared," said Jonathan Bensamoun, a senior associate at PricewaterhouseCoopers and one of the hack's four creators.

"It was incredible how quickly Face.com could process the images and that they could capture emotion for every face in the crowd," added Mr. Bensamoun. Facialytics was then able to chart the average mood of the audience throughout the film and find high points for pleasure, surprise or sadness. "I was thinking it would be tough to get cameras installed in every theater to do this," he went on to say. "But someone told me that most movie theaters already have infrared cameras to watch the audience for piracy or lewd behavior." It's easy to see how the big film studios would pay for analytics that showed exactly what parts of their films were resonating with the audience.

Gil Hirsch, Face.com CEO, was visiting from Tel Aviv. "We were just blown away by the incredible uses people found for our API. What's going on in New York right now is very impressive." Face.com isn't looking for revenue right now, said Mr. Hirsch, but rather trying to get their technology in front of as many people as possible. "We saw a bunch of projects tonight that I think have the potential to be big."

Facialytics

After all, for years, the NYSE and NASDAQ have competed to be the exchange where tech start-ups go public. Before New York City decided to get into the game, that attention was focused on the Valley. But now that's we're lookin' all bubbly around the edges, it would make sense for NASDAQ to get its brand in front of the future public company owners and align itself early, especially at a hotbed for start-up activity like General Assembly. NASDAQ is even offering up a high-profile prize: the top three apps from the hackathon will be showcased on the NASDAQ screen in Times Square. Your move, NYSE.