Build me some apps to distract from the fact I've missed the train, again. (Photo: flickr.com/anniemole)

Your smartphone is useful for more than Bejeweled now that there's Wifi in many stations, and the MTA is trying to use that connectivity to make your commute better. (Just don't ask when your train is getting a countdown clock.)

This weekend, techies gathered in Brooklyn at NYU Poly's MetroTech Center campus for the first official, MTA-approved transit hackathon. Participants threw together a total of 17 submissions judged by authorities like Rachel Haot, General Assembly cofounder Matt Brimer and AT&T New York president Marissa Shorenstein.

The winner, taking home a not-too-shabby $5,000 (fronted by AT&T): SubCulture.FM, which would make it easier for you to find singles from your favorite subway buskers. Musicians who sign up for the program get QR codes that'll direct fans to a downloadable link.

Unfortunately, that woman who plays the Love Story theme on a recorder on the N train probably hasn't released a single, and as yet, there's no app for IRL muting your least favorite musicians.

Taking second place was MTA Sheriff, an app which would allow you to report subway problems like that one perpetually broken-down escalator, and third went to Accessway, which helps wheelchair-bound and visually-impaired folks get around the system.

This hackathon was actually just a kick-off. The winners are also now in the running for the App Quest competition, a virtual challenge that'll run until late August, also sponsored by NYU Poly, AT&T and the MTA. Anyone who's willing to work with an MTA data set or API can compete for an additional $40,000 in prize money.

Word to the wise: Anyone who hacked a way to block the urine smell would be idolized citywide as a hero.

The team presenting cLoudspeaker at NYU's Courant Institute. (via Kaushal Parikh)

Last weekend's hackNY Hackathon at NYU's Courant Institute culled some of the best young engineering minds from the East Coast to compete in a 24-hour code battle to the DEATH (okay, not really). But still--intense! The main project criteria for this hackathon? "Awesomeness," obviously.

"For seriously this is not a hackathon about building something with a huge market or a 'minimum viable product' or something," reads the Hacker League page. "Build something that blows away the judges with creativity and skill, either in design or technical winning."

By the afternoon on Sunday, three teams would place, but only one could be declared the first place victor. That winning team? cLoudspeaker, a collection of Princeton and Rutgers students that built an app to crowdsource music through laptops.

"Almost a year ago, I was looking for differences between two mp3s of the same song,"  said cLoudspeaker team member Eugene Lee, a computer science student at Princeton. "I found I could easily play both at the same time by using two computers, but more importantly, found that this made the song louder. I realized that it could be really loud if extended to many computers, so I added it to my 138 page list of random ideas and never saw it again until I unearthed it at hackNY while looking for an idea."

Mr Lee. said he thought that it could be a cool concept to pursue, but that "it would be impossible to do at a hackathon."

That's where Rutgers student Kaushal Parikh stepped in.

"I really liked the idea when I first heard about it," Mr. Parikh told Betabeat over email. "I was also really concerned about getting it done in the 24 hour time frame that we had to work within. This is where our mentors played a large role. We talked with them about the idea and they helped us narrow down the idea into what we ended up delivering at the end of the competition."

To get the hack working, the team used an API called Pusher, which allows synchronized messages to be sent to computers on the network. They encountered some problems with latency differences between computers, but employed the help of Amazon advisor Ryan Hubbard to get things working, they said.

When it came time to unveil the app, the team demonstrated the "crowd based power of cLoudspeaker" by triggering nearly the entire audience's laptops to play the same song at the same time (hence the name "cLoudspeaker"). The song they chose to blast from hundreds of computers simultaneously? A Deadmau5 song called "Strobe," spliced with clips of "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley, naturally. When the familiar track began to play, a member of the audience shouted, "I KNEW IT!"

"I think the fact that we had a demonstration the audience could partake in was major to impressing the judges," said Mr. Lee.

"We were also able to Rick-roll them, so hey," the team added. Always a plus.

cLoudspeaker will be presenting their winning project to NY Tech Day on April 19th.

(twitter.com/arthackday)

What do you get when you throw programmers and artists into a room together for 48 hours of creative collaboration? A lot of potentially terrifying things but also: this weekend, East Williamsburg gallery space 319 Scholes hosted an event where hackers and artists cooperated to build digital, primarily open-source art projects.

Art Hack Day co-organizer Olof Mathé called the event “an anti-startup weekend” that seeks to prove “great art can be produced by teams and under strong time constraints.” Participation was the key theme of the hackathon, with the artists focusing on collaborating inside 319 Scholes while outside participants could view live streaming video of the event and interact with the artists through Twitter and Ustream chat. Unfortunately, there seemed to be a few technical difficulties: the live stream was offline when Betabeat logged on last night, and the thumbnails for each of the projects on the Art Hack Day website have been missing since yesterday evening. UPDATE: Mr. Mathé sent Betabeat an email late in the day. "The live stream was a 30 min tour of the hack by our friends at 319Scholes and was just 'live.' However we are assembling videos and pictures from the event and should have them handy by tomorrow Monday." [Maybe the broken images were part of the art??? -ed.]

At the end of the designated 48 hours, 319 Scholes opened its doors to the public for an exhibit of the work, as well as live performances and a “massive party.”

Each of the Art Hack Day projects represents a compelling hybrid of technological innovation and artistry, ranging from the visionary (ScratchML is a new markup language for turntables with tools for “recording, analyzing, sharing, and even recreating scratch performances with robot arms”) to the just plain cool (Jello City With Earthquake applies electronic oscillators to shake a city made of Jello). And for those of you who have always wanted to play Russian Roulette but were afraid of that whole dying thing—rejoice! There’s a project for that, too.

The event included participants from across the globe, including New York, San Francisco, Vienna and Stockholm. Brooklynite Casey Pugh of VHX.tv focused on making GIFS from his popular crowd-sourced movie project Star Wars Uncut, while Uber engineer Conrad Whelan worked with Mr. Mathé and Swedish consultant Andrey Zhukov to create a jump rope competition where the jump rope is replaced with three iPhones. Other notable participants included Canv.as CTO Timothy Fitz and SoundCloud founder Eric Wahlforss. If only we coulda seen it (without shlepping out to Brooklyn, obvs).

We set about trying to unmask the event's organizers. "It's being put on by 'Morpheus,'" one hacker with knowledge of the event told Betabeat. "Morpheus is an anonymous hacker. While it is not clear where he first appeared, or even if 'he' is a single person, the handle was first seen on usenet boards many years ago."

The site describes the event thusly:

The Hacker Olympics is not your run of the mill hackathon. They don't want to see your slide deck of Groupon for Cats or your app that uses social, mobile, and daily deal technology to generate wubbin' dubstep beats. This is a non-elimination tournament where hackers from all areas of expertise and skill levels have a chance to accell in wildly diverse challenges. You will be challenged to build unconventional, often useless technologies that show off your pure hacking skills. You will be judged based on creativity, speed, and overall hacking knowledge.

The event will be around 45 hackers, our source said, and there's cash on the line. "There will be multiple prizes, both for teams and individuals, but they haven't yet been revealed," the source said.

It's impossible to run an event that's free for the participants without sponsors, so don't expect an ad-free space; but as hackathans are increasingly turning into recruiting fairs and "make some apps on our platform" parties, the hacker-only hackathon should be a refreshing return to cold hard coding. Betabeat has set about trying to secure an invitation to this event. Although we can type but a few lines of Javascript, we don't take up much space and we won't try to recruit anybody, we swear.

This is a guest post by Brian Borger, director of content and strategy at Gojee. Follow him on Twitter at @BrianBorger.

When a sleepy 8:30 a.m. rolled around last Saturday, the labyrinthine co-working space that Cookstr calls home roared to life. Around 120 developers, designers, data crunchers, policy experts, and marketers participated in the Farm Bill Hack, hosted by Food+Tech Connect and Gojee to analyze and spread the word about the crucial piece of legislation that will be making its way through D.C. in the coming months. The bill determines funding for the agriculture industry, and influences which crops farmers produce, their quantities, and their prices.

Participants broke into teams to tackle 10 different topics tied to the Farm Bill, ranging from tracking government dollars to new farmers to facilitating communication between Hudson Valley apple orchardists. (Full list of proposed topics here.)

As tends to happen with research projects, a lofty analytical goal or two occasionally fell victim to the inherent difficulties of dealing with data. But as the deadline closed in, morale remained high and the hackers continued to fight the good fight. Ten hours in, each team was energetically pitching catchy ways to represent their findings.

In the end, the “Farm Bill of Health” walked away with top prize for the group’s accessible depiction of the funding disparity between commodity crops vs. fruits and vegetables. Second prize went to Meatlessly.com, a mobile app designed to encourage participation in Meatless Mondays.

For more information about the projects and winners from this amazingbunch of weekend warriors, read more at Food+Tech Connect.

"It's basically a re-envisioning of the Foursquare new user experience / game mechanics. We use your Foursquare check-ins to build an illustrated map featuring 8 distinct districts (corresponding to the top level Foursquare categories, retsuarants, nightlife etc.). Every district has four levels, each with it's own art (in other words, a lot of art! 8*4 = 32 custom illustrations, plus all the other art). The point is to level up in each district."

Mr. Fisher built the project with Keenan Cummings, Jeff Escalante and Tyler Brock.

New users see a city full of empty lots and suggestions from power users, left as foursquare tips, of how to build up a mini metropolis. Every time they refresh the map they get a new group of user suggestions. Getting to the top level means you become a guide, helping new foursquare folks discover the city around them.

The hackathon was sponsored by AmEx, which is making a big move into early stage investing. "Most of us spent time in the agency or finance world, where it often feels like the whole is less than the sum of its parts. What's gratifying about participating in a hackathon (and startups in general) is that you can, in a very short time, create something that is greater than the sum of its parts," said Mr. Fisher.

Wander Mapper

GDI is now accepting applications for the event, set for July 15-17. It's not quite as luxurious as the Startup Workaway, the hackathon in Costa Rica. But the women feel they should be able to build their projects in relative comfort. "As an alternative to cheap beer and pizza, the participants will enjoy wine and food cooked on the grill. The ladies of Girl Develop It and Jump Thru feel that you don’t have to feel like you are in a fraternaty house in order to build intelligent software solutions for global issues," they said.

The Startup Workaway villa.

"So, an update," writes Nick Tommarello, organizer of the tropical Startup Workaway, the latest twist in the hackathon craze, in which hackers will gather at a vacation house in Costa Rica for 10 days of coding and business development. "We ended up with 120 applicants--quite a lot of work to go through!" Mr. Tommarello, who lives in Boston, said. "We ended up upgrading the villa. I booked a team of chefs to cook up three meals a day. And I'm in the midst of organizing some scuba diving, kayaking, and sloth befriending excursions."

Eighteen hackers are in the final group, which will head out next week to the Jade House, a hillside villa studded with turquoise pools and decks overlooking the Pacific in Escaleras, Costa Rica. Twelve are coders; six are non-technical. Two are from funded start-ups.

The hackers are from Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Israel and Germany--none from New York, where hackers at the epic TechCrunch hackathon were just treated to luxuries more in the hackathon tradition, namely pizza and airbeds.

Despite the island distractions, the Startup Workaway founders are scheduling eight hours a day for work. They'll be updating their blog with photos and video.

"Our next one is likely to be in Bali in December," Mr. Tommarello said.

Ms. Ellsworth and her partner Rashaad Newsome, a New York-based video artist, ended up working on a motion-controlled instrument that simulates vocals.

Other art-hacks produced included supercut.org, built by Andy Baio of Expert Labs, and Michael Bell-Smith, who works with animation and music. The site randomly generates a supercut of supercuts, which are abruptly-cut montages from movie and television scenes, usually cataloging each instance of a specific phrase or trope--every time the Dude drinks a White Russian in The Big Lebowski, for example.

Bre Pettis, founder of Makerbot and NYCresistor, and Zach Lieberman, an open source programmer and hacker, created a sculpture called Important People using facial tracking feedback from an XBox Kinect camera and video footage of people talking about their loved ones, which they projected onto 3D-printed models of the speakers' faces. "The great thing about this is we have a short time to do things and I look forward to be inspired and push the limit of what's possible in one day," Mr. Pettis told Betabeat before the event.

Other hacks included a surrealist card game by Ben Cerveny, who runs VURB, a think tank for urban computational systems, and Liz Magic Laser, a video and conceptual artist; Bringitforward.info (not live), an interactive timeline for historical events by Kellan Elliott-McCrea of Etsy and Emily Roysdon, a New York and Stockholm-based artist; and Behin.de (not live), which enables inline commenting, video, and annotations on the web, by 4chan/Canvas founder Chris Poole and Ricardo Cabello, a Barcelona-based artist and designer. The last hack was an iPad app for layering and fading photographs by shaking or holding the device still, created by iPhone developer Erica Sadun and installation artist Camille Utterback.

The event was part of AOL's art funding, which includes the Project on Creativity and AOLArtists.com, and was organized by New Museum affiliate Rhizome.

Not bad: The Startup Workaway office.

TechStars alum Nick Tommarello can't work in the cold, so it only makes sense that he would organize a start-up hackathon on an equatorial beach, right? This morning Mr. Tommarello, along with Nick Plante, Greg Belote, Zach Iglis, and "a few others" launched Startup Workaway, a ten-day trip for 20 "developers, designers, engineers, & biz guys" who want to "get stuff done" for eight hours a day in a beautiful house in Costa Rica.

"We believe magic happens when a bunch of smart people are stuck in the same room. We hope life-long friendships (and a few companies) will form," the website says.

Six applicants have confirmed, Mr. Tommarello told Betabeat, but he's pretty sure he hasn't received any from New Yorkers yet. "I expect 90 percent of the applications will come in on the deadline on Friday," he said.

The cost is $500 per person and the organizers are expecting they may have to subsidize the costs themselves, but they've found one sponsor and are scheming to get more. "Working on more right now, so it doesn't all come out of my pocket! Plus I'd like to do the next one in a castle," Mr. Tommarello said.

So is this vacation/hackathon going to be the opposite of the the how-can-we-make-this-more-extreme trend in hackfests epitomized infamous Startup Bus hackathon, which took place over three days on a no-frills coach? Not quite. "You can count on the lodging, some sort of food, and wifi. Otherwise, this ain't the Ritz. If there's a problem, we hope you can fix it yourself," the site says. But, the site says, every day will include three hours of mandatory fun! "We want to keep it light. We'll have a few group adventures, some peer-taught classes, and a half-hour daily demo."

Applications are due by May 6.