“Young Adult Book Discovery Start-up Evoke Wins First Publishing Hackathon”
From Digital Book World (w/ Additional Links):
More than 200 digital book entrepreneurs competed in the hackathon and the winner was announced today at Book Expo America after a final round in which each company was given six minutes to pitch its idea to a panel of technology experts.
The Publishing Hackathon attracted 200 people in over 30 teams. Six made it to the final round.
Evoke, the winner, received $10,000 and a breakfast with Ari Emanuel, co-CEO of talent agency William Morris Endeavor.
The finalists were:
BookCity (Vincent Trivett, Charlie Gaines, Nathan Gao) – a way to find books set in your travel destination
Captiv (Christina Zou, Lucas Lemanowicz, Russell Huang, Dmitry Pyatin, Wei Yin, Kane Hsieh) an approach to mining events both global and personal to make better book recommendations
Coverlist (Dani Frankhauser and Chris Ciabarro) – a solution focused on the joy of browsing jackets
Evoke (Lisa Maione, Jason Pearson, Jill Axline) – a way to discover young adult literature through characters
KooBrowser (Sage Wohns, Ahmed El Kholy, Marmina Abdelmalek, Tarek ElElaimy, Mohamed Altantawy) – an approach to making better book recommendations based on browsing history
LibraryAtlas (Michael del Castillo, Monica Katz, David Lau, Andrew Leung, Peter Rood, Aaron Siewert, Gabriel Troia) – a book discovery solution based on geolocation
Read the Complete Report (via Digital Book World)
See Also: Judging Criteria
Filed under: Publishing, School Libraries

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.