Dwolla & Etsy join up for NYC’s first Ecommerce Hack Day

New York City’s a great spot for e-commerce innovation, and payments startup Dwolla and online marketplace Etsy are taking advantage of that fact by organizing NYC’s first-ever Ecommerce Hack Day.

The event won’t be your typical hackathon, Dwolla’s business development head Alex Taub told VentureBeat in an interview this morning. First off, there’s a “bullshit filter” for developer registration in the form of a puzzle in the Hack Day’s website source code. The first 200 developers to figure that puzzle out will get a free ticket to the event. Additionally, the event is geared towards creating something that you can make money from.

“For every hackathon, maybe one hack lives on,” Taub said. “We’re not guaranteeing that anyone will build something that will last… Just we think there is a much higher chance.”

Also participating in the event are Zappos, Twilio, Stripe, and several other companies. The Hack Day will be held on August 4 and 5 at The Hatchery in New York City.

Taub described the puzzle as a good filtering process for finding legit developers: “If you can solve this puzzle, you can basically make an API call… It proves you know the difference between binary, base64, and JSON, and can make AJAX calls.”

Photo via Chris Isherwood/Flickr