Twilio announces its 7 hackathon finalists (exclusive)

Seven developers have emerged from last night’s Twilio’s hackathon to pitch their Twilio-based products in the hopes of winning up to $10,000 in prizes.

It seems every conference has a hackathon these days, an event in which developers band together at night and to create a new and hopefully useful product by the next day. Twilio’s hackathon requires developers to use Twilio’s application programming interfaces (APIs) and hack together a product for the next generation of Twilio-based companies.

[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":334593,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"dev,","session":"C"}']

The hackathon lasted from 8pm to 1am — five hours of a lot of beer, pizza and telephony talk. Seven hopefuls will show their products to a panel of judges today including sponsors Salesforce, Dropbox and Appcelerator, as well as three secret Twilio employees. The winners will receive up to $10,000 in prizes such as 11 inch MacBook Air computers and an AR Droid.

The finalists are:

1. PresenTweet: A product that gives you the power to send tweets during a presentation by attaching tweet commands as you move through slides.
2. Yap.io: A conference-focused iPhone app that allows you to submit voice recorded questions to a presenter, who can then play the recording on stage and respond during the event.
3. Sidebox: This app allows service industry employees such as plumbers, to text in a query about a job and receive customer information and outstanding balances.
4. Qwestioned: Adds a voice option to question and answer focused websites.
5. Betwext Talk: An app that allows you to send SMS messages between your browser and a phone.
6. Custard: A platform that allows you to add a customer support call center to any website.
7. SportsSignup.com Roll Call: A coach’s best friend, this app sends notifications to teammates to see who will make it to the game.

The developers will go on stage and pitch their creations at 3pm today. Successful Twilio-based companies will also have an opportunity to be funded by the recently announced Twilio Fund. Dave McClure of 500 Startups and Ron Conway of SV Angel are footing the $250,000 bill to fund a number of these companies over the next year.

[Photo courtesy of Twilio/Flickr]