Mobile Hacks Roadshow: And the Winners Are...

In the past two months we've visited some of the world's most exciting mobile development hubs, including New York, Boston, London, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong, Singapore, Seoul and Tokyo.

Over the course of nine mobile Hacks, we notched up

• Over 2,000 attendees
• Over 450 hours of code writing
• Over 200 mobile projects

Meeting up with developers and getting our hands dirty with some code is a great way to help people build successful social apps. It's also an opportunity for us to hear directly from developers what can be done to improve our Platform and make their lives easier.

Mark Zuckerberg at our Hack in Tokyo

Each developer Hack is also a competition, and we always reward and recognize the best projects we see for their innovations. In each city, a panel of local investors and mobile experts award the winning developers with high-end mobile devices (kindly donated for this tour by our generous sponsors, Sony and Samsung).

Awards ceremony in Hong Kong

So far we've had 36 winning projects and 12 honorable mentions. Mobile Open Graph was by far the most popular project category, illustrating the high interest of the developer community worldwide.

Many of the teams self-formed at the Hacks themselves, but sometimes local companies brought whole engineering teams along. A couple of those were Gamaroff team and OMGPOP, (winners from our New York hack in January) - whom I think we can say went from strength to strength in subsequent months!

A small sample of some of the more interesting Hack projects we saw throughout the tour include:

Instapeace, Tel Aviv: An app which selects two people from different countries (say, Israel and Iran) based on common Open Graph actions - and then displays their interests and Instagram photos to illustrate individuals' similarities and help promote peace in the region.

Pass the Smirk, Tel Aviv: A "Hot Potato" meets "Six Degrees" mobile game, where people compete by sending a "Smirk" from one person to another across the globe, accumulating as many transactions and miles as possible in 6 hours. This app received $50k in angel funding from local investors after winning the Hack.

Promised Mind, Seoul: An app that allows users to post personal resolutions to their Timeline and encourage friends 'Like' the resolution to participate. Friends share the cost of the award (if the resolution is kept) or receive a penalty coupon (if it fails). Coupons are subsidized by brands as advertising.

Corolin Planet, Tokyo: Our special guest, Mark Zuckerberg, visited the Tokyo Hack and this project took his advice to add an Open Graph implementation to an existing mobile game which allowed users to review their friends' gameplay.

You can find the set of winners in each location on our Mobile Developers page.

Looking back, we've quickly learned that the one thing that all of these teams share (wherever they are in the world) is their desire to innovate, experiment, and enjoy this unique hands-on coding experience. As ever, we are constantly amazed by the abilities and talents of our developers worldwide and it was a huge pleasure hacking with these vibrant communities.

Hopefully we'll see many of you at similar developer events in the future!

Jonathan Matus, Manager, Mobile Platform Product Marketing, is thinking about new ways to make mobile apps more social and social apps more mobile.