DealWallet wins $10,000 in Appcelerator hackathon

Appcelerator Marketplace features 50 mobile solutions built on Titanium platform

Following Monday’s announcement of its online Marketplace for Titanium integrated mobile apps, Mountain View-based Appcelerator announced Tuesday that DealWallet  won the Hackathon at the company's first CODESTRONG conference in San Francisco. The lucky developers earned themselves $10,000 and other goodies, after demonstrating appropriate skill level with Titanium APIs.

• Drink n Cab - 5th place
• PPDraw - 4th place
• PayPad & PayBill - 3rd place
• Doc share.me - 2nd - $2,500 + Nook
• DealWallet - 1st $10K + NOOK

The open-source Titanium platform is used by Open Mobile Marketplace, Appcelerator's just-launched Web property for Titanium-integrated apps. Already, the marketplace features 50 leading mobile solutions, including PayPal, Salesforce, Millennial Media, and a full gaming platform. The marketplace also enables any third party to sell native and HTML5 mobile modules, app templates, design elements, and cloud extensions to Appcelerator’s entire developer community. 

Backed by Storm Ventures, Sierra Ventures, and eBay, Appcelerator was founded in 2006 by Jeff Haynie, Nolan Wright, Michael Asher, Scott Schwarzhoff, Kincy Clark, Trenton Truitt.

What is the Titanium platform?

Appcelerator’s main product, Appcelerator Titanium, is a mobile cloud platform that enables fully native, cross-platform development from a single codebase, at Web-development speed. A free and open source application development platform, Titanium allows coders to create native mobile, tablet and desktop application experiences using existing Web skills in Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python, Ruby, and PHP.

Who uses it ?

Appcelerator has signed over 1,000 customers, including TripLingo, NBC, eBay, Kellogg's, Merck, Medtronic, GameStop, and others.  

NBC Universal, for example, turned to Appcelerator in 2010 when it needed to expand its mobile access.

After initially focusing on delivering iPhone apps, NBC.com rapidly saw a need to expand and to address the rapidly growing Android mobile market. NBC wanted to showcase their content to every user on every device, so they needed a platform that enabled them to reuse code from OS to OS.

NBC.com first started using Appcelerator Titanium in early 2010. Their first app was Jay Leno’s Garage. After Jay Leno’s Garage came Late Night with Jimmy Fallon ("LNJF") but it had to be cross-platform. The results: NBC achieved an 80% reduction in cost and time-to-market versus outsourcing to an independent vendor.

TripLingo used Titanium to help business and leisure travelers in five countries communicate in the local language.

Recently announced is a new partnership with Barnes & Noble to accelerate the deployment of Appcelerator Titanium™ apps on the award-winning NOOK Color Reader’s Tablet™. 

The apps marketplace is thriving.

One example is Oneforty. In January 2010, Oneforty rolled out a premium Twitter App marketplace.  The brainchild of Laura Fitton, the startup provides a comprehensive e-commerce marketplace where third-party developers on the Twitter platform can sell their apps. Over 700 Toolkits have been built.

Then there's Facebook. Facebook's f8 Developer Conference, taking place on September 22 in San Francisco, is one of the most widely attended conference for any persons interested in creating a more social web.

"This is significantly different from any other offering because we have built the demand for mobile components by growing a thriving developer ecosystem 1.5 million strong," Scott Schwarzhoff, VP of marketing at Appcelerator, said to me. " We felt it was important to establish the demand for a marketplace first, much like Salesforce did before AppExchange and Facebook before it opened up its API."

Nevertheless, the online marketplace for apps is crowded, with competition from Facebook, Twitter and the like. But there's room for more.