Coming out from the airport there was a long line of Taxi waiting, so I didn't need to try Uber yet. First Taxi in line is a minivan. I ask the driver he takes credit cards and he says of course. Well, often it's not the case. So I jumped in, he had a backseat TV and the rider was great. He was also named Daniel. Arriving at the hotel he accepted credit cards wit Square. Got my receipt per email. Perfect.

Taxi:1 Über:0

Before I realized that the Hackaton was conflicting with some long term ski vacation we had planned I signed up and was excited to have a more active part at the Launch Conference. By meeting tonight some of the participants I don't know if I could have programmed several days in a row with little sleep like many did. Great job 'guys'!

The winner of the Hackaton will get a $75k investment or $30k in cash.

They where 123 projects…here are the top 12 select tonight in no specific order:

Day 1 of the Launch festival is not finished yet as the Hackaton finalist will be revelead in a while.

There where three launch sessions where a serie of startup pitched their idea followed by a question and answer session by the judges. Everything was recorded so I'm sure you can find these sessions online. I will add the links when I find them. I took a few notes, but each session is very fast paced, so I may have skiped a few keypoints. But I like to keep track of what I saw, so here we go. Note a few pitches where for new ideas from exsiting startups and these are marked as Version 2.0

So here we go, 18 hot startups...

UPDATE: Use teaspoon now to integrate Jasmine with your Rails app and Rails engine.

Jasmine is a behavior-driven development framework for testing JavaScript and CoffeeScript code. I wanted to use it to test CoffeeScript for a Rails Engine I am working on. Enters Jasminerice a gem that let's you add Jasmine tests to your Rails application. From it's website Jasminerice takes "full advantage of the Rails 3.1 asset pipeline. Jasminerice removes any excuse YOU have for not testing your out of control sprawl of CoffeeScript files.". This said out of the box the Jasminerice gem does not support Rails Engines. It's a Rails Engine itself, but from their website they say "Unfortunately this is currently not working when used in a mountable engine.".

So I looked under the hood of the gem and found that with a couple of fixes you can get it working with a Rails Engine.

Flex has been really good to me for many years. In fact I moved to the US in 2002 and started working on a Flash project and we jumped on Flex before it was 1.0 with Royal which was the beta code name of Flex. Flex had a long road since and I delivered many fun and successful customer projects. Many of which were internal enterprise projects and I also worked on a few pretty visible public ones like the Australian Open Tennis Vault, the NCAA Vault. I even co-authored a "Flex on Rails" book.