If you build it, they will come. Check out all the cool new things you can do with Foursquare! #hackathon

Over the weekend, over 200 hackers came together in NYC, SF, and around the world as part of the 2013 Foursquare Hackathon to build more than eighty creative, useful, and clever apps that utilize our API. We were especially impressed by the strong showings at non-official sites in Madison, WI (hosted by Snowshoe), Myrtle Beach, SC (hosted by CoWork MYR), Tokyo, and Los Angeles. Thanks to everyone for coming out!

For those who are uninitiated, a hackathon is basically a day for engineers to build apps that customize Foursquare for new uses. With so many great app submissions, plus a ton of great prizes, we knew selecting winners would be tough. We took into account a number of factors like creativity, design, utility, innovation and technical prowess to choose the winning apps for 2013:

Foursquare Grand Prize winner:
Gym Shamer allows you to set personal fitness goals and then connects to Foursquare to track your check-ins at the gym. If you don’t meet your goal, Gym Shamer will tweet and post to Facebook on your behalf, letting all your friends know (don’t worry, we know you’ll meet yours!). The app was built in NYC by Tal Flanchraych and Volkan Unsal, who have won not only the famed Foursquare title belt (!), but also a video date with Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley. High fives to both of them!

Twilio Grand Prize winner:
Droptask allows you to get the skinny on the wait at that restaurant you’re heading to, or the line outside your favorite bar, without leaving the comfort of your home. You can leave tasks at places on Foursquare for others complete, and reward the people who help you out. For creating the best hack using both the Foursquare and Twilio APIs, Twilio is turning SF-based Yufei Liu and Meekal Bajaj into custom action figures!

NASDAQ Grand Prize winner:
Reward Board allows businesses on Foursquare to display real-time check-ins on a monitor in their store or restaurant. Reward Board also shows the current mayor, and a site-specific leaderboard. Business managers can set up tiered rewards and specials for customers to unlock, and even hook up a thermal printer to automatically print receipts. A few of the Reward Board creators Joe Clarke, Mikkel Green, Kevin Young, and Rocky Dohmen will be flown from Myrtle Beach, SC to New York City later this year to ring the NASDAQ bell (and get their faces on TV!). Plus, their app will be featured on the Times Square billboard.

Mashery Grand Prize winner:
Couch Cachet Too tired to go out? Couch Cachet is a tongue-in-cheek app that helps you live vicariously through Foursquare. Using the Mashery API, this little hack finds cool things going on and trending spots near you, and checks you in (note: checking in when you’re not at actually at a place is against the Foursquare House Rules!). And to complete the illusion, Couch Cachet will also share appropriate tweets and Instagram photos. Your friends will be none the wiser. The NYC team of Brian Fountain, Justin Isaf, Harlie Levine, and Christopher Kennedy will receive tickets to SXSW Interactive and will be featured in the Mashery Circus Mashimus.

In addition to our grand prize winners, we’d also like to congratulate the winners of our jury prizes, some of which were awarded on-site on the day of the hackathon, and a few more that were selected after the submission window closed. These were hacks that really knocked our socks off:

Jury Prize winners

• FlashSquare is Snapchat meets Foursquare. Check in at a place and upload a photo for your friends and others who check in to discover. But it’ll only be visible to you for five seconds!
• FourPass makes it easy for you to store all your loyalty cards and access them quickly when you check in at the corresponding place.
• Join Me! finds friends nearby once you check in and allows you to send them a message, or you can incentivize them to join you by sending them a “gift.”
• Trending Alerts is an app for Android that allows you to see what’s trending nearby, and receive a message (similar to Google Alerts).
• NASDAQ Facts will tell you how a publicly-traded business is faring in the market when you check in at that place.
• Connect to Team Turf War and up the competition with friends and coworkers for mayorships at your favorite spots.
• 4sqTrigger Lets you associate apps or websites with locations so you can quickly launch them when you check in at that place.
• FourPlay cross references your interests with those of potential mates who use the app and have checked in at the same place you’re at.
• Use HipSpot to access and play minigames when you check in at certain points of interest.
• Healthy Lemur encourages check-ins at gyms, tracks, pools, and other fitness-oriented places by sending you positive reinforcement.
• FourDrinks lets you pick a place, invite some friends, and meet up for drinks, minus the hassle.
• DinerBeware lets you know about health inspection and health violations that might exist for restaurants you check in at.
• Connect Jamsesh to Foursquare and when you check in, your favorite song will start playing at the participating store or restaurant.
• ThreeSquare remembers what you ordered last time, so you won’t have to!
• 4SQ ID lets you check in at a place with an RFID tag.

We’d like to give a huge thanks to all of our sponsors, judges, and to everyone who participated. We’re always blown away by the enthusiasm and talent of our developer community. So go ahead and try out a few apps, and let us know which ones are your favorites!