You might have seen on our Facebook page or Twitter that Shutterstock hosted a hackathon last week. Well, we thought we’d fill you in on a little of what happened at this exciting annual event. But first let’s start at the beginning…

So what exactly is a Hackathon? It’s basically what it sounds like: a marathon for hacking. It’s about empowering employees to develop quickly-built projects (or “hacks”) of their own choosing, without being encumbered by the usual approval process. The only requirement for these projects is that they must add value to Shutterstock in some way – whether it’s customer value, contributor success, or just good, old-fashioned entertainment.

Hackathons have become relatively common at tech companies (Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook host them regularly), and Shutterstock allows all employees to participate, not just engineers and developers.

Some time around 4am on Friday, teams were still hacking away...

Continue reading ‘Recapping Shutterstock’s Annual Hackathon’ »

Photo Hack Day, put on by Aviary, is a 24 hour image-centric hackathon that brings together the brightest minds in photography, photo-editing, web design, computer science, and more. Shutterstock sponsored the first Photo Hack Day, and is thrilled to sponsor it again; we love the free thinking, spontaneity, and often serendipitous discovery that comes from hackathons, and to have one focused specifically on photography is simply awesome. This year’s event takes place at General Assembly in New York City on February 25-26.

The first Photo Hack Day (last summer) had over 200 developers who put together 43 impressive hacks with APIs from 25 different companies. These “hacks” showcased some amazing ideas, ranging from an application that allowed you to upload a photo and instantly add a beard or mustache, to an application that gauges the emotional stability of a website based on facial recognition of its photos.

We hope to see some more amazing hacks this year across the board, and are eager to see how folks will use the Shuttertsock search API in their projects. A few ideas that particularly excite us, are: searching the Shutterstock collection based on mood (using facial recognition), searching the collection by matching a color from another photo (like mood boards), and finding similar photos in the collection based on specific people in the photos.  And, of course, we are super excited to see things that we haven’t even thought of yet!

To top all of this excitement off, we are giving away a DSLR to the team who creates the best hack using the Shutterstock API!

Here is the link to the Photo Hack Day site where you can find out more information:
About Photo Hack Day: http://www.photohackday.org/about.html
API’s & Ideas: http://www.photohackday.org/apis-hackideas.html

As usual, we’ll be tweeting and posting live from the event next weekend, and will recap the best hacks here on the blog.

Matt Smith
Director, New Products

On July 21, history will be made at Shutterstock.

For the first time ever, we’ve set aside an entire day for the staff to work on their own creative projects. The only criteria is that the work should “make our company’s products or services better.” The office will be open all night, from noon Thursday to noon Friday, for 24 hours of sleepless, manic brainstorming and building.

We’re calling it Hack to the Future, and rest-assured we will be hunkered down, plugged in, buzzed on strong black coffee, and deploying code at 88 miles per hour. (And we’ll still be serving our customers like any other business day.)

Come Friday afternoon, every team will get a chance to demo their projects in front of their peers (and yes, this is after working for 24-hours straight). The best part is, we’ll be sharing clips and pics from the festivities here on the blog, on twitter and on our facebook page. Think of it as your little sneak peak into what goes on behind the scenes here at Shutterstock – and see just how passionate we are about creating the best site and the best experience for our users and contributors.

Stay tuned and check back often for live updates!