October 1, 2012 - Denver Startup Week

September 1, 2012 - Mark Scheel of Digital Construction Inc., and team, won the first place grand prize at the first ever HackDenver event, an AT&T Hackathon. He built Contact Peek, a native Android application that gives users additional insight into the contacts in their phone's address book, with the help of a graphic designer, over the two day event.

The hackathon, a competitive app building contest, took place August 17th and 18th in downtown Denver. It was sponsored by AT&T, MasterCard and local companies like AlchemyAPI, FullContact and SendGrid. Over 100 developers signed up and more than ten teams finished apps during the event. The smallest team, Mark and a graphic designer, won the overall AT&T grand prize, and the prize for best use of the Full Contact API. Including awards from GitHub the team won over $1000 in cash and prizes.

Mark Scheel offered this advice for winning a hackathon:

"A lot of people are curious how you win a hackathon. I would stress three important things. The keys to our success were first soliciting feedback from judges and participants before starting, and during product development (make sure you build something they like). Next, I would stress keeping your app small and lean. Make it do one thing and do it really well, and above all finish it, be merciless cutting features to get to a completed app. Finally, work on your presentation. We spent an entire hour putting together our presentation, which seemed like an eternity with so many features to work on, but it worked. Our presentation, we were told, was by far the most professional and polished. This was in part due to writing down a script and memorizing it. This keeps you on time, and avoids lots of awkward umm's."

Contact Peek was born during Hack Denver and is now available for sale in the Google Play store, it has been updated radically since its initial debut, and is a much more polished product today, with more features yet to come!

Here is a transcript of the product pitch delivered during the event's competitive presentations:

Hi everyone, I'm Mark. My team partner Michael and I built Contact Peek. It is a native Android application that takes the best of the Full Contact API and makes it even better.

Lets jump right into a real world problem. I have a coffee meeting with Brad Feld tomorrow to discuss business. This is awesome, but I don't know Brad real well. Because we have been emailing about the meeting GMail has automatically put his contact email into my address book. When I launch Contact Peek the app calculates a data density score about each of my contacts, letting me know which ones are worth looking into. As you can see Brad has a pretty high score. When we click on Brad we are given actionable information I can use for my meeting.

By viewing his pictures I can tell if he is a serious guy or not and choose what to wear for our meeting. Seeing pictures of him will also help me recognize him in a crowded coffee shop. By reviewing his recent tweets I can be up to speed on what small talk to make, by noting his interests.

Michael did an amazing job with the design of the app. It starts with the logo. It has a mountain peak, and a contact peeking out behind the peak. Our product is Contact Peek. Hopefully you get it.

There is a uniform color scheme throughout and the app is simple and easy to use. It is lean. It does one thing and it does it well.

The design carrys over to our website at contactpeek.com.

So now that you understand the real world problem our app solves, you might be wondering how to get it. We are thrilled to announce that today, not only did we register the domain name contactpeek.com, but we have also launched our app in the Google Play store. It is available now. Download it. Rate it. Enjoy it!

Thank you for your time.

"This was an amazing event, the sponsors and organizers did a fantastic job. It was an incredible weekend, a perfect reflection of the energy and spirit that Digital Construction brings from Colorado to our clients. When I told someone about my weekend, she remarked 'you did more this weekend than I have done all summer!'. Besides winning the hackathon, I experienced some of the more amazing things Colorado has to offer. As one might imagine, Friday night I coded until after midnight, it was important to get a good base for the app. But most people don't know I got up extra early Saturday and participated in the Main Street Mentors Walk put on by the Downtown Denver Metro Small Business Development Center (Kudos to the organizers, what a great event).

Pictured, local Venture Capitalist and leader Vic Ahmed, and Mark Scheel, sporting a stylish Code For Communities T-Shirt and Powell's Books hat

After the walk it was back to the hackathon where breakfast was still being served. We worked feverishly through lunch to finish what we could for presentations (our arrival in the Play Store happened before we presented, but after the presentations started, phew!) After the Hackathon ended I hit the town with Denver startup team members enjoying Denver's nightlife from the River North neighborhood (MatchBox) to Lower Downtown and finally to Uptown where we had a blast at Denver's NYC style Ping Pong bar, Aces. It was a great way to celebrate a win. On Sunday, I shook off a headache from the night before to complete a 12 mile trail run in Golden, CO with over 2000 vertical feet of climbing (White Ranch). After a quick clean up, it was off for a hike with a friend up Mt. Sanitas in Boulder, CO. After dinner in downtown Boulder, I capped off the weekend with a concert at the legendary concert venue Red Rocks in Morrison, CO." said Mark Scheel, President of Digital Construction, Inc.

Contact Peek is on sale now at the Google Play Store, and is marketed at ContactPeek.com. If you have feedback on the app or feature suggestions, Contact Us, we will continue to update and improve it as we strive to make it the best Android contact information app in the Play Store. Our dozens of early users have provided great initial feedback for our product roadmap but we can always use more input.

Mark Scheel will be presenting at the National Association of Realtors Headquarters in Chicago, IL along with Trulia, Zillow, and other leading Real Estate technology companies in early September. He will fly back early to make sure he will be at the Denver startup bash, where local favorite, Flo-Bots, will be performing (new album out now!). Yes. He can ride his bike with no handle bars. But not his tri-bike. Or his lady-cruiser. Or his mountain bike. Or really any bike since he was about 11 years old. But once, he could.