The Mashery developer outreach team has been noticing a trend in 2012 that started last year of vertical hackdays: hackathons focused on vertical topics, such as music, photos, media, commerce, civic data, and health data. This vertical focus for hackathons, accompanied by relevant API data sets and knowledgable evangelists representing those APIs onsite, does seem (generally speaking) to allow developers to organize themselves around a hack concept more quickly. This initial concept focus allows developers to form teams quickly, then dive right into development at the hackathon kickoff rather than wasting time deciding what to build. Perhaps most importantly, we're seeing that the quality of hacks at these vertical hackdays has been getting noticeably better than what we are seeing at general hackathons. We'll keep monitoring to see if this trend holds.

Two hackathons around interesting verticals are both happening this weekend. The first theme is a vertical around participants rather than output: Women in Tech. We really dig the approach of the organizers of the HacknJill #hackyoursummer event happening in NYC, Friday evening, June 15 and Saturday, June 16 -- striving for a gender-balanced hackathon of "one woman hacker for every man."

After a rash of unfortunate examples of casual sexism in tech in 2012 already, Mashery is ready to re-focus the industry on the great hacks we've been seeing built by women programmers. For example, Viberunnr (formerly SnipIt) that won the Mashery Best Hack prize using the Rdio API in February at the BeMyApp NYC Mobile Olympics built by Maria Martinez from Brooklyn, NY. Or YellowYellr, the Confoo 2011 hack winner built by Erin Kennedy from Montreal, Canada using Yellow API.

Mashery's very own Priyanka Dhanda will be representing Mashery onsite at HacknJill (being a Mashery Java engineer is her day job). She will also be accompanied by our friends at ESPNW (The ESPN API is in the Mashery API Network.) So hackers who build a hack with ESPN or any of of the APIs in our Mashery API Explorer will be eligible for our Mashery Red Jambox prize and a ton of great schwag we always roll with. Whether you are a Jack or Jill, make sure to connect with Priyanka onsite for help with your hack or getting more info about Mashery.

Another interesting theme we have seen emerge recently is big brands wanting to engage with developers at hackathons, in some cases for the first time. We've seen brands like Ford, Pepsi, NASDAQ, Disney, American Express recently hosting and sponsoring developer events. This weekend, Mashery is bringing along data sets from big brands like Best Buy, ESPN, USA TODAY, and Aetna to the Social Loco Big Brands Hackathon with Home Depot and Kraft. These Big Brands are bringing Big Bucks to share with developers: $45,000 in cash and prizes are on offer this Saturday, June 16 through Sunday, June 17, at Madrone Studios in SF.

Developers who register for this #bigbrandhack with the code MDSComp (Note: the code is case sensitive) get in for free to compete for the $45K in cash + prizes. Hook up with Neil Mansilla, our head platform evangelist for hacking help on any of the APIs in the Mashery API Network, including social data and location data (Social Loco, right?) We also heard a rumor that Bravo Network might be onsite, filming the demo pitches in front of the judges for their upcoming Silicon Valley reality series. You might walk away with your 15-minutes of fame in addition to hefty prizes for building something interesting.