egg watchers

In December, we had a hack day at Poke. In a nutshell, we had 24 hours to come up with an idea and make it an online reality. It was brilliant, exhausting, stressful, fun and inspiring. Here’s how it worked:

On the eve of hack day, the theme was revealed – food. Then, at 2pm on the 9th December we were divided into teams, evenly spreading Poke’s strategic, creative, design, project management and coding skills as evenly as possible.

We then had one hour to come up with an idea, which we subsequently presented to the rest of the company. Twenty-three hours later, our creations would have to be live and kicking online.

Our team’s idea was to create an egg-timer that served up a Youtube video to match the exact length your egg needed to be boiled for. No staring at the egg. No staring at a boring timer. Just watch the video and you’re done. And it dishes up different videos depending on how you like your egg. Have a look for yourself over at eggwatchers.com.

We didn’t have time to make it a mobile app, before you say it ;) oh – and it’s not working on all versions of IE. But Firefox is fine.

Overall there were some great ideas that day. It really hit home how many talented people we have here. In fact, when the teams were announced, I found myself thinking: ‘Wow, they’ve got a strong team… an they have too… man, look at their team” I realised quickly that all six teams were strong :)
You should take a look at the other ideas too, listed on the Poke blog. I won’t list them here because it might distract from this:

please help us spread the word about egg watchers!!!

Whichever idea receives the most traffic by March wins an amazing dinner out. So if you like eggwatchers.com, please tweet it, shout it, sing it, blog it. We’ve already featured on the BBC Good Food site. But there’s work to do. Help us spread our eggy love.

The first person to tweet about it today: I will give you an egg. That’s right, I’ll give you an actual egg. Go go go!