Over 230 college students gathered this weekend in NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences for HackNY’s annual Hackathon, a 24-hour group coding competition fueled by caffeine, Chipotle burritos, and a ridiculous number of surge protectors.

Early Saturday, sixteen locally based startups including Tumblr, foursquare, Yipit, Etsy, and Boxee presented APIs (application programming interfaces) to an auditorium of eager young hackers. (The innovative, not illicit, kind of hacker.) APIs are released publicly by companies and contain information and rules on how to utilize their services with other products. That’s what lets your phone access your Facebook contacts, or how your favorite Twitter application loads your newest tweets. Hackathon participants are required to pick at least one API, split into collaborative groups, and build upon it to create something awesome. Last year’s winner Ian Jennings created rooster.am, a web application that pulls from your accounts (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Google Calendar) to wake you up in the morning with a “while you slept” report.

This year, Hackathon participants were excited about location-aware apps, with nearly half of the projects utilizing the foursquare API. NYU students Jeremiah Malina and Michael Ranieri created a zombie apocalypse game using foursquare’s API in which users can “infect” their foursquare friends and, upon infection, receive an SMS notification using the API from communication startup Twilio. In a more elaborate (and perhaps more useful) use of the foursquare API, Columbia students Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinsky developed a service that turns social networks into physical networking; users identify companies they wish to work for and the service will notify them via SMS when employees of those companies are nearby. The application polls LinkedIn’s listings as well as other social networks to find companies’ employees and their respective foursquare accounts. It’s creepy, creative, and incredibly cool.

Representatives from the startups stuck around on Saturday to provide technical support to participants. In one group, Rob Spectre of Boxee and Justin Sheckler from Etsy spoke to NYU students Adit Shukla, Doug Fulop, and City College of NY student Eric Seidel, who together collaborated to create an application for popular media center (and now set-top box) Boxee that allows users to browse Etsy’s selection of unique handmade products from the comfort of their couch.

According to CAS freshman Misha Ponizil, events like Hackathon breed creativity: “I have tons of ideas and I haven’t had time to build any of them, but when you commit 24 hours to sitting down and writing code, you’re going to get something done.” With multiple students collaborating all day and night on projects, development at Hackathon looked more like a college party than serious work. “It’s all about creativity and the celebration of hacking,” said HackNY general manager Matylda Czarnecka.

The competition closed Sunday afternoon, after a panel of venture capitalists, CTOs, and startup executives crowned Adit, Doug, and Eric’s “Etsy Shopping Network” this year’s winner. The application runs on Boxee‘s cross-platform app or set-top box (download it from the Boxee app directory) and devices running GoogleTV. Because it’s designed using HTML5, you can play with the app on Chrome or Safari; use your keyboard’s arrow keys, enter button, and “Esc” in lieu of a remote and go nuts!

“We worked and coded straight through from the start of the hackathon at 4 PM on Saturday to the minutes before final presentations started at noon on Sunday,” said Doug Fulop of Stern, one of the three behind the winning project. The team thanked company representatives Rob Spectre (Boxee) and Justin Sheckler (Etsy) for all of their help. “[They] stayed on the floor to help us power through any snags along the way.”

Brown student Evan Wallace took home second place with “WebGL Filters” and Abe Stanway of RU won third for “Come @ Me Bro.”

Additional photos from the event are available through HackNY’s Flickr photostream.