Foundry in the hackathon race

RECIPES from the Taste.com.au platform could be coming soon to your Fitbit or Jawbone wearable fitness device.

RECIPES from the Taste.com.au platform could be coming soon to your Fitbit or Jawbone wearable fitness device after a Taste Move button to send recipes to wearable devices was judged the joint winner of a three-day News Corp hackathon-style innovation competition.

It tied for first place in the News Foundry 54 event with Real Time Mobile Advertising, a program designed to make mobile advertising more contextually relevant to the time and location in which people are viewing them.

The News Foundry 54 exercise, which took 20 mobile and social ideas “from concept to code”, is part of a program designed to help make News Corp more innovative as it increasingly competes for new media ideas, staff and advertising dollars with digital competitors such as Google and Facebook.

Companies such as Google, Yahoo! and Facebook are better known for hackathon-style development events, but News is just one of several traditional media companies borrowing from the playbook of digital competitors in order to be able to compete with them on the innovation front.

Nine Entertainment, Fairfax and the ABC are others taking a similar approach.

“The teams (who develop these ideas) are thinking like a start-up business,” News head of innovation Mark Drasutis says.

“We also do a small hackathon every month. It makes us more creative in the market,” he said. “It makes News more innovative.”

Mi9 chief executive Mark Britt says the digital arm of Nine Entertainment runs hackathons twice a year. The company also has an Entrepreneur Initiative that gives employees permission to found a start-up while employed at Mi9 through a flexible working environment.

The ABC’s Innovation department, now headed by former Macquarie Radio chief Angela Clark, helped launch one of the television industry’s most significant platforms to date with the launch of iView in 2008, still an industry benchmark for catch-up TV.

The department has about 50 staff and Clark says part of its brief is to “disrupt” the organisation to find new ways of presenting its content. It has run small hackathons in the past and is planning a larger one.

“Part of the role of any internal innovation team is to bring some internal disruption because we are seeking in part to disrupt ourselves in a landscape where if we don’t disrupt ourselves we are going to be disrupted,” Clark says.

Two weeks ago, Innovation launched an app, The Brief, designed to present content from across what is still a very siloed media organisation in eight multimedia stories a week.

Fairfax won a global innovation award from the International News Media Association last week, albeit for reorganising its work practices for digital-first publishing. It would not comment for this story but sources say head of digital innovation Adam Mather is similarly charged with fast-tracking digital product developments.

Google Australia says innovation is “built into” its working culture and fostered by the 20 per cent time rule that allows engineers to spend a fifth of their time on new projects, regular hackathons and “distraction areas”.

At Facebook, all-night coding hackathons have been taking place since 2007. “(We) often end up with products that hit the internal and external versions of the site within weeks,” head of communications Antonia Christie says.