Happy New Year! We kick off 2012 with a guest blog from Stu Bradley of Floxx Media, who just before Christmas took the brave step of running a 24-hour hackathon – read his account of how it all went below…

Having spent weeks whinging about the lack of disruption (despite plenty of talk about it…), Floxx Media Group decided to put its money where its mouth is and run a 24 hour hackathon during which we would try to design, brand and code a product in one day. No sleep. The results were as eventful as might be expected.

You know that scene in The Social Network where Zuckerberg tests potential interns on how well they can code while drinking shots? To us, that scene represents a turning point. The media no longer represents hacking and coding as something done alone in darkened rooms. Somewhere between the leather-clad rebellion of The Matrix and nerdy bespectacled characters like Goldeneye’s Borislies a new breed of social hackers, who are as likely to be found at underground punk gigs and clubbing in (the now deceased) Bungalow 8 than they are behind their computer screen.

This is exactly what we wanted to convey by hosting a 24 hour hackathon-cum-open day. Admittedly, we probably would have done better without having our Christmas party at The Roxy until 3am the night before. Fuelled by Nando’s, Domino’s Pizza and Red Bull (the latter of whom have previously sponsored us and dubbed us one of the UK’s 50 most disruptive and innovative brands – if DP or Nando’s want to get in on the action, we’re up for that…), we set to work on building something fun…

So what did we learn? Most importantly, we learnt that there is such a thing as being too ambitious – after spending eight hours trying to build a Facebook app that actually gave you insight into the time you’ve spent on the site (as opposed to those scammy looking report cards that seem to randomly assign you grades on the most pointless things imaginable), we had to ditch the idea because most of the data we wanted to use wasn’t publicly available. It was either give up or try to hack Facebook and we didn’t think 16 hours was enough time to bring down the Zuck…

So instead we tried to think of something that would be fun, shareable and interesting, which led us to come up with Desert Island Discs. While it’s very easy for Facebook friends to check out each others’ tastes in music, it’s not something you can easily do through Twitter unless someone actively uses Last.fm or the #nowplaying hashtag. Asking people to choose the eight songs, book and luxury item they would take to a desert island is not only thought provoking, but also something people would (hopefully) want to share. And unlike some radio show with the same name (ahem), you don’t even have to be a celebrity to take part.

Overall, despite not quite finishing the product in 24 hours, I think we’d class the day as a success – Sky News and Bloomberg covered the project, London Loves Business came down to film us and we liveblogged the event for Management Today. Still, if we were to do it again there are a few things we’d change – we really should have tested whether we could get all the data we wanted before spending so long on an idea we had to get rid of, and it would also have been nice to have a competitive element and work alongside other entrepreneurs and teams trying to build something in the same amount of time…an idea for the future, perhaps. Oh, and we’d really have liked some more sleep.

The finished product is now live at http://desertislanddiscs.co.uk – we hope you’ll give it a try and share your Desert Island Discs with your friends!

Stu Bradley is Floxx’s head of marketing and communications. He also works as a freelance tech and celebrity journalist. He tweets (quite a lot) at http://twitter.com/stu_bradley. Floxx Media Group was founded in 2010 by Rich Martell (age 22) after the success of FitFinder, which launched whilst he was an undergraduate at UCL. Floxx is privately held, previously raising $500,000 of investment, and is headquartered near Old Street in London.