Nokia, to promote the Lumia 1020 and its new Imaging SDK recently held a hackathon event, titled Future/Capture, at its Lund offices in Sweden. Ten teams (six individuals and four teams of two) were invited, from around the world, to take place in the 27 hour event that aimed to turn an imaging idea into a Windows Phone app.

The winner developers were students, Rudi Chen and Shida Li, from Canada, with their "content aware down-sampling" smart resizing app that "allows users to edit or remove empty space between more important parts of a photo while maintaining the rest of the image". The runner up was Jason Pdwojski, from the UK, with an app called Social Scene, while the second runner up was Matt Cavanagh, from South Africa, with an as yet unamed remote control app.

Nokia Conversations has a post on the event that gives some addition details on the winning app idea, but also notes that details of apps in the competition are deliberately being kept vague:

According to Rudi’s pre-contest interview posted on Nokia Developer, the Hackathon was the “perfect occasion” to try to implement this idea, and clearly it worked like a charm.

Without giving away any secrets, the idea of the Smart Resizing app is to “downsample” an image so that empty space between the more important parts of a picture can be edited or removed, and the rest of the image is maintained.

The first runner-up in the contest is UK-based Jason Podwojski for his app called “Social Scene”; and the second runner-up is Matt Cavanagh (from South Africa) for his yet-to-be-named remote control app.

We cannot share a lot of detail about the winning apps and other hackathon apps just yet, in part because we are helping the developers to protect their intellectual property.

Nokia will be promoting many of the apps from the event. Sami Niemi, Director, Capture and Relive Lund, said:

"Naturally, we’re looking forward to helping take these apps to the next level, and seeing them available for consumers to download from the Windows Phone Store."