AdHack is an open marketplace for ad creative. Anyone can make an ad. Anyone can buy an ad. You can find more information about it here.

Through our work with AdHack, we were able to practice our brand of agile development with great results. As usual, the Drupal ecosystem helped a lot! Here are a few factors to the success of our approach:

• Focus on communication: In the case of AdHack.com, our lead developer was present at the AdHack premises which ensured great communication and rapid feedback. Not to mention frequent delicious sushi lunches!
• Managing expectations and scope: Instead of over-promising, we prefer to discuss the scope in depth to make sure no unexpected details will complicate the implementation. Based on rough wireframes, we are able to provide realistic estimates to the completion of each feature. The client is then able to make informed decisions regarding the priority of needed features.
• Minimal new code: Thanks to the plethora of community-contributed Drupal modules, we are able to rapidly prototype the required features with no coding. When out-of-the-box features are incomplete, we create patches and contribute them back to the relevant modules. In addition, we avoid hacking Drupal at all costs! In general, we find that business-specific logic requires the most new code, and we usually create a project-specific module to contain this code.
• Documenting the development: A key factor to ensure the sustainability of a Web application is enabling the internal team to manage the application on their own. To this end, each feature is documented as a separate ticket that is tracked to closure, including a description of the relevant Drupal settings that control it.

Some great features were added to AdHack.com. They include:

• Twitter integration using the Twitter module and additional patches to re-tweet and list all tweets that contain business-specific #hashtags.
• Geo-tagging and Google Maps integration with microformat awareness.
• User points integration with additional patches to further customize points allocation.
• Computed fields in Views with additional patches to support sorting.
• PayPal integration with business-specific workflows.
• Customized site search.
• Cross-browser compatibility: Firefox 3, Safari, IE 7/8.

Thomson Reuters is the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. Combining industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial, legal, tax and accounting, scientific, healthcare and media markets, powered by the world's most trusted news organization. With headquarters in New York and major operations in London and Eagan, Minnesota, Thomson Reuters employs more than 50,000 people in 93 countries. For more information, go to http://www.thomsonreuters.com.

Intel, the world leader in silicon innovation, develops technologies, products and initiatives to continually advance how people work and live. Additional information about Intel is available at http://www.intel.com/pressroom and http://blogs.intel.com

Microsoft Innovation Lab in Cairo (CMIC) is a Microsoft group representing the company interest in applied research and development initiatives in the Middle East and Africa. CMIC projects are initiated and self directed by the staff and are measured by their success in producing new concepts, economic and business value and ultimately in technical transfer into Microsoft products and services.