With a $200,000 donation from two angel investors in 2010, Mike Silagadze and Mohsen Shahini built a platform to make use of technology virtually all students bring into lecture halls and classrooms: smartphones. Top Hat lets educators take attendance, administer quizzes and share lecture notes by connecting to students’ mobiles. The platform can deliver homework and interactive educational content, and Top Hat is now creating and distributing interactive materials as a viable alternative to textbooks. The logical, practical, democratic and fun nature of Top Hat prompted the BV judges to doff their caps and make the award of Most Innovative Open Source Software Developer (US).