You know what’s so great about hackathons? It’s always solving a problem in this world and making it a better place to live in.
NYC Ports and Logistics is a 48 hour hackathon located in, of course, the beautiful city of New York City that took place on January 20th, 2017 - January 22nd, 2017! The hackathon started off the day prior to the event where hackers were able to socialize and network with other hackers. Since a majority of them just met each other, it was important for them to find teammates with different skillsets to create a new application. Austin Hyland (my colleague) and I had a great time talking to different teams slowly forming and making sure they were all well formed.
There were over 125 participants (developers, business people, designers, domain experts, lawyers) building prototypes, rapid fire market validation and business model invention. (Information from the devpost website).
There were many sponsors, including Microsoft Azure, SendGrid, and Cisco DevNet. Of course, let’s not forget the wonderful venue sponsor Galvenize and Blender Workspace!
[image: Learn, Code, Inspire DevNet stickers using one of our phone lenses we gave out]
Cisco DevNet was very excited to have a booth and help out hackers using our APIs. (Tropo API and Cisco Spark API). We gave out a prize for expensive Meraki routers to the team who had the best use case of our APIs. The grand prize for the entire event was a $5000 cash prize!
The winner we chose was "LCL Enterprises". The app was about using hardware to keep track of LCL packages. They wanted to add the ability to send customers automated messages. For this hackathon they added coded examples of individualized messages when packages were shipped and broadcast messages when cargo arrived. Then they used HTTP to send variable data to the code and fire up the text messages. This piece was automated in the back end which was in Ruby on rails.
This was a great event, especially because it was ran by the organizer Daren McKelvey who was very organized and worked very hard to make sure it was a successful event. As a sponsor, one thing that stood out with Daren compared to other organizers is that he went out of his way to make sure each sponsor was content and had all the information they needed.
We hope to be there again next year!
1 Comment
