Editor’s note: Today we are featuring a guest post from Julio Antonio Trejo, who participated in a hackathon at the recent AT&T Developer Summit in Guadalajara, Mexico:
Everyone loves a good hackathon. And why not? It’s a wonderful and exciting event which boosts creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship among young people who use technology to create positive impacts and bring value to the Networked Society.
I work in Tactical Marketing in Ericsson’s Region Latin America and Caribbean. That means I spend a lot of time with customers, talking about strategy, explaining our reports or our vision, seeing how we can support our customers’ strategies in the best way. It’s been quite a while since I hung out with friends in college, so my first hackathon was interesting from a personal point of view as well as professionally, seeing how developers connect to our customers and how they participate in a Networked Society. Here’s a recap of how it went:
8:00 in the morning: AT&T Developer Summit 2016 opens. There are around 150 participants in Expo Guadalajara and at this moment, staff is still receiving more registrants.
We happened to meet Raúl (an organizer hired by AT&T) at the main entrance while waiting in line for a cup of coffee. He says this will be a very exciting hackathon because of the simultaneous execution in two cities (there is also one at the AT&T Developer Summit in Las Vegas in the US), and he also explains the relevance of this kind of event in Guadalajara City, due to local presence of high tech companies related to IT (Information Technology).
This is just the second time AT&T has organized a hackathon in Guadalajara (indeed, the third outside US) and they expect to see a growing trend in terms of quantity of attendants. Actually, Raúl told us that his company, Campus Party, wants to organize a world record hackathon in the near future: they’re aiming to have the most attended hackathon worldwide, an interesting challenge undoubtedly.
During my experience, I started to realize how hackathons are a great way to see the Networked Society in action. Here we are, collaborating with our customer AT&T, we’re co-creating innovative solutions for the world’s problems, and empowering individual developers to do so. You can feel the energy and the excitement about having this opportunity. You can see it as well. Inside, tables are covered by computers, electronic gadgets, simulators, programming tools and tons of enthusiasms from participants, most of them are very young, glowing and impatient to start with the action.
Organizers and sponsors explained the challenges, criteria and prizes; we were also told about live streaming between Las Vegas and Guadalajara during the working session and the opportunity that the winner will have to virtually expose their project to the audience in Vegas, which seemed to have an important impact among participants (even bigger than prize announcement). Before teams started working, sponsors explain the tool sets to be used (optionally) during competition; Ericsson presents data from our ConsumerLab study related to connected transportation, and the challenge is defined under this topic.
Thirty hours of continuous programming to face the challenges, different teams working in two cities at the same time, all makes for a long night. Dinner, luckily, was sorted: pizza for people in Mexico and tacos in Las Vegas, a nice switch on the cultural norms for each city. The teams felt even closer with the live stream on the YouTube channel.
Walking among working tables makes me forget the prizes, guys look really enthusiastic and happy for being part of this event, they feel themselves winners.
Next day: In Guadalajara, we had over 200 developers participate, forming 40 teams, ten of which ended up implementing the Ericsson APIs for their solutions!
The three teams that won were:
Smart Commute
Smart Commute will let you know how long it will take you to move from your current location to your destination including different actions like: walking to the nearest bus stop or train station >> waiting for the bus/train (knowing exactly at what time it will arrive) >> taking the bus/train >> getting off the bus/train >> walking to your destination.
OMGTraffic
Intelligent traffic light with real-time synchronization function of traffic flow that is able to adjust red/green to reduce traffic and give priority to emergency vehicles and public transportation.
Hazme un Paro
The app streamlines and improves the user experience when using public transport by providing a dashboard for relevant emergency, medical, and public transport communications.
To be part of this experience has been very gratifying to me in the professional sense but even more in the personal aspect due to the enthusiasm and outstanding work of everyone at the hackathon. I was particularly impressed with the significant number of participating teams creating new ideas and innovation with no fear to fail. All their hard work made this a success!
