Picture credit: Mercedes-Benz

An app which enables a driver to assess the damage on their vehicle at all times, has won a recent hackathon organised by Mercedes-Benz Vans and DigitalLife@Daimler.

The event, which took place on November 5-6 in Silicon Valley, featured students and young professionals who were allotted a task to develop intelligent transport and mobility concepts for the Mercedes-Benz Vans division, with experienced mentors on hand.

The winning team, ‘MBarc’ (above), developed their damage...

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Comcast NBCUniversal will be conducting its sixth public hackathon on October 22-23 in Miami, Florida with a theme around ‘creative viewer engagement driven by emerging technology’.

The hackathon participants will be given a challenge to use software and video content to explore new technology innovations, with a focus on delivering richer, more personalised, interactive viewer engagement for NBC News and Telemundo viewers and driving awareness of innovative services like Golf...

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Here’s an example of how hackathons help move products forward: Utah-based software company MasterControl asked its customers for the number one enhancement request to its enterprise quality management software (EQMS) product, and challenged its developers to come up with a solution within 48 hours.

The final customer demand was to upgrade the “My Tasks” feature in a way that will allow the users to organise and prioritise all the tasks in the EQMS. The process of vetting, validating and...

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GlobalPlatform, a not-for-profit industry association aimed at advancing the standards for secure and interoperable management of applications, will host a TEE Hackathon event to build applications using the latest trusted execution environment (TEE) security technology.

The hackathon will be held on October 7-9 at GSVlabs in Redwood City, California, in collaboration with sponsors Sequitur Labs and Samsung. Cash prizes will be on offer, along with the chance to present the developed...

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New York has hosted the Open Data Maker's Hackathon for agriculture and nutrition data.

The Open Data Maker's Hackathon, in New York on 16 September, was part of the GODAN Summit 2016, and was also part of the Open Data Challenge by GODAN, which sees entrepreneurs, marketers, designers, students and coders to uncover new ways to utilise open data to solve challenges in agriculture and nutrition. They also work to enable the open data community, farmers and policy makers to push forward the...

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A new Women in Law Hackathon, sponsored by Bloomberg Law and aimed at addressing gender parity issues at leading law firms in the US, was praised as encouraging according to a review by The National Law Journal – although adding more work needs to be done.

The hackathon, held at Stanford University in June, was the brainchild of Caren Ulrich Stacy, founder and CEO of Diversity Labs, in collaboration with Stanford Law.

Writing for the journal, Deborah Rhode, professor of law at Stanford...

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The city of San Diego is organising a hackathon on May 20 to 22 at the University of California (UCSD), involving the public and private sectors to find solutions to support climate action.

The City of San Diego is looking to cut greenhouse gas emissions and improve the quality of life for area residents. The city is focusing on five areas – climate resiliency; energy and water efficiency; clean and renewable energy; zero waste; and biking, walking, transit, and land use.

The hackathon...

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The Tech Valley Center of Gravity (TVCOG) will host a hackathon and game jam in New York on 16-17 April 2016 aiming to target the augmented and virtual reality spaces.

Hackers and programmers participating in the event will get access to software development kits from 1st Playable Productions and immersive rifle controllers provided by Ilium VR. They will also get computers with graphics cards from TVCOG and a cave automatic virtual environment (CAVE) by Rensselaer Polytechnic...

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SkyWatch has announced that the NASA International Space Apps Challenge hackathon is returning to Waterloo and will run from 22-24 April.

The hackathon will see Waterloo's top citizen scientists, developers, app makers, entrepreneurs and engineers work continuously for 48 hours to address challenges designed by NASA. Waterloo is one of 170 cities hosting their own Space Apps hackathons in the same weekend, with an estimated participation of 15,000 people globally. In 2014, 14,000...

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Microsoft India has launched Microsoft Openness Day, an open source conference and hackathon aimed at helping developers explore and discover the company’s Azure cloud platform for government and enterprise solutions.

The conference, which is targeting around 1000 architects, developers and cloud professionals, will also feature Open Hack, the country’s first Open Source on Azure hackathon, organised by Microsoft with support from the Government of Telangana. The six hour hack...

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Dublin Airport has announced a Smart Airport Hackathon event on April 15-17 in order to foster innovation and enhance the customer experience at the airport.

Held at the DCU Alpha Innovation Campus, the hackathon will be held in collaboration with RTÉ Digital and Frontline Ventures, who will provide judges and mentors.

Dublin Airport managing director Vincent Harrison said: “Continuously improving the passenger experience at Dublin Airport is a key priority for us. We have embraced...

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Verizon is playing the lead role at the Cloud Security Alliance’s fourth annual Software Defined Perimeter Hackathon, taking place at the USA 2016 RSA Conference from February 29 to March 4 in San Francisco. The hackathon is open to participants from across the globe and the challenge involves hacking a cloud-based mission critical application. The first hacker to either access or disrupt the server will get the top prize of $10,000.

Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) is a...

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With the Super Bowl taking place on Sunday, it seems only apt that the past couple of weeks has seen a hackathon dedicated to American football; and the winner of Girls in Tech’s Super Football Hackathon is a mobile app which helps explain the game to newbies.

Girls in Tech partnered with espnW, ESPN’s business that focuses on serving women who love sport, on conducting the weekend-long event that resulted in the creation of 10 apps, ranging from location-based recommendation and...

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As we reported earlier in the week, automotive giant Ford held its first hackathon over the weekend hoping to create new "drivable" applications. The results are now in, and the winner of the Tel Aviv hackathon is called 'Wake Me App'...

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Automotive giant Ford held its first hackathon in Tel Aviv last Sunday with the aim of building new apps catered for the car, or "drivables" as they are becoming known. The new term is due to the design similarities which applications for the car share with wearable apps, such as offering the relevant information with as little interaction required as...

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Religion is often misunderstood due to all the negative things you hear about it from the worldwide media, but it's also often a power for good. A group of faith-motivated programmers have come together at the 'Code for the Kingdom' hackathon in Seattle with the hope of solving a few societal problems. 

The event, now in its second year, was sponsored by the Deaf Bible Society, the Leadership...

Canonical, developers of the world's most popular Linux distro, Ubuntu, are hosting a hackathon October 15th – 16th with some interesting prizes for the winners. The hackathon was announced yesterday and will take place in Bangalore, the capital of India's southern Karnataka state. 

"With Bangalore being a developer hub, we are very excited to meet all the talented developers from across India and are get them hacking on the latest operating system to hit the Indian market," said Amrisha, Social Media and...

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Earlier this week, developers came together at the Wayra accelerator in London to help tackle some of the biggest problems faced by refugees as part of the Techfugees hackathon. The crisis is growing as more and more people flee conflict in areas such as Syria – risking their lives – in the hope of finding a better future whilst countries scramble to deal with the influx. 

It's a horrific situation which seems to have no end in sight, but that won't...

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NFC is finally taking off, but at the moment it's mostly just for payments. TrackHack, a hackathon focused on proximity-based technologies, wants to change this with an event during the NFC Solutions Summit in Phoenix, Arizona on October 7th – 8th. 

Combining various tracking innovations such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Near Field Communication (NFC), and...

Microsoft's HoloLens is perhaps the most impressive demonstration of what VR could become in the not-so-distant future, but it's sure to arrive with a cost out-of-reach for most ordinary folk. Google Cardboard, on the other hand, is an incredible example of how to create a VR experience yourself or for just a small amount of your local currency. 

The uphill battle the entire VR industry faces is proving that virtual reality is worth...