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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WeWork Moorgate will host a large-scale hackathon on 26-27 September, with young entrepreneurs from across the UK invited to tackle major issues.

The entrepreneurs, aged from 16 to 26 years, will meet at the event to tackle local and global issues. They will form teams and partnerships on common concerns and use their programming and design skills to develop and explore applications and solutions. The partnerships formed from this fest are expected to create new companies focused on...

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International Alert, a leading peace building charity, has announced a series of global hackathons to ‘generate innovative solutions for using technology to build peace in cities.’

The events, launched to commemorate the UN’s International Day of Peace on September 21, will run across the weekend of September 26 and 27 with Barcelona, Beirut and London already confirmed. Four other cities – Colombo, Derry, Medellin and Washington DC – are pencilled in with concrete details to be...

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PennApps, claimed to be the world’s largest collegiate hackathon, is taking over the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia for its 12th edition from September 4 to September 6.

The hackathon began in 2009 as a project by students at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science with little more than a dozen students taking part. Now organisers are expecting more than 2,000 attendees from as far afield as Spain, Australia and Cameroon to fill the 19,500 capacity...

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Facebook has confirmed it is testing a new ‘profile tags’ feature following an internal hackathon examining new features for the social network.

If you think this sounds a little familiar, then the feature is not too dissimilar to LinkedIn’s skills and endorsements profile section. As reported by The Verge, friends will be able to add tags about each other describing personalities which...

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Data released by Devpost from more than 13,000 project tags has revealed HTML/CSS to be the most popular programming language students code in at hackathons, followed by JavaScript and Python.

If you’re wondering how an organisation with an unfamiliar name came by such large swathes of data, rest assured: Devpost is the new name for ChallengePost, and the company released the report as part of the rebranding.

Having looked at project tags from a sample of...

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Hot on the heels of other female-exclusive hackathons this publication has covered, the African country of Namibia is getting in on the act with a successful women’s hackathon at the Namibia Business Innovation Institute (NBII).

The object for the 20 participants, who met up on July 1, was to design a prototype of an application which would “solve local societal challenges” through the NBII Mobile Lab. For the organisers, it was to bring about a forum for women who had been “outnumbered”...

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Nintendo is enlisting the help of Facebook staff to create a new level for its upcoming Super Mario Maker game at a hackathon event on July 28 and 29.

The event, to be held at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, will get employees of the social behemoth to design a special level for the Wii U game through using its demo version showcased at the E3 gaming event back in June.

The hackathon will be judged by representatives of both Nintendo and Facebook, and the winning team or individual...