HyperTrack and GSA Hackathon 2017 In Review

Jeremy -

According to Wikipedia a hackathon (pronounced “hakəˌTHän”) is “a design sprint-like event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development including graphic designers interface designers project managers and others often including subject-matter-experts collaborate intensively on software projects.” That was certainly the case when we traveled to Gdansk Poland for the 2nd GSA Galileo Hackathon last week.

Piyush and I arrived in Gdansk and were pumped to meet with the members of the GSA and to begin preparing for the Galileo Hackathon which began on May 15. On that day over 20 participants divided into 7 teams in the event arrived to find out more about Galileo the EU’s global navigation system and HyperTrack. They were given the information necessary to begin to formulate their ideas of what they wanted to work on and begin “hacking” away at them.

Over the next 24 hrs Piyush and I worked with the 5 teams who decided to use HyperTrack’s location SDK and APIs and answered any questions they had about implementation. Some of them stayed and worked through the night while others took breaks and came back in the morning to finish up. Here are a few pictures that we took during that time:

At the end of the allotted time for development each team presented their ideas with the ones using HyperTrack for the location services summarized below:

  • Future Makers – “GroundBattles”: A social strategy game to conquer over regions of land using user’s location. The game works by user taking over parts of land by moving and circling around that part of land – the more land one has the more reputation they have on the leaderboard.

  • Midnight Coders – “Safewayz” (formerly “Walkwayz”): Allow for showing events (emergency and non-emergency) and situations of a given area via crowdsourcing. Grant individuals the ability to help where they can or if an emergency situation route to the nearest provider.

  • CDV – “Awesome App”: Make city experiences better by allowing people to add location-tagged images (i.e. trash sites potholes free yoga classes in the park etc) and allow other citizens/authorities/etc. to act on this information and help make the city better.

  • Connected Frogs – “NOTEMAPS”: Location-tagged notes app where users can add a note about a specific location including memories notes instead of graffiti etc. Other users can experience these notes when they’re in the proximity of these locations.

  • HighPTrack: Make an aggregator for Social Events taking place around you using open-sourced data and available APIs along with crowd-sourced information. Find the nearest events around you based on your location and track with your friends going.

After a lot of deliberation the Midnight Coders team won the €1000 HyperTrack prize for the best implementation and utilization of the HyperTrack SDK and APIs.

Congratulations to the team and thank you to the EU GSA for allowing us to be part of the 2nd Galileo Hackathon and we look forward to future opportunities together!