SXSW 2017 Hackathon @Techspace #Austin #Texas March 14th - 15th
Kicking off with around 30 pitches we brainstormed ideas to help creative artists and musicians with their current challenges and had 24 hours to demo a prototype.
Some ideas included connecting traveling artists to fans willing to host the artist for overnight stay while on tour. Services like Airbnb didn't allow enough time for artists to coordinate stay since they only had a limited time to provide notice.
Madame Gandhi pitched the idea of an app to connect to her fans and offer to offer exclusive merchandise.
One of the most innovative companies in the #VR #AR space to bring their technology to #hackers was MergeVR a combination of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality allowing new types of interactions using a special cube that could be configured to allow various types of data to be assigned to each side.
A surprise appearance from Robert Scoble aka @scobelizer was one of the judges and provided coverage on the demos on show.
Verizon Thingspace had a demo of their Smartcity LED which could track traffic and gather data allowing for better utilization of energy.
IBM provided API's to their Bluemix platform which also allowed for blockchain ledger integration.
Pubnub provided APIs for developers building secure realtime Mobile, Web, and IoT Applications
SOCAN The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada is a Canadian performance rights organisation that represents the performing rights of more than 135,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers.
Wolfram introduced a fundamentally new way to get knowledge and answers—
not by searching the web, but by doing dynamic computations based on a vast collection of built-in data, algorithms, and methods.
SYNQ provided a video API for developers along with a complete video infrastructure for your new app or website.
One team walked away with a $2000 + $800 in cash prizes for an augmented reality tool that allows users in the virtual world to interact with objects in the real world. Their demo connected to the Verizon thinkspace Smartcity LED which could be triggered in game.
My team and I used MergeVR to create an interactive game on the cube which played music files and displayed artist covers on each side of the cube. The user rotated the cube to match the artist with the song. If guessed correctly a http request is sent to IBM's Bluemix and the blockchain would verify the details and return a code allowing the user to download the entire song. A new way to discover music and promote artists through a fun experience.
Following 24 hours of intense hacking, we celebrated with an afterparty at Greenlight social playing classic arcade games like Streetfighter.
Stay tuned for more updated details soon.
