RE: Nordic sponsoring hackathons

Eirik Midttun — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 09:24:37 GMT

@Tiit: This is the kind of event we would like to hear about, thanks for sharing! It definitely seems relevant for Nordic, so I'll have a look :)

RE: Nordic sponsoring hackathons

Tiit Rätsep — Sun, 30 Nov 2014 19:28:03 GMT

Very cool idea.

I'm not sure if this event is big enough for you but there is an upcoming hardware hackathon in Estonia in February (Garage48). This is the second time they are doing this (I'm not affiliated with that event - just participated last time and will again this time). The reason I'm bringing this up here is that the last time there were around 15 teams of about 5 peaople and I would say more than half of them used Bluetooth in their prototypes. As this Garage48 is actually mostly a software event and they only do a few of these hardware events there was a focus on app connected gadgets and wearables so BLE was the obvious choice.

Last time we built a cat toy prototype - a ball you can drive around and control from your phone and the idea that won the event was a pressure sensitive insole for high heels. Both were BLE connected at least at the event. The winning team went on to form a startup as did quite a few of the ideas from the event. Most went on to a hardware incubator either here or in other European incubators.

The event organizers provided some tools but I'm not sure if they had any Nordic stuff. Would be nice to have something to work with. We brought some dev kits we already had for our prototype, others did something similar but some had to use things like the TI Chronos kit because the organizers just didn't have any proper wireless kits to give out.

Oh and the event lasts just 48 hours :) Incredible what can be done in such a short time.

RE: Nordic sponsoring hackathons

Anne van Rossum — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 08:14:13 GMT

Nice initiatives!

I wouldn't mind so much the prizes, but to be able to come in contact with "people doing the work" in other companies - especially also the larger ones which are harder to reach! - would be great.

This could be AT&T, or it can be Philips, Tomtom, ARM (besides Nordic of course!).