I just realized I haven’t talked about my recent hackathon winnings. For the uninitiated, a hackathon is an event where you have to build some tech project in a very short deadline. It’s fun because you really have to prioritize what’s important and learn tons of new stuff really fast.
Back in December, I went to a Lincoln Labs open government hackathon. The challenge was to create an app using data feeds provided by the government. I got together with a bunch of people I met there and built an app we called Safe Seattle. It uses a smartphone’s gps and listens to police feeds. When a crime is happening nearby, we notify the user so they know that they should be careful/not go outside/run for cover. We won first place! The prize was $3000.
Last month I went with a couple of my coworkers to the AT&T Art+Tech Hackathon. The goal of this hackathon was to build artwork to increase peoples’ interest in bees, potentially to be displayed at the airport. We built an app we called Join The Hive. It was designed to be run on a monitor at the airport, with no input device other than passers-by’s phones. Here’s a demo:
We won first place, which got us $500! We were also selected to have our project displayed in the Sea-Tac Airport and it sounds like they might send us out to the east to present it at a conference.
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Congrats on the wins. So the app can actually understand the audio police feed and turn it into useful information? Seems like that voice recognition would be tough.
It doesn’t use audio–it uses open data feeds. The feed we listened to is the 911 incident feed. If you’re interested in other open data feeds, you can find lots of good ones at data.gov.