Terence Bennett - September 22, 2016DreamFactory partnered with Verizon and Mapquest to host an all day hackathon at the beautiful Verizon campus in Dallas,Texas filled with fun, food, drinks and prizes. The September hackathon hosted 76 developers coming from different career, education and programming backgrounds which fueled creativity, collaboration and ultimately the innovation that followed.
We challenged the hackathon attendees to employ DreamFactory REST API platform, Verizon’s Secure Cloud Services and the MapQuest Developer API in their hackathon projects. In turn we were challenged to think about our services, platforms, and APIs and how they can be leveraged to build elegant real world applications for mobile, web and IoT.
The winning team cleverly integrated all three technologies to build an interactive digital signage application that used IoT sensors, targeted advertising and big data for meaningful insight about the effectiveness of this targeted media. The winning hackathon project was an awesome demonstration of working efficiently and productively with all three technologies to create a cohesive application capable of delivering measurable results.
Some of the other projects included an app for field technicians to fill out inspection forms at a particular location and send via API to a database, an IoT enabled scale (think Fitbit Aria), and a geo-enabled cell phone signal optimizer.
Every hackathon project presentation was not only engaging but also thought provoking. We wish everyone in attendance continued success and hope they will build on these ideas as this type of innovation continues to influence our industry by challenging the status quo.
Here at DreamFactory we are looking forward to sponsoring future hackathons with our partner Verizon as well as offering a more robust suite of instant APIs to offer developers and hackers alike the opportunity to build exciting applications without managing the complexity of server side code. If you haven’t had a chance yet, slide over to https://www.dreamfactory.com/verizon and sign up for a free DreamFactory instance on the Verizon Cloud to see how DreamFactory can accelerate the development process in your mobile, web or IoT projects. Again, thanks to all the hackathon attendees for making this event such an incredible success and we look forward to seeing you at future events!
Terence Bennett, CEO of DreamFactory, has a wealth of experience in government IT systems and Google Cloud. His impressive background includes being a former U.S. Navy Intelligence Officer and a former member of Google’s Red Team. Prior to becoming CEO, he served as COO at DreamFactory Software.