[Archived] Live Blog: CreateNow Hackathon 2015

[keeshenniphof]

---23 APRIL 2015, 03:45PM---

Team FEMA wins the 2015 CreateNow Hackathon!

ServiceNow founder and Chief Product Officer Fred Luddy and co-creator Pat Casey just announced the winning application in the 2015 CreateNow Hackathon: Team FEMA! Scroll down to 21 April, 07:30PM to read more about their Disaster Victim Assistance application.

Congratulations to Scott Wyatt and team. Eternal glory is yours! Have fun with the Quadcopters (send us a video)!

---21 APRIL 2015, 05:25PM---

Time to chat with some of the contestants

As the video 360 degree is rendering, I have time to introduce you to some of the teams and the projects they're working on... back in an hour!

---21 APRIL 2015, 06:45PM---

Quick chat with Allan Leinwand, CTO

Allan Leinwand has been our Hackathon patron from the very start, some years ago. I asked him how this year's event is different from previous editions. "Well, over the last year, we have really simplified application development in ServiceNow. So basically it has become easier for these 40 teams to develop the apps. But they have the same amount of time on their hands. As a result, I expect that we will see richer, more developed applications this year around."

"Obviously," he continued, "our partners are becoming more and more advanced at creating apps - therefore we had to separate partner teams from the customer teams, just to make sure our customers have a fair change at securing one of 5 golden tickets to the finals."

---21 APRIL 2015, 07:15PM---

"How easy is it to create a basic app on ServiceNow?

Loyola Ignatius (on the right in the picture - principal technology architect, Infosys) brought 2 of his team members (Sumitha Mahalingam, middle, and Bhushan Malshe, left) to Hackathon. "We are part of the ServiceNow service line at Infosys. I basically want to see how easy or how hard it is to develop apps for specific business groups and then publish them in a service catalog. We're developing TennisNow, an app to manage a tennis competition. We'll try to keep it basic and simple, so that we can actually use what we learned back in Texas."

---21 APRIL 2015, 07:30PM---

"We're here to learn and create something amazing"

Scott Wyatt (left in the back) is CEO of Advantage Integrated Solutions, a Denver-based boutique solution provider supporting multiple development platforms. They recently started reviewing the ServiceNow platform for custom application development. Scott brought his team to the Hackathon for some serious learning and developing. "App development is important for our business," he said. "We have over a decade of experience developing apps on various platforms. Now that we're starting to understand ServiceNow capabilities, it is clear that the ServiceNow platform is a technologically superior, more powerful platform. The initial adoption by IT departments is central to the adoption by the enterprise."

Asked about his reason for joining, Scott said: "We're here to learn and to create something amazing and inspiring in a small amount of time. The working title of our app is FEMA Disaster Victim Assistance — ServiceNow Saving Lives. It will be something very special."

---21 APRIL 2015, 08:10PM---

"Our app solves a real problem in ServiceNow!"

Sharek Ullah (middle) convinced his TESM colleague Rubhayat Choudhary (right) and their customer Saleem Dewji (left) of Nationwide to join the Hackathon. "We are trying to solve an issue we have been running in to for quite some time now," Sharek said. "Our app is called ACL Analyzer. It helps the user control access to tables in ServiceNow. If the environment isn't too complex, the issue isn't that big. When you're trying to understand access rights on bigger, more complex applications, it can be a nightmare. Our ACL Analyzer allows you to look into table access rights by user or by role. I expect many users will want to use this app if we get it done in time!"

---21 APRIL 2015, 09:15PM---

"We're packaging a bootstrapped portal page"

Chais McRae (right below) and Dyna Wang of Canadian partner Online Business Systems are colleagues and friends. They joined Hackathon to create something that their customers have been asking for some time. "We're packaging a bootstrapped portal page," Chais explained. "Super user friendly, so that every non-graphic designer can create a very rich and responsive user experience. Something that we'll definitely will take to our customers as soon as we're back. It will basically make our own lives a lot easier."

Chais and Dyna solved a development issue they ran into by browsing the ServiceNow Community. "Yeah, it was funny," Chais said. "Between the two of them, Nathan Firth and Travis Toulson had solved the issue we were struggling with."

---21 APRIL 2015, 10:15PM---

"We came without a team"

5 developers representing 5 different customers, together developing an app to put some structure around posting tweets to Twitter. "Neither of us had a team when we came in," explains Van Tran (red shirt below) of Standford Healthcare. "So we just got together and started brainstorming about the app we could be developing. We all liked the idea of managing posts to Twitter — and here we are. We call ourselves 'Socialize At Work'. The app makes sure that the corporate Twitter handle is only available to the right people, and tweets go through an approval process before being pushed through to Twitter".

With Van, they are But ch Istook (Intel), Ashley Sattler (Information International Associates), Bryan Harris (Veterans United Home Loans) and Dan Schaefer (Exegy).

---21 APRIL 2015, 11:30PM---

Service Bridge to broker internal/external services

Since Knowledge14, Hackathon veterans Robert Fedoruk (standing), Joel Olives (left) and James Neale (front right) launched a new company, Wolfpack, to provide — among others — Hackathon-as-a-Service, where the Wolfpack comes flying in to build the app you need in 72 hours. Chris joined them for this gig. Point being: these guys have been practicing.

This year, they tasked themselves with creating a service bridge. "Most of the content," Chris explained, "is about services being delivered within the company. But a huge chunk of the services rendered in a company are external, so delivered by vendors. Our service bridge brokers services between the inside and the outside — where internal and external services are both displayed in the service catalog. The internal customer doesn't care where the service originates, as long it is being delivered within SLA. If not, the vendor can be switched out without the internal customers even noticing it."

"I hope we get it done in time," Robert added. "We ran into quite a number of hurdles along the way, pertaining the scope. Things aren't always working as we'd expected, so that called for a number of work arounds. Getting the transactional information from one instance to another, to give just one example. So excuse us, I have to get back to work!"

---21 APRIL 2015, 11:45PM---

Meet Ana, our one-gal-team from GoDaddy

Before the jury announces the finalists, we have time for one more story. Ana Tomboulian of GoDaddy entered the competition with 3 of her colleagues. The team took on a very ambitious project: adjust the OnCall Rota to allow for people to take a quick time-off from the duty. Your on call, but someone's at the door, you need to go to the bath room, answer an urgent phone call. What if you could tell the system — with a simple push of a button on your smartphone — that you're not available for the next 5 minutes, so that your backup is automatically alerted and pulled in to the process, so that nothing drops on the floor. You can think of a whole range of situations where this scenario would make total sense.

But it's a tough thing to accomplish, and after a couple of hours of debating and struggling, her team mates decided it wasn't a realistic goal after all and they jumped ship. Ana remained on her own. And she figured it out, took her until around 5 minutes to midnight. Kudos from the ServiceNow team for hanging in there, Ana — well done indeed!

---21 APRIL 2015, 12:00PM---

Meet the finalists of the 2015 CreateNow Hackathon

These are the 5 finalist teams of the 2015 CreateNow Hackathon:

1. FEMA Disaster Victim Assistance - for details, scroll up to "We're here to learn and create something amazing" - 07.30PM
2. Cinema food ordering, by Carlos Gama. Carlos created an app that would allow movie audience to scan a QR code on their seat, complete and submit an order and have it delivered to their seat.
3. C'est Ne Paas (Robot) - Nuclear Disaster as a Service. This application would enable disaster recovery teams to send a robot into a disaster area and have it execute a task.
4. Social networking management - for details, scroll up to "We came without a team" at 10:15PM.
5. On-call scheduling, by Ana Tomboulian of GoDaddy.

---22 APRIL 2015, 10:30AM---

Help us select the winner - go meet with our finalists today!

Now that we have identified the 5 finalists for the 2015 CreateNow Hackathon, we need your help to help us pick our winner. Today in the afternoon, between 12:00 and 16:30PM (ExpoNow, Bayside C), all finalists will pitch their apps to Knowledge15 attendees. Here is the instruction on how to cast your vote for the winner.

To vote for the finalists, text one of the below codes to 22333.

You can vote up to 3 times. Voting will close at 8pm tonight.

1. On-call scheduling — text: CALLME
2. C'est Ne Paas (robot) — text: NUKER
3. Social networking management — text: SOCIALIZE
4. FEMA emergency requests — text: FEMA
5. Cinema food ordering — text: POPCORN

Thank you for supporting our contestants!

---22 APRIL 2015, 04:00PM---

Our finalists are going at it on the ExpoNow floor!

Here below, watch Ana's Team ONCALL, the FEMA Emergency team and the Social Networking Management team pitch their apps to the ExpoNow. The 2 other finalists - POPCORN and NUKER - we didn't get to introduce yesterday, so scroll further down for more information on their applications.

> Team CALLME

> Team FEMA

        > Team Socialize

---22 APRIL 2015, 04:15PM---

Team POPCORN; Carlos, where are you man!?

You see, we weren't sure whether Carlos even knew that he was among the five finalists of this year's Hackathon. He was done early and left to have some Vegas fun. And it took some time for us to locate him - but here here he is, at last. Carlos won the Innovation of the Year Award in 2012, made it to the Hackathon finals in 2013, and competed at K14 as well.

This year, and on his own, he came up with the idea for CinemaNow (dubbed POPCORN in voting), an application to enable cinema audience to put in an order for delivery to their chair. "Yes, the process is kicked off by scanning a QR code on your seat. From their, you can select your order from a menu, and request delivery. The waiters receive the orders linked to chair numbers. If I had more time, I would have added a function to take availability of staff into account."

To vote for Carlos, text POPCORN to 22333.

> Team POPCORN

---22 APRIL 2015, 04:30PM---

Team NUKER; Let's save the world with ServiceNow, shall we?

The last team in our band of finalists initially went by the name Nuclear Disaster as a Service. However, overnight, they decided they needed something just a tiny bit less apocalyptic - and came up with Containment Strategy (NUKER in voting).

This team consists of Max Pham and Justin Burns of the Washington State Office of the CIO and Brian Griffith of HIS Consulting. At work, they're mainly using ServiceNow Project & Portfolio Management (PPM) - they joined the Hackathon to show off some of their other ServiceNow skills, like orchestration.

"That's right," Justin explains. "We wanted to work on something really big and important, so we thought: 'Why not save the world with ServiceNow?' And that's we did. We created an angular app with PowerShell on the mid server and used the API explorer to have it depend on rest ServiceNow API's. The app requires just one business rule, which kicks the orchestration flow into action."

"And what it does," Max explained, "is that as soon as the nuclear alarm goes off, the business rule puts the state on FAULT, which initiates the orchestration flow that will wake up our robot [see little car coming out of the cardboard box in picture below, red.]. The robot drives against the red emergency shutdown button - which usually is reffered to as the 'scram button', as one of the power plant engineer attendees mentioned - and contains the nuclear hazard. We have saved the world. Do you want me to do it again?"

Yes please. Keep saving the world, guys - this is awesome. To vote for Containment Strategy, text NUKER to 22333.

> Team NUKER

So now that you have met our 5 finalists, please cast your vote by texting one of 5 options to 22333:

1. On-call scheduling — text: CALLME
2. C'est Ne Paas (robot) — text: NUKER
3. Social networking management — text: SOCIALIZE
4. FEMA emergency requests — text: FEMA
5. Cinema food ordering — text: POPCORN

Tomorrow afternoon, during the CreatorCon keynote with Fred Luddy and Pat Casey, we will announce the winners of the 2015 CreateNow Hackathon!