[Live Blog] CreatorCon Hackathon 2017 [ARCHIVED]

[keeshenniphof]

07:10pm

And The Winners Are...

Chris Pope just announced our 3 winners of the Knowledge17 CreatorCon Hackathon:

Category Business Solution

WINNER: Team undefined

Category Innovation

WINNER: Team #

Category Social Good

WINNER: TEAM ABC Social

Team Social Enablers got a honorable mention for their great efforts throughout the day.

07:00pm

Judges huddle to agree on the winners

06:15pm

Finalist Pitches in the Developer Theater

Tension is building, as our finalists present their apps to our judges, backed by a massive crowd!

ServiceNow Judging Team:

• Allan Leinwand, Chief Technology Officer
• Chris Pope, Office of the Chief Strategy Officer
• Joe Davis, Vice President of Platfrom Engineering
• Howard Beader, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Platform
• David Gatley, Technology Partner Product Manager

06:00pm

We Have Our Finalists

Throughout the afternoon, our 5 judges made their rounds reviewing the apps in production. They just announced 3 finalists per category. They are:

Category: Business Solution

• Team undefined
• Team Happy Panda
• Team Business Enablers

Category: Innovation

• Team #
• Team Snowboard
• Team Platform Expander

Category: Social Good

• Team Four Guys and a Girl
• Team Social Enablers
• Team ABC Social

Next, these teams will be presenting their apps in front of the Developer Hub audience...

05:35pm

Visualising IoT data into a COO dashboard

Another group of ServiceNow Hackathon veterans returned as Team undefined. They consist of Robert Fedoruk, James Neale, Tim Short and Huw Nolan, who recently founded their new business Whitespace Studios, a ServiceNow AppDev house.

This year, they create Greenlight, a ServiceNow app to help COOs manage energy spend and carbon footprint. The team took lighting as an example to bring IoT data communicated from the lighting installations into the ServiceNow platform in order to provide the COO with a dashboard showing electricity usage levels, carbon footprint trends, energy costs, maintenance issues etc.

"Currently," James explains, "a COO gets reports from all sites across the country or globe, from all these different providers. By pulling it all into the ServiceNow platform, she or he can control the global energy spend and carbon footprint, compare sites, model various scenarios and reduce the carbon footprint over time."

> Team undefined: Robert Fedoruk, Tim Short, James Neale and Huw Nolan

05:00pm EDT

Team # just tells the platform what to do

YES! The legendary hackers of Amazon's Dash button in last year's Hackathon returned as Team #.

Joseph "Tyler" Hoge and Matt Saxton (who recently started his own company, CloudPires) brought their Vantiv colleague Brent Llewellyn to develop a scoped ServiceNow app that recognizes speech. "Google now has built-in voice recognition in their browser, Matt explains. "We use it to give voice commands. You give the command, and the platform raises the ticket. Without connecting with a third party, so the data stays within the platform." He clicks the microphone button, says "I want to order an iPhone 5s", the order is created and submitted.

"You see, now you don't need a keyboard to interact with the platform," Matt continues. "Everyone can do it, whether you understand the technology or not. You push the button and say what you want to do. Down the line, this can enhance all kinds of customer support interactions."

Team #'s scoped app, Ludi (Language Understanding Dynamic Interface) will be available in ServiceNow Share later his month.

> Team #: Brent Llewellyn, Matt Saxton and Tyler Hoge

02:15pm EDT

Quick chat with Howard

I sat down for a quick chat with Howard Beader (Sr Director, Product Marketing Platform).

So Howard, why should every software developer out there check out the ServiceNow platform?

Because the rest of the world is checking us out, both customers and analysts. The main reason is that the ServiceNow platform can support no code, low code and pro code development on a single platform.

So, who are we competing with?

There's only two players in the High Productivity Platform as a Service (PaaS) market right now: ServiceNow and Salesforce.com. Whenever we go head-to-head against Salesforce.com in a competitive situation, when it gets to a Proof of Concept, ServiceNow clearly and always wins. We do it faster, simpler and cheaper. Faster, because we're not starting from scratch, we can use many built in, reusable components. Also, developers can get started for free, there's no cost until they deploy into production. Lastly, all too often, Salesforce is only used in sales and marketing. ServiceNow is an enterprise platform. So, if you want to build an app just for sales, then great: build it on Salesforce.com. But if you want to drive enterprise transformation with apps that run across your departments, run your development on ServiceNow.

Alright, alright. Let's talk some more about the ServiceNow platform, then!

Yes, because we have developed a host of functions to make application development on the platform even easier. Some really cool new capabilities got added, like the Script debugger, the automated test framework, and guided tours. All of these are further enhancing our developers' abilities to ship great applications faster than ever before. And we'll continue to do just that.

Okay, so what's next on your roadmap?

Well this morning, we announced the intelligent automation engine [press release], which will be available for apps old and new. With this new technology, developers are going to be able to — without AI stack, without data scientist — enable applications to learn form history and predict. And later this week, we have more announcements planned, so stay tuned!

Will do, Howard — now let's return to our hackers, shall we?

01:15pm EDT

Team Panda tracks applicants

Team Happy Panda is what hackathons are all about. Developing apps for a day with a bunch of total strangers. Sravani Gandla (NetApp), Harlal Dhabas (Accenture), Abhinay E (AIG & ServiceNow Community MVP) and Tim Deniston (Careworks Tech) just showed up and formed an impromptu team earlier today. Their applicant tracking app supports the end-to-end recruitment process of finding, interviewing and signing new employees. After the signature is in place, the standard onboarding process takes the recruit from there. "Central to the app," Tim explains, "is a service portal with services relevant to the recruitment process, for both hiring managers, HR staff, legal services and anything else that plays into the recruitment process."

Asked why he decided to sign up for the Hackathon, Tim said: "I just wanted to go through this experience. I have been working with ServiceNow for the last 8 years, but mostly on ITIL-focused functionality. In the hackathon, you can play around with other parts of the platform."

> Team Panda: Sravani Gandla, Harlal Dhabas, Abhinay E and Tim Deniston

12.15pm EDT

More sensors? We trust each other at Dish!

Let's walk around and talk to some of our participating teams, shall we? Chris Raga, John Ulrich, Harish Viswanathan and Pierre Pichot entered the competition as Team SNOWBOARD. These 4 guys run the ServiceNow shop at satellite television provider Dish. "Yeah, we do it all," Chris Raga explains. "We're the ServiceNow admins, the developers, the support desk and sometimes even the PMs. We run Incident, Problem, Change management, CMDB, Service Catalogue and recently implemented Project Portfolio Management for IT."

On June 1st, Dish will celebrate the 2nd anniversary of their ServiceNow Go Live. Tomorrow, they will host a Knowledge17 session on the datacenter visualization application they developed in about 5 months (BRE4132 - "Dude, Where's My Server?", May-10, 14:40 in W103 AB). Today, they are creating an automated self-service IT asset vending machine.

"Yeah," John adds, "because you sometimes need IT equipment like a mobile phone, a projector or a mifi device, outside of office hours. Our vending machine allows you to just go in, request an asset and take it out of the locker that lights up right there. No IT crew needed!

"We're still debating whether we need some heavy tech to be able to see whether someone has actually put the asset back in the locker, after they've checked it back in and opened the door. But you know what? We trust each other at Dish!"

TEAM SNOWBOARD -- Chris Raga (l), Pierre Pichot, Harish Viswanathan and John Ulrich (r)

10.30am EDT

And we're off!

Well, well, well. All tables have been taken, still more teams at the registration desk, but lo and behold, the room is quieting down. Apps are being developed. We're off for a great start of our Hackathon!

10.20am EDT

So what about the PRIZES?

As with every true hackathon, the only prize that really counts, the one that everyone wants to win, the one that will carry you far in your ServiceNow career, is the right to BRAG, isn't it? And each year this hackathon grows bigger, so the bragging rights.

However, beyond the bragging rights, we have some other cool prizes too:

In each category, we will select a winner at the end of today. Each member of each of the 3 winning teams will win:

- A cash gift card.

- A HackerBox (see image). Each HackerBox includes a carefully curated collection of projects, components, modules, tools, supplies,

and exclusive items

- A unique hackathon 2017 hoody.

- A live team interview on TheCube, our in-event television station broadcasting globally all throughout Knowledge17.

- Part of a live webinar

- Coverage in the ServiceNow Developer Newsletter (delivered to 90,000 ServiceNow developers).

> Our Master of Ceremony, Mark O'Donnell, is instructing incoming teams.

10am EDT

Just 30 minutes until the start of the Hackathon

Welcome to the Knowledge17 CreatorCon Hackathon! As you can see on the picture below, the teams start coming in to register.

As part of registration, each team picks one of 3 categories:

• Business Solution, where they are solving a real-life business issue.
• Innovation, where they are pushing the envelope on the ServiceNow platform.
• Social Good, where they use the power of the ServiceNow platform to support a good cause.

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This Live Blog covers the 2017 CreatorCon Hackathon taking place at the Knowledge17 Conference in the Orange County Convention Center of Orlando, FL from 7-11 May, 2017.

Review the Live Blogs of previous CreatorCon Hackathons by clicking the links below:

CreatorCon Hackathon 2016

CreatorCon Hackathon 2015

CreatorCon Hackathon 2014

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