[Live Blog] CreatorCon Hackathon 2018 [ARCHIVED]

[keeshenniphof]

[wed 5/9, 12:30pm - END OF LIVE BLOG]

And our 3 winners are:

1. Team Vocalize

2. Team Apoxxio

3. Team Scrantonicity

The winning team claims the trophy: Team VOCALIZE. Congratulations!!

[wed 5/9, 12:15pm]

Now to the difficult part...

The judging team are having a hard time getting to the 3 winners...

[wed 5/9, 11:00am]

We Are Ready For 9 Finalist Pitches!

Our Executive Judging Team are ready to review 9 pitches:

Maureen Robson-Norman (Lloyds Banking Group)

Allan Leinwand, CTO (ServiceNow)

Dave Wright, Chief Innovation Officer (ServiceNow)

Josh Kahn, VP & GM Platform Business Unit (ServiceNow)

Chris Pope, VP of Innovation (ServiceNow)

9. Team 404: App 404 Adventure, to increase the adoption rate of the University's service portal using gamification. This one-man-team created a multiplayer Text Adventure game within the ServiceNow service portal.

8. Team BHive: App OhBeeHive collects information on a bee hive at any given moment using IoT telemetrics.

7. Team Null Pointer: App to manage Employee Performance Appraisal Lifecycle, including role-based self-assessments, Achievements tracker, Interim reviews, Employee-Manager interactions, performance analytics and reporting. 

6. Team undefined: App ShipNow manages resupply of oil and lubricants of cargo ships, brokering services between oil companies, ports and ship masters.

5. Team Scrantonicity (gotta love those shirts!): App NeutreNow to incentive healthy behavior (scroll down for full review). Tracks calory intake and calories burnt.

4. Team Make A Pledge: App Heartfelt makes it easier to bridge the gap between social networks and philanthropists willing to submit and fulfill a child's wish. Team Make a Pledge consists Enable Professional Services staff from across the globe, who first met at Knowledge18.

 

3. Team Skynet: AirX, app to make air travel safer by preventing accidents due to human error, mechanical failure and weather conditions. (scroll down for full review) 

 

2. Team Apoxxio: SafeNow, a Teacher Portal to track students in a scenario where children with autism need additional attention and tracking of whereabouts.

 

1. Team Vocalize: Sentiment analyses of support conversations. Based on quality of sentiment metrics, you can assign actions and tasks to prioritize follow up on conversations.

[tue 5/9, 11:40pm]

We have our 9 finalists!

Our lead judge, Chris Pope, just announced our 9 finalists in 3 categories: Business, Innovation and Social Good.

1. Skynet
2. undefined
3. Appoxio
4. 404
5. OBHive
6. Vocalize
7. Scrantonicity
8. Null Pointer
9. Make a pledge

Tomorrow at 11am, these 9 teams will pitch in front of a packed Developer Hub and our executive judging team, including Allan Leinwand (CTO) and Dave Wright (Chief Innovation Officer), who will decide on the winner per categorie.

[tue 5/9, 11:20pm]

9 finalists are about to be announced

The judging team is conferring, we'll have their verdict in about 5 minutes: 3 finalists in each of the 3 categories. These 9 teams will pitch once more tomorrow, before we get to a winner per category.

Chris Pope, head of the jury: "The overall quality this year is really high. We have seen some very ambitious apps, far from the usual IT Service Management projects. Also, many more impromptu teams versus previous years. The judges are very impressed by this year's outcome."

 

[tue 5/9, 11:00pm]

Healthy App From Pennsylvania

Team Scrantonicity, 5 Pathways Consultants from Pennsylvania, created a healthy app based on ServiceNow Service Portal. The app tracks exercising, calories burnt, the food and drinks you consumed. You can use your phone to scan barcodes from food items. The app pulls from openfoodfacts.org to calculate calories, and it allows you to add to the database manually if needed. For the exercises and the calories, it pulls from a Harvard study. Lastly, it applies gamification to let you compete with friends.

Team Scrantonicity: Sean Teeple, James Trott, Brandon Senese, Ken Wehrmann and Joe Rinosites (all representing Pathways Consultancy)

 

[tue 5/9, 10:35pm]

Videoconferencing in ServiceNow. Sure!

More familiar faces in team Whiskey Business: Matt Saxton and Tyler Hoge, remember them from when they hacked into Google’s Dash button to connect it to the Now Platform?

For this edition of CreatorCon Hackathon, they used WebRTC, the technology behind Google Hangouts, to create a videoconferencing application in ServiceNow that requires no plugins, “no outbound anything”, and works side-by-side with web chat. Of course, the video conference is stored with the web chat, as part of the related incident.

Matt and Josh fire up a ServiceNow web conference and chat.

Team Whiskey Business: Matt Saxton (CloudPires), Tyler Hoge (Vantiv), Andrew Saxton, Josh Virelli and Rich Stemann (ProMach)

 

[tue 5/9, 10.00pm]

The Judges Are Making The Rounds...

Robert Fedoruk of Team undefined, selling software

 

[tue 5/9, 9.45pm]

Keep track of who has access to the instances

“As a vendor, I work for many clients,” Sam Mackenzie of team API Hack explains. “And at every client, I have access to many ServiceNow instances, test, dev, production. But usually nobody keeps track of who has access, who should have access, who still has access even after the project was completed and the vendor isn’t working for the company anymore. That’s what we want to fix. So we built a Vendor Access Management application.”

Team API Hack consist 5 developers of 5 different companies – they met each other earlier today. Together, they created a system to keep track of access, with a start and an end date, a kill switch and potential links to projects, contracts and customer data. “It’s actually an additional service to my customer,” Sam said. “If I use this app for my customers, I help them be compliant and avoid liability. They’ll appreciate that.”

Team API Hack: Rick Marsha (SANS Institute), Zachary Pampel (Deloitte), Sam Mackenzie (Aptris), Naomi Sugawara (NTT Communications) and Chris Bui (PIMCO)

[tue 5/9, 9.15pm]

Team Dancing Lions: I need a ride!

This team of Canadian young guns create a carpooling app to connect drivers and passengers. “On some days may you have a car at your disposal, but on other days, you need a ride,” Caroline Boudreault said. “So our app allows people to register and put in all kinds of specifics around where you live, where you work, what time you want to leave home, and when you want to return home. The platform then connects drivers and passengers based on their preferences. It’s all connected to Google Maps, so you can even see how much longer your driver will take before they’ve reached you, given their current location.” Very cool!

Team Dancing Lions: Alexandre Gagnon, David Cote-Ouelette, Phoenix Fafard Levesque, Pawankumar Pallod, Caroline Boudreault and Alex Barrioult, representing HGC Technologies

[tue 5/9, 8:45pm]

King OD Sings "Viva Las Vegas"

[tue 5/9, 8:30pm]

ShipNow: The Right Port, The Right Oil, The Right Price

Last year’s winners, Team undefined, are creating an app for the shipping industry. “You see, cargo ships on international missions will sooner or later require oil and lubricants,” Tim Attenborough explains. “But different ports charge different tariffs, so a system to advise on the best port for what you specifically need, is a smart idea. And when it comes down to the oils and lubricants, a lot can go wrong – if that happens, there’s a lot of money involved. So with our system, we reduce human error and help companies avoid liability.”

“We create a CMDB with all the ship parts involved for the order managers and the ship chiefs to work in,” adds Huw Nolan. “A service portal allows them to work together and the platform can correlate the relevant variables and come up with recommendations as to where to go to get the best price.

“Another nice add-on,” Tim adds, “is that we have the opportunity for oil and lubricant producers to advertise in the platform. Based on the CMDB we know which product types would match to the ship – so why wouldn’t we serve relevant offers to the customers?”

[tue 5/9, 7:30pm] 

Integrating ServiceNow with the Blockchain: It’s all about trust

Enable Professional Services actually sent 3 teams to today’s Hackathon. The second team is Team Scrambled Eggs. “We are working on a Blockchain integration involving the 3 layers of the Blockchain,” said Federico Mantegazza. “Through this integration, users can buy goods paying with cryptocurrency (Ethereum in this use case), report on the transaction status and link to attached documents stored in IPFS (Interplanetary File System), the recently introduced protocol and network designed to create, store and share hypermedia in a distributed file system.”

Team Scrambled Eggs: Graham Strydom, Jake Gillespie, Bhavesh Jain, Ram Karan and Federico Mantegazza, all representing our partner Enable Professional Services.

[tue 5/9, 6.45pm]

What happens to your DR if the shared drive is not available?

Another make-shift team of people who didn’t know one another before 4pm today: Team 4 dudes and a lady. This team is out to develop “DR Exercise”, an app to automate Disaster Recovery. “I have been walking around with the idea for this app,” Michelle Slater of TTI, Inc. explains. “Today, this process is mainly managed in Microsoft Excel on shared drives. But if a proper disaster occurs, the shared drives will not be available, right?”

The team is building on standard platform capability around IT governance, CMDB, Automated CI updates and test outages to create a duplicate environment that is updated automatically with the production environment – a mirror CMDB with DR related process information. Sounds like a real business issue is being addressed, team!

Team 4 dudes and a lady: Michelle Slater (TTI, Inc), David Allison (Carnegie Mellon University), Colin Clinton (Cherokee Nation Businesses), William Howell (Institute of Nuclear Power Operations) and William Reverman (Cascade Plumbing)

 

[tue 5/9, 6:15pm]

Need an app? There’s a developer for that!

Team Reunion Tour: Three guys who used to work together, a university's IT Architect and a law firms App Integration Specialist, together hacking away at an app to bring supply and demand for Service Developers together. This is the stuff that makes CreatorCon Hackathon such a special place.

“Companies can create a job, describe it, add a budget to it,” Tim Deniston of Careworks explains. “Developers can put a bid in to land new projects.” The app comes with a rating system for both developers and companies, similar to apps like Lyft – hence the app’s name, SNyft.

Team Reunion Tour: Tim Deniston (Careworks), Nick Martinez (Sigital), Robert Chrystie (Careworks), Kim Reverman (Texas A&M University) and Kevin Nelson (Sidley Austin LLP)

[tue 5/9, 5:15pm]

Team Skynet wants to prevent airplane crashes

“So why do airplanes crash?”, asks Stefan Gordean of our Australian partner Enable. “In 50 percent of cases, it’s caused by human error – when the pilot makes a mistake. The other half of incidents are due to mechanical failure or weather conditions.”

“So the demo of our app – AirX – will cover 2 of these 3 use cases: human error and mechanical failure”, added Avneet Chawla. “This last use case is an IoT case, Smart Control Room, where we use sensors to keep an eye on the plane mechanics, the runway, plane movements.

[Image source: http://global.jaxa.jp/] 

“For the Human Error use case,” she continues, “we connect a service portal to take the pilot’s which we run through a series of algorithms to determine whether the pilot is fit to fly – not drunk, sleepy or stressed, which can happen given the work pressure they’re under. There's no way of faking it!”

Wow! We can't wait to see the demo, Avneet!

Team Skynet: Stefan Gordean, Avneet Chawla, Durgesh Rastogi, Kunal Kashyap and Siddharth Tiwari of Enable Professional Services

[tue 5/9, 04:40pm]

Team undefined are back!

We saw them at K17, we saw them at the PartnerNow Hackathon in Barcelona earlier this year, and they’re here at K18. Last years winners, team undefined (James Neale, Tim Attenborough and Huw Nolan, joined by their latest addition, Mike Ellis) are back in competition, poised to clench the trophy once more. They represent boutique ServiceNow partner, Whitespace Studios, who sell an app for pro code integration in the ServiceNow Store: Unifi, “the definitive integration management application”. Good luck, gentlemen – I’ll be back to hear about today’s project!

Team undefined: Mike Ellis, Tim Attenborough, Huw Nolan and James Neale

[tue 5/9, 04:00pm]

Peter Doherty: "This is what you're competing for!"

 

[tue 5/9, 04:00pm]

Chris Pope kicks the CreatorCon Hackathon 2018 into gears

 

[Tue 5/9, 3:45pm]

View of the room

 

[Tue 5/9, 3:30pm]

The teams are settling in – this Hackathon is picking up speed fast...

Boy, does this feel like a Le Mans start – the instances haven’t been distributed yet (that will happen around 4pm), but this Hackathon is underway. Over 170 people are in, there’s still a line at registration, we’re matching people and creating impromptu teams.

Around me, brains are storming, apps are being conceived, work is sized, scoped and allocated. Chris Pope is making the rounds, shaking hands, firing them up. Many familiar faces in the room, but even more new participants.

Start of Blog: Tue 8 May, 03.30 PM Pacific Time

On Tuesday May 8th, teams of developers made up of our customers and business partners go head-to-head in the annual CreatorCon Hackathon, an eight-hour quest for sweet prizes and unfettered glory. 

The goal: Build an app to solve a real business problem. 

Like every year, I will be filming, writing, photographing and tweeting from right within the event, publishing on the fly – interviews, event impressions, app reviews, judge reports – it will all be in here, to help you grasp some of the brilliance in the making at Knowledge18.

So, come back here this Tuesday (3pm – 12.00 am PT) for an ongoing account from our Knowledge18 Developer Hub in The Venetian, Las Vegas.

In the meantime, you can read up on previous editions of CreatorCon Hackathon:

2017
2016 (my favorite)
2015
2014

Thanks for following, reading and sharing!

Winners of the 2017 CreatorCon Hackathon, team undefined: Robert Fedoruk, James Neale, Tim Attenborough and Huw Nolan