[Live Blog] CreatorCon Hackathon 2016

[keeshenniphof]

[5/19, 12:45pm PT — END OF LIVE BLOG]

Overall Winners 2016 CreatorCon Hackathon: Team Smiles!

>jump to 10 finalist pitch videos

The jury wholeheartedly agreed with our community. With an overwhelming 81% of votes in the Innovation category, the overall winners of the 2016 CreatorCon Hackathon are Team Smiles, with the make-a-wish application Happiness-as-a-Service.

The app was developed for UNOS, the United Network for Organ Sharing, and brings together kids awaiting organ transplantation and people who want to help make their lives better for a day. The team is donating their $1500 of prize money to UNOS, in order to help them implement the application.

Congratulations to Team Smiles! Thanks to our community for voting and helping pick the best creators of this year's CreatorCon Hackathon! We look forward to seeing you all in Orlando for Knowledge17 (May 7-12, OC Convention Center, Orlando FL).

[5/19, 12:30pm PT] Winners per category

Winners Category Platform: LifeNow

Winners Category Business: The Enablers

Winners Category Innovation: Smiles, Happiness-as-a-Service

Congratulations to our winners, you created phenomenal apps in just 8 hours. Eternal glory is yours.

[5/18, 02:00pm PT] OK, IT'S TIME TO CAST YOUR VOTE

We just launched the voting page, with pitch videos by each of our 10 finalist teams. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to cast your vote.

VOTE NOW (link removed)

Here are the direct Youtube links to each of the videos:

Category: Business

• Team We'll Code For Food / App: eWaste: https://youtu.be/T98ft4Tj9dU
• Team The Enablers / App: CreateDoc: https://youtu.be/jP99ityPijU
• Team Food Processors / App: Food Processors: https://youtu.be/ZgNGjQ4Clbo

Category: Platform

• Team Rocket Wolf / App: Service Right Now: https://youtu.be/Iyz4rjoW-o0
• Team Crowd Service / App: Artificially Intelligent Knowledge Management: https://youtu.be/g1Ukd5l0THk
• Team LifeNow / App: LifeNow: https://youtu.be/4MbyvYW_bvk
• Team Platform Eviscerators / App: Scrum Story Voting: https://youtu.be/u1baAUvlMFI

Category: Innovation

• Team Lyger / App: Hacked Amazon Dash Button triggers workflow: https://youtu.be/oC3J-7JCV4E
• Team Smiles / App: Happiness-as-a-Service: https://youtu.be/z4zcudi4cjE
• Team IowaNow / App: FamilyNow: https://youtu.be/AokaZysjHbQ

[5/18, 02:00pm PT] The teams are pitching their apps on video

Ok, that's a wrap! We just finished recording 10 pitch videos, one for each of our Hackathon finalists. They will be posted later on, as part of the global community voting process. Stay tuned!

[5/18, 00:40am PT] Jury announces 10 finalists — Community Votes For 3 Category Winners On Wednesday afternoon

After ample deliberation, our judges have selected the following 10 finalists. As you will notice, we have an ex aequo in our Platform category, so four finalists there. The innovation with Service Portal Designer was simply too high to pick just 3 finalists.

Category: Business	Category: Platform	Category: Innovation
The Enablers	LifeNow	IowaNow
We'll Code For Food	Team RocketWolf	Team Smiles
Food Processor	Crowd Service	Lyger
	Platform Eviscerators

So, what's next?

• The finalists can continue to refine and polish their application until 11:59am PT tomorrow.
• At noon, each of the 10 finalists will record a 2-minute pitch and demo video of their application.
• These pitch videos will be posted here, on the Knowledge365 Community.
• The community (both present at Knowledge and in the rest of the world) is then invited to vote for one finalist per category. The community will determine the category winners!
• Around 5pm PT tomorrow, voting will be closed and the jury will pick the overall winner of the 2016 CreatorCon Hackathon.

        Our finalist teams put their feet up after 8 hours of application

        development. Great job, all!

[5/17, 11:40pm PT] Consume standard catalog items via swiping/tapping/scanning

Robert Fedoruk and Travis Toulson of WolfPack Cloud Services join Nathan Firth of NewRocket Inc to this year's Hackathon "to prove platform capability and subvert expectations". Using building blocks of ServiceNow available in the Helsinki release, "Team RocketWolf" created ServiceRightNow, a platform for formless workflow. Shown as both a Point of Sale and warehouse control system, "ServiceRightNow allows consumers to consume standard catalog items via swiping/tapping or bar code scanning," Fedoruk explains. "Leveraging only Service Portal widgets, record watchers, the native iPhone app and bar code scanning, all data synchronizes immediately across all devices. When a bar code is scanned from a phone, the selected catalog item instantly appears in the cart of the POS device. This solution provocatively showcases ServiceNow's viability across a range of commercial and industrial applications."

        Team RocketWolf: Robert Fedoruk, Nathan Firth and Travis Toulson

[5/17, 11:10pm PT] An app to catch someone do something good

Every year, we come across teams of developers who didn't know each other prior to Hackathon. Team "Time On Our Hands" is one of them — and they're an international bunch consisting of Ashton Sheppard (British Columbia Automobile), Noah Stahl (Automys), Jesus Luis Mendez (SOFTTEK), Christine Dorsey, Jon Barnes (Citi Group) and Doug Line (OH-Tech).

They started reaching out on the community on Thursday. Come Tuesday, the team was ready to rumble. After quickly bubbling up ideas, they decided to create an app to reward service desk staff on a job well done: KudosNow. "Managers are always looking for ways to acknowledge good performance." Ashton explains. "Our app adds a simple button to the incident management app allowing employees to 'flag good performance'. The manager receives automated reporting on kudos suggested and can decide to actually give them to the employee, who can exchange them for gifts."

"The employee receives a notification for kudos suggested," Christine adds, "even if the manager decides to hold on to the kudos. So even then, it will have a positive effect on the worker!"

        Left to right: Noah, Ashton, Christine, Doug, Jon and Jesus

[5/17, 10:45pm PT] We are ready to start judging..!

WAT!?!? ALREADY?!?! Yes, although the teams have until midnight to code, the process of judging 40 teams takes some time, even with 3 judges: Allan Leinwand (Innovation category), Chris Pope (Business category) and Joe Davis (Platform category).

[5/17, 10:05pm PT] Quick chat with Allan Leinwand (CTO) and Chris Pope (Office of the CSO)

Allan, this is your fourth Hackathon. We have 35 teams competing, every year more developers join. What's the trend here?

Well first of all, we're growing as a company, as a technology portfolio and as a community. As a result, more participants create all kinds of apps in these Hackathons. Also, it's fascinating to see that people are really going native on the platform, leveraging recently introduced technology like scripted REST API's, service catalogue, source code repositories, the Studio in Geneva — they're going all-in!

Chris, did anything else catch your attention?

Allan is right, and it's all the more interesting for the participants that they have full access to our Helsinki release, which was only announced last Friday. It's so stable that we didn't have any doubts using Helsinki for the CreatorCon Hackathon.

Chris, it's remarkable to see these guys going at it for 8 hours straight. What drives them, you think?

First of all, it's the networking — the opportunity to spend a full day's work with your buddies, without any corporate overhead. It's serious playing, this.

I got the feedback that they not always have access to the latest release or the full set of features in the platform. Here, they have the latest and the greatest, Helsinki unrestricted — and there is no manager telling them to do this or that. They can just try new things, have some fun and improve their overall ServiceNow skills. Lastly, I think winning Hackathons looks pretty good on resumes these days!

Is that what you see too, Allan?

Yes absolutely, and don't forget the full access to the ServiceNow experts at Hackathon. We have a small army of them available here, and they have nothing else on their hands but helping the teams. No sales pitches, unlimited time — another aspect you only find at Hackathon.

Thank you for your time gentlemen — now, let's get back to the teams!

        Chris Pope and Allan Leinwand

[5/17, 09:15pm PT] Team Lyger pushes the button on the IoT

Joseph "Tyler" Hoge (right on the picture) and Matt Saxton are both software engineers at payment processing company Vantiv. Today, they are hacking Amazon Dash, the wifi connected one-click button for ordering Amazon products — a perfect example of the fast growing Internet of Things. "Today we still need to hack these buttons," Matt explains. "But within a few weeks, Amazon will open source them, so that we can basically program them to do whatever we want. Today, we want them to send notifications over to the ServiceNow platform."

"Think about it," Tyler adds. "You can stick one of these on any machine in your company, say printers, laptops, coffee machines, elevators, toilets — you name it. If something's broken, you press the button, an incident is created using Notify and submitted to the right service workflow."

"You can think of so many applications for these buttons," Matt concluded. "Summoning a waiter in a restaurant, panic buttons, home delivery — this will actually be possible on the ServiceNow platform within a few weeks!"  

[5/17, 07:30pm PT] Team IowaNow makes mom's life easy with ServiceNow

Cindy Galde-Hick (ATOS, left below), Phil Ward (Farm Bureau Financial) and Linda Kendrick (State of Iowa) all come from Iowa, and therefore — and because they met at their local SNUG meetings — formed a team called IowaNow. Together, they're building an app for home management dubbed FamilyNow. "Its purpose is to make life easier for the mom," Cindy explains. "Call it advanced task list management, where a record producer is used to create task lists, like 'Do the laundry', 'Feed the dog', or 'Do the dishes' — all these things moms worry about all day, every day."

"Now," Linda continues, "the platform will send push notifications to the husband and the children, informing them that a new chore is awaiting them. I created a front-end portal with knowledge articles, on how to wash the whites, for example."

"Once done," Phil concludes, "mom receives a notification. We're adding duration, so that we can use Performance Analytics to show how fast chores have been completed. And we're thinking about adding geo location, so that we can assess which tasks should go where. Like 'You're close to the supermarket, pick up some beer…ehm diapers', I mean. What else?"

[5/17, 07:30pm PT] "Developers will love this app!"

Andras Kisgyorgy (left below) of French business school INSEAD met his buddy Goran Lundqvist of the Swedish Lunds University on the ServiceNow Community. "We keep track of each others content and contributions to discussions," Goran explained. "We bumped into each other earlier today here at Knowledge and decided to join the Hackathon as a team."

"We are building an app to make it easy for developers to document their work," Andras explains. "This app is solving a real issue for developers, they always struggle to come up with proper documentation. Our app picks up the description fields within the development records and uses Knowledge Management to automatically generate documentation in knowledge articles, including things like business rules and client script. If we're done, I would absolutely use this app myself. The ServiceNow developer community will love us for it!"

[5/17, 06:20pm PT] So Andy is building a slime mold multi-player game

Meet Andy, who is a developer at Denver International Airport. He entered the Hackathon as a one-man team. During pre-conference, one of the trainers listed things that can be done with ServiceNow to the left of the whiteboard, things that can't be done to the right of it. "Multi-player games" were on the right. And Andy really didn't agree — so he joined the Hackathon to develop a multi-player game.

"It's a browser-based slime mold game," Andy explains. "I am basically building a 2D grid for the playing field. The player starts with a small slime mold with low energy. By encircling other molds, it can grow and pick up extra energy."

"So Andy," I asked. "Why did the trainer think building a multi-player game can't be done on ServiceNow, and why do you think he was wrong?"

"Well, because they're not thinking out of the box. Of course it can be done. I just created a table to hold all the different pieces of mold."

OK Andy, I'll be back. Good luck!

[5/17, 06:10pm PT] Team xPerts (xMatters): Knock knock, who is there?

Travis Depuy (left below) and Darren Fraser of our partner xMatters build a home automation app on ServiceNow. "We're creating a conceptual map of a home," Travis explains. "Then when someone enters the house, we take their picture and use facial detection to assess whether they're friend or foe." The app follows whoever enters around the house and notifies the homeowners if someone is trespassing.

Very cool, guys — we'll come back to check in on you later on!

[5/17, 04:33pm PT] Time to claim your dev instance!

As our President & CEO Frank Slootman mentioned in this morning's keynote (see slide below), we we are spinning up 50,000 ServiceNow instances for Knowledge16 — partially on AWS, partially on Microsoft Azure. We obviously use our service automation platform to orchestrate all of this. And part of those 50,000 instances are used by our dear Hackathon contestants right now. And now that they are up and running, the room is going very quiet. Let's walk around and meet some of the teams!

[5/17, 04:10pm PT] Our MC Chris Pope gets things going — we are out of the gates!

[5/17, 04:04pm PT] Teams are getting ready... there's lots of them!

[5/17, 03:40pm PT] Let's have a look around in the Developer Hub, shall we?

The Developer Hub, in short, is an IT (wo)man cave on steroids. It has, in non-alphabetical order:

• A mini cinema
• Lounge areas
• Pinball machines
• Arcade machines
• Fussball table
• DJ Lezlee (see picture)
• Free drinks and all the fast food you can eat

But of course that's just to keep the developers happy and going. There is some serious stuff here as well:

• HackLab, a place for short tutorials, staffed by our subject matter experts ready to help should you have any questions or issues you need support with.
• HackZone, a crazy corner of the room where we connect many things to the ServiceNow platform, including drones, Pebble watches, Amazon Echos, sensors of all kinds and even a home-made cocktail mixer (pic below).
• An army of Developer Experts.

And, last but not least: Guys with Beards. It's a Developer Hub.

So, it's all here. Register, come down, get down.

[5/17, 03:06pm PT]

For the third year in a row, I will be reporting live from the Developer Hub at Knowledge16. Check in regularly to meet the teams, hear their

ideas, follow their progress, and — around midnight local time — take a front-row seat for the announcement of our finalists.

This year, the teams compete in 3 categories. Here's what we're looking for:

1. Platform: Best use of new Platform features and tools in Helsinki — think Service Portal, ECMAScript/JavaScript 5, Git integration. Excel XLSX support, native Android app, Delegated Development.
2. Business: An app that delivers the highest tangible/measurable ROI in terms of i) increasing revenue, productivity, efficiency, business agility, user satisfaction (NPS) or ii) reducing cost or risk. Think about pitching your app to the CFO or COO.
3. Innovation: The open category. The only requirement is that it be of high value to some kind of business (any business, not necessarily your current place of work). Unleash your creativity about what can be done with the ServiceNow Platform.

For the full detail on the assignments and rules, check Martin Barclay's post here.

Before we start, let me give you a short impression of this awesome place, the Developer Hub. Be right back!

[5/17, 03:03pm PT >> START]

YES, we are less than an hour away of the start of the 2016 CreatorCon Hackathon.