Live Blog: CreateNow Hackathon 2014 [Archived]

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Follow this blog for continuous updates, stories and scoops directly from the Moscone Center in San Francisco, where Allan Leinwand announced the winning team. This Live Blog ended May 1st, 10.30am PT.

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[5/1 - 10:30am] And the winner is...

Congratulations to Team SchoolHub for winning the 2014 CreateNow Hackathon!

We hope to see you all back next year, at Knowledge15 in Las Vegas.

Team SchoolHub put the classroom in the Cloud

Team SchoolHub applied the power of the ServiceNow platform to the interaction between teachers (give assigments and grades), faculty (biographies, tracking attendance), parents (check the grades, fill out all kinds of forms — absence, dietary, holiday requests) and students (survey teachers, get assignments). On top of that, a GPS tracker for the schoolbus, crisis management with ServiceNow Notify to quickly inform all parties in case of emergencies our mass communications, a service catalogue tied to Knowledge Management for all kinds of information, teachers and parents blogging, and last but not least: "Virtual Classroom", pulling in a live webcam feed, allowing absent students to attend anyway.

Team SchoolHub consist of Ryan Lemay, Sean Caron, Cherylyn Dawson and Tim Provin of Linium, and Josh Andres of Xerox Business Services. "We joined to show our talent and see what we can accomplish in 8 hours. We used Software Development Lifecycle, SCRUM and 6 or 7 sprints to get it done. Cherylyn was our project manager, and she really got the wip out! Also, we wanted everything to work. And it does." said Ryan Lemay of Linium.

Josh Andres adds, "The audience really likes the design of our app and everybody wants the Virtual Classroom for their kids!"

        (Photo: Rebecca Beach)

[5/1 - 09:55am] We're getting ready to announce the winners

The announcement of the winning Hackathon team is planned at the end of Dan McGee's keynote. Our 5 finalists are sweating it!

Yesterday, they all pitched their applications to the Knowledge14 audience, in order to collect their votes.

[4/30 — 18:30pm] Meet Rich, who hardly knew ServiceNow but created anyway

One of the most remarkable contestants in this year's CreateNow Hackathon is a young man called Rich Acosta, who is a UNIX Engineer at a Financial Services firm out of New Jersey, NY. Rumor has it Rich joined the Hackathon with less than a day of ServiceNow experience under his belt. Nevertheless, and on his own, he produced an app to measure audience sentiment in Twitter. Mike Lusk (Director of Americas Marketing Programs) and I met up with him to get some detail.

- So Rich, what's your story, buddy?  

"I have some experience working with Twitter and I have always been into data analytics. So I created a Hootsuite-like interface in ServiceNow, connected to Twitter, and integrated with a ServiceNow approval workflow. This way, employees create tweets, but before they're pushed to Twitter, the manager has to approve."

- OK, but wouldn't that create a huge workload for the managers once all employees start shooting off tweets?

"Yeah you are right, we don't want the management to be bottlenecks. So next, I pulled a sentiment analysis algorithm off of the internet. Similar principle to the kind of thing they used to get IBM's Watson to understand natural language. It produces a smiley (positive sentiment), a very unhappy smiley (negative sentiment) or a neutral smiley (neutral sentiment). Smileys go straight to Twitter, Neutrals go to management and unhappy faces get rejected straight away."

- …and you're sure you have less than a day of experience in ServiceNow..?    

I guess so. I had two hours of labs the day before and then some presentations on Tuesday. But I already mentioned I have some good experience with the Twitter API. So…

- Yeah you did mention that. OK, and where are you going to take the ServiceNow platform at work? What are you guys looking into?

We want to introduce ServiceNow Service Catalogues and use ServiceNow as our Service Automation platform. Personally, I am also interested to learn more about your CMDB capabilities. I work with and maintain whole range of legacy homegrown systems, and I'm looking to retire some and replace others with ServiceNow. Get everything recorded and maintained. But first I'll finish my masters degree in Computing & Business at NJIT in May. Is it already May?

- No Rich. It's only April 30^th. You have some more time to discover ServiceNow. We sure hope to see you next year!

[4/30 — 17:45pm] Password Vault for shared corporate accounts

"When it comes to password management and credentials, no one wants shared accounts. But you can't always avoid it. Think about an account for some external service, a backup account or even just a corporate Youtube account. Therefore it is better to control it and have visibility." I am talking Jason Norred, Director of Service Management at PCM, a Managed Service Provider.

Jason and his team of ServiceNow Developers — James Carroll and George Floratos — were excited to enter the Hackathon. "But we wanted to put it to good use. Last year, we had some fun, created a game. This year, we wanted to focus on an app that we can bring back to our 100+ engineers on Monday."

"If not controlled," he continued, "these passwords reside with a couple of guys within the IT department. Nobody knows when a given password was last changed. Nobody wants to go ahead and change it, because it is a pain to communicate it out to the right co-workers. So nothing changes, people leave, passwords get lost. It's all quite risky. We remotely manage services for our clients and we see this happen all the time — so we are genuinely looking for a solution."

"We created a password vault to store credentials in. The app generates a secured password and we use orchestration to make the change a reality. The credentials are encrypted and we use Access Control List (ACL) to make sure you see only the credentials that you are supposed to see in your role. On top, you take a deliberate action to access it — therefore that activity is recorded. If a system is compromised in any way, we can see who last retrieved the password for it. It creates visibility and control around a topic that is quite often neglected."

[4/30 - 17:05pm] San Francisco needs CableCarNow!

The app of Team CableCarNow was born out of frustration. The world famous cable cars of San Francisco are always full and the queues at the stops are way too long. "So the city needs a solution and it needs it fast," said Melhem El-Achkar, who is a managing partner at ncc solutions out of Munich, Germany. "This is our second Hackathon, with some slight changes to the team. Last year, we created CasinoNow, a blackjack app that got us great acclaim. This year, we're not playing games; we address a real issue in this city."

Our app has two parts: one part is consumer-facing, one is the back-office where the cable cars are managed. Through an API with Google Maps, consumers can see where the cable cars are. Using sensors, we'd push back information on the length of the queue and the capacity of the cars. That way, consumers know when they can expect t find an available spot. They can then purchase tickets online using the mobile app.

Because all variables — cars, routes, stations — are Configuration Items, we can apply the full service management capabilities to this story. We incident and asset management to keep track of the status of our cable cars, we use financial management to track tickets sold. Incident and problem management for cars that break down. We have it all covered. The city needs this!"

CableCarNow consists of Melhem El-Achkar, Konstantin Bazanov and Thomas Fregin of ncc solutions, Chris Bailey of Pro Health Care and Maxime Richard of Imakumo.  

[4/30 - 14.45pm] Meet MudMonsters, a text adventure game

Scott Brian, one of last year's Leftover's, came alone and found his team members But ch Istook of Intel Corp, and Hunter Wolf and Erik Brostrom of CH Robinson. Together, they created a mult-user, text-based action adventure. Using text commands, the players can fight, do and take damage, solve puzzles, and inspect items.

"We have 35 locations, 12 monsters, many items in there," Scott explained. "We use business rules to govern the behavior of all elements. The business rules trigger events based off of the text body in the commands. You win when you reach the final destination. If you loose, you go back to square one and you loose all items."

"This is my first Knowledge. I hope we win the Hackathon," Bu tch said. "So I will have to come back next year to defend the cup and my boss will approve the travel."

[4/30 - 14:15pm] Team SchoolHub put the classroom in the Cloud

Team SchoolHub applied the power of the ServiceNow platform to the interaction between teachers (give assigments and grades), faculty (biographies, tracking attendance), parents (check the grades, fill out all kinds of forms — absence, dietary, holiday requests) and students (survey teachers, get assignments). On top of that, a GPS tracker for the schoolbus, crisis management with ServiceNow Notify to quickly inform all parties in case of emergencies our mass communications, a service catalogue tied to Knowledge Management for all kinds of information, teachers and parents blogging, and last but not least: "Virtual Classroom", pulling in a live webcam feed, allowing absent students to attend anyway.

Team SchoolHub consist of Ryan Lemay, Sean Caron, Cherylyn Dawson and Tim Provin of Linium, and Josh Andres of Xerox Business Services. "We joined to show our talent and see what we can accomplish in 8 hours. We used Software Development Lifecycle, SCRUM and 6 or 7 sprints to get it done. Cherylyn was our project manager, and she really got the wip out! Also, we wanted everything to work. And it does." said Ryan Lemay of Linium.

Josh Andres adds, "The audience really likes the design of our app and everybody wants the Virtual Classroom for their kids! Personally, my key take-away is that you can get so much done out-of-the-box. I work for a client that is heavily customized — now I feel I can go back and get them to try new things straight out-of-the-box. There is so much in there that we haven't tapped in yet."

[4/30 - 10:30am] Who will win it?

[4/30 - 00:45am] We have 5 finalists!

The judges deliberated, decided and handed out the tickets to the final stages of our competition. These are the 5 finalists of the 2014 CreateNow Hackathon:

1. SchoolHub, cloudification of education, enabling schools, teachers and students to interact.
2. SociaLoop, a Social Media Campaign Management application, enabling organisations to activate all employees around social media.
3. MudMonsters, a chat-based text adventure game.
4. Password Credential Management, a password vault for holding and managing individual passwords, changes and approvals.
5. CableCarNow, an application to track timings, availability and capacity of   San Francisco cable cars.

Look out for more back grounds of these applications tomorrow!

    > Allan Leinwand and Jay Berlin hand out the Golden Tickets to our finalists.

[4/30 - 00:00am] TIME IS UP

The judges are reviewing the last couple of applications. Hang on for the announcement of our 5 finalists.

[4/29 - 23:15pm] TravelNow, for next generation Travel Management

Travel Management apps are popular this year. Team Aspediens, 5 creators from France, Switzerland and Russia, went all in. Eureka preview release, full integrations, interaction, APIs, making use of the visual task board. Silvère Poirier is very excited with the capabilities of the upcoming product release. "For TravelNow, we try to really use the new features of the platform," he explained. "It is basically a Travel Management app for companies with multiple locations. The user can select the location he wants to travel to, after which the system will suggest a plane ticket and a hotel. We used APIs with travel websites like Expedia.com to pull the data in. Once approved by management, the travel is booked and the user can add travel expenses. We use the visual task board to manage the approvals and rejections of travel requests. We have a number of web services employed: first we check availability, then we check the room, the price, and lastly, we create the booking."

Team Aspediens consists of Silvère Poirier, Alain Muller, Alexandre Herrero, Nikita Mironov and Stephane Kieffer.

[4/29 - 22:55pm] SociaLoop, Social Media Campaign Management App

Talking to Chris York of Team SociaLoop is like talking to a social marketing consultant. His application allows marketing departments to activate the entire organisation in support of social media campaigns. "In SociaLoop," he explained, "the campaign manager can build social media campaigns, add them to a categorized central repository and execute them through the social handles of employees. Content can be a whitepaper, a website, or just a simple message. The employees can manage their settings and permissions in the user profile — authentication is stored on the user record. Content can be pushed through segmented special interest groups and all postings are being reported on. Which content items perform best, which have reached their goal and need to be retired?"

So Chris, when is your app available in Share, so that the ServiceNow Marketing team can start using it?

Team SociaLoop consists of Chris York, Robert Fedoruk, Jeremy Gardner, James Neale and Joel Olives.

[4/29 - 22.35pm] Wheel of Now; "It's like raising a kid"

Carlos Gama (left in picture below) and Justin Drysdale, Application Developers at Pacific Life, made it to the finals last year. In 2012, Carlos was part of the team winning the Innovation of the Year award. This year, he and Justin came up with Wheel of Now, a full-fledged Wheel of Fortune on the ServiceNow platform, including a spinning, sounding wheel and voice command capabilities. Multiple users can play from multiple terminals, scores are being accumulated centrally. If you hit "Bankrupt", you loose it all.

It wasn't very easy, Carlos admits. "You know, it has been a bit like raising a kid," he said. "We created it, and then had to teach it how to behave, coming up with many new tricks in the process. Just some examples? Well, I had to write the entire wheel, compartmentalized and all. And a way to create sounds in ServiceNow. First, we used html audio tags, but we moved to pure java. For the voice command, we integrated a web kit, which is only available for Chrome right now. Yeah, quite intense."

[4/29 - 22:15pm] The first apps are being judged

[4/29 - 21:45pm] "We are taking our competition down"

The Joint ServiceNow Fighters are a mix of Logicalis SMC creators joining forces with two customer creators, representing Northgate Arinso (NGA), a global leader in helping organisations transform their business-critical HR operations to deliver more effective and efficient people-critical services. One of the NGA guys is Helmut Bernardt, who is a Manager Standards and Processes within the IT organisation. "Yes," he adds, "which basically is a central function within IT to standardize processes and support the other IT functions."

Helmut was invited by the Logicalis SMC guys to join their Hackathon team. "We are building a meeting organizer app," he explains, "which would enable global participants to find the most cost effective location for a meeting. We use an API to pull in data on flight tickets and hotel room availability and then propose the best scenario. Once submitted, it's tied to internal approval workflows. I really like how it pulls in external data in combination with internal process."

The Joint ServiceNow Fighters are Helmut Bernardt and Wayne Fay of Northgate Arinso and Rik Burgering, Jeffrey Meijer en Lam Hoang of Logicalis SMC.

[4/29 - 21:30pm] The judges are about to make their rounds

Allan Leinwand just encouraged the teams to start uploading early versions of their applications to the Share environment to allow the judges to start reviewing. Some nervous response in the room... Just 2.5 hours to go until the final call.

[4/29 - 19:15pm] The teams race for gold

In just little over 3 hours, we will hand out 5 Golden Tickets to the final. The teams are working hard to be part of that select group of ServiceNow Creators.

[4/29 - 18:20pm] Share & Inspire

Sat down with Craig McDonogh, Sr Director Product Marketing and one of the organizers of the Hackathon.

- Craig, how is it going so far?

Really well. We have many more participants compared to last year and I am always impressed by the incredible creativity of our customers and partners. To me, that is what the Hackathon is all about: Showcase the power of the ServiceNow platform. If you have no constraints and you can do whatever you want — how far can you take the ServiceNow platform?

- So what have you seen? How far are they taking it?

The room is filled with some very smart people. It's inspirational. Just like when we review the projects submitted for the Innovation of the Year contest. There's so much creativity and talent gathered here. Our customers come up with ideas that even Fred Luddy and the other creators of our platform haven't thought of.

- Are all apps being uploaded to Share?

If they want the app to be judged, they'll have to upload it to Share. But they can choose to not make it publicly available. Some of these apps are too valuable to just give away, I guess.

- The participants could choose between Dublin and "Eureka Preview" release. What's the current balance?

It is about 50-50 right now. And I understand that; if you really want to compete, you feel more comfortable working with a tool that you know by heart. You don't want to have to learn and create and win — all in one session. Although, half of them did go for Eureka. I really get that, too.

[4/29 - 17:13pm] Releaved!

Quick conversation with Brian Hollandsworth, Product Marketing Marketing at ServiceNow. Brian is part of the ServiceNow Hackathon team.

- So Brian, how do you feel an hour into the competition?

"Releaved! Man, we had a bit of a holy-cow moment last Wednesday, when we saw the registrations for this event passing the 500 mark. Last year, we had about 80 participants, and most of what we did to prepare and get contestants going, was done manual. But to quickly enable over a 100 teams to start developing, you need to scale the way you distribute the URLs to the instances. It cannot be done manually."

- OK, so how did you solve that? "We're ServiceNow, so we decided to create an app. So now, participants fill out an online registration form, and then automatically receive the URL to their instance. We got it to work in time!"

- Good job, Brian - we'll hook up again later on!

[4/29 - 16:40pm] Heads down developing

The room is quieting down. Teams started with some discussion, but quite soon started developing. Notice the high five of Paul Hardy here in the front. Confident contender. We'll walk around for some quick interviews to get first feedback.

[4/29 - 16:15pm] Prizes, people. Prizes!

All participants receive the much coveted CreateNow shirt.   The members of the two winning teams will get Pebble smart watches. And — let's not forget — eternal glory.

[4/29 - 16:10pm] Get your instances

The participating teams receive a simple briefing: get your Dublin or Eureka instance and start executing your plans. You can't use any code previously created. At the end of the Hackathon, all apps are to be uploaded to Share for the judges to review.

[4/29 - 16:00pm — 8 hrs to go] The Hackathon is underway

Craig McDonough (Sr Director Product Marketing) and Jay Berlin (Platform Architect) just officially opened the CreateNow Hackathon 2014, here in the Moscone Center.

*** START LIVE BLOG ***