Hackathon

Dealing with email is something I have become an expert in out of necessity. While it’s out of control, it’s a chore that is wired into my work in a deep way that, regardless of the explosion of real time communication channels, will likely continue to be the least common denominator for communication for the next 100 years . That is one of the reasons why I’m interested in seeing the projects that come out of the Context.IO App Challenge , a long-format online hackathon that I’ll be judging in a few weeks along with David Cohen, Fred Wilson, Matt Blumberg and Josh Baer. ...

The open data movement is great for business, but is also great for us as citizens. To accelerate that program, President Obama and US CTO Todd Park have created a national event to leverage technology and open data to strengthen our democracy in the United States. On June 1st and 2nd the largest hackathon in the world is forming. Over 5000 people in 87 locations will be joining up to use their talents to make their communities a better place. The National Day of Civic Hacking is the first of a yearly event created by the White House to gather Citizen Engineers and have them use newly accessible government data to improve their communities and our entire society. The multitude of data that is being released as part of the Open Data Initiatives. ...

Last week President Obama played with a Sphero . This weekend you can win up to $5,000 at the Sphero Hackathon in Boulder . It starts Friday May 4th at 6pm with a Welcome Reception (which means beer and Spheros) and runs all day Saturday and Sunday where you can hack with Spheros and the Orbotix SDK . I’ll be around Sunday from 1pm to 3pm taking a look at what people have done, playing around with the apps, and answering any questions about why I think Sphero (and Orbotix – the company that makes Sphero) is so awesome. ...

My friends at Orbotix , a TechStars Boulder 2010 company that Foundry Group invested in recently, are having their second hackathon on 11/13 – 11/14 at their office in Boulder. Orbotix is the gang that is “reinventing the ball” while also creating smartphone apps that control robots. The November Hackathon is all about hacking Android apps and there will be a contest that I’ll be judging on Sunday afternoon along with Paul Berberian (Orbotix’s CEO) and Julian Farrior from Backflip Studios. ...

Over the years, a number of companies I’ve been an investor in have had hackathons. These are typically day long events where everyone in the company works on whatever cool new ideas they have. On Monday night I got a note from a company I’m on the board of about a hackthon they just completed. As I looked through the list of things that the various teams created, I got chills of excitement. ...