TADHack (Telecom Application Developer Hackathon) is a global event, created and driven by the grassroots of the industry to help developers discover the latest ways to add communications to their application, services and business processes. And compete for $20k in prize money. It is unique because it brings together all relevant telecom application development tools and technologies in one event for both education and competition.
When?
6 – 7 June 2014. Friday and Saturday. We want developers with families that often struggle to take part in weekend hackathons to still be able to attend the education sessions and take what they learned back into their businesses.
Where?
Madrid and the World. We’ll be streaming the sessions live, having content on the TADHack site before the event, AND allowing remote entries so you do not have to be in Madrid to compete. There will be some limitations on accessible capabilities, but we’re trying to be as inclusive as possible. Keep an eye on the TADHack website as we have some exciting announcements coming up on making this a truly global event.
What?
It has never been a more exciting time to add communication into your applications, services and business processes with the explosion of telecoms tools and technologies. The development themes covered in TADHack include:
- Telecom APIs (including any IP based communication services; video communications; rich communications services; the good old PSTN);
- WebRTC (Web Real Time Communications) that extends communication services to any web-connected device;
- CRBT (Call Ring Back Tone) APIs opening up new possibilities simply through the act of calling;
- In-Call services, that is new services within the call made possible through IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem);
- SMS/USSD applications for developing markets and e-inclusion such as mobile payments, banking, e-commerce, bitcoin for emerging markets;
- Converged applications, e.g. taking the idea of Amazon Mayday and embedding customer experience management everywhere;
- In-network services, including NFV (Network Function Virtualization) and SDN (Software Defined Networks);
- Business vertical focused applications in healthcare, automotive, government, entertainment, financial, customer care, etc.
- Mash-ups across themes, really anywhere you think telecoms can make life better.
There will be education sessions across these themes, and also a hackathon with $20k in prize money to be won by developers for ideas and demos across the themes.
Who?
TADHack’s founding sponsors are the companies prepared to put their money where their marketing mouth is and be judged head-to-head with competitors to help educate and build the telecom application developer community. The founding sponsors making TADHack possible are:
Apidaze
hSenid Mobile
Nexmo
Solaiemes
Telestax
Tropo
TADHack is an independent grassroots initiative to raise the profile of telecom application developers with the resources to support them, and create a sustainable and profitable telecom application ecosystem. Founded by Alan Quayle, who has spent most of his life building telecom applications within telcos (BT), vendors (Lucent, Cambridge Technology Partners), his start-up Teltier (presence applications), and working with many tens of telecom application developers around the world. Alan writes a blog providing insights into the telecoms industry.
Why?
Telecom application developers exist and are grossly underserved by the telecom industry. They include: telco independent software vendors, system integrators, enterprise developers and many other developers building apps that live either in the core telecom network, enterprise data centers or public cloud.
Telecom application developers extend operator infrastructure in a variety of ways using SS7, SIP, Web APIs, and many new cloud-based technologies. There are hundreds of thousands of developers out there building commercial telecom services and applications all solving similar problems, face common challenges technically and commercially, and are key to Telecom’s future survival.
TADHack was requested by the attendees of the first ever TADSummit in the closing conference discussion on what we should do next. TADSummit also put together the TAD Manifesto, which documents what is required to make the Telecom Application Developer ecosystem a reality, through identifying the needs and responsibility of the three main actors in this ecosystem: developers, vendors and telcos.
Please check out TADHack, we have loads more content and many more announcements coming over the next 4 months; its going to be fun!