Announcing TADHack Global 2016 plus TADHack Update

We’ve changed the date for TADHack Global in response to developer feedback, its now in October 14-16 (Friday through Sunday), rather than June. Each location will run on 2 of the 3 days. Now, University students are in attendance and not worrying about exams, the warm weather is not calling the Northern Hemisphere to the beach rather than hacking (sorry to those developers in the Southern Hemisphere), and there are less pressing end of year or before the summer deadlines. Within hours of announcing TADHack Global, registrations were in double figures with lots of commitments on Twitter and Linkedin. We also have Pakistan (thanks to Ufone) and Sydney Australia (thanks to Telstra) confirmed as locations today. So we’re at 34+ locations (the + is for all the remote locations, that is the comfort of your own home.)

The focus of TADHack is technology, developers and creativity. We provide an open forum for developers to learn, share, code and create around telecom app development. The ‘coding’ can be done with surprisingly little coding these days, thanks to webhooks, scripts and graphical unser interfaces. From TADHack’s beginnings in June 2014, we have doubled in size every year. We expect 2000 registrations across all the locations. In this weblog I provide a preview of TADHack Global, and a review of TADHack-mini Uruguay and TADHack-mini London that ran in May and April respectively.

If you’re going to invest 2 days of your time this year in learning new skills, TADHack is the best 2 days you’ll have learning, networking and creating.  Where developers, creativity and technologies are celebrated in their ability to make the world we live in better.

TADHack Global

TADHack Global will run over the 14-16th October (Friday-Sunday), locations will run on 2 of the 3 days. We have 32+ locations confirmed around the world including: Athens, Austin, Bangladesh – Dhaka, Berlin, Boston, Brisbane, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Kuala Lumpur, Kyiv (Ukraine), Lisbon, London, Madrid, Melbourne, Mexico, Moscow, Netherlands, NYC, Orlando, Oslo, Paris, San Francisco, Seattle, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka – Colombo, Sri Lanka – Jaffna, Stockholm, Tokyo, Voronezh (Russia), Warsaw, and Zambia. Plus the comfort of your own home, that is remote entries. We also have more locations in the pipeline (Pakistan and Sydney have just confirmed). Its great to see the whole industry working together to build a global community around telecom app development.

TADHack Global will be for the 3rd year running the largest telecom focused hackathon in the world. Given it doubles in size every year it is becoming one of the largest hackathons globally. We currently have $42k in global prize money, and some of the global sponsors have promised more prizes if we have loads of hacks; also this figure does not include all the location prizes, there will be lots of love (prizes) to share 🙂

Thanks to the global sponsors for making it possible: Cisco Spark, hSenid Mobile, Matrix, Nokia Networks, Telestax, Tropo, and VoxImplant.

Partners for running locations including: Clarify, CMTelecom, DataArt, UPM, Flowroute, IST, IPCortex, Iquall Networks, Locatrix, Magyar Telecom, MTN, BongoHive, ProIDS, Synchronoss, Telenor Digital, Telstra, Temasys, TXM, UCL, VoIP Labs, WebRTCH4cks, IIT RTC Labs.

This year we also have some development themes, more details will be provided soon. We’re open to all ideas, the themes are just some guidance from the global sponsors on particularly area of interest for those developers looking for some guidance:

  • Application to person (A2P) on messaging platforms: Hacks on platforms such as Slack, or Matrix, or Facebook Messenger, or any other IP messaging platform.
  • BOTs are software programs on communication platforms: BOTs have been theme of TADHack since its inception, as well as becoming quite fashionable. Hacks like Guber Conference from TADHack Chicago have become commercial services.
  • Internet of Things: From dancing robots to an irrigation hack from Sri Lanka that has gone commercial. IoT remains a theme at TADHack, with a focus on getting those ideas to market.
  • Network Function Virtualization and The Dangerous Demo. In 2014 we showed the hack, IMS in minutes, this became the dangerous demo we showcase at every TADSummit. In 2015 we showed a complete mobile core network running in the cloud. We’re keen to see hacks around NFV or built on the Dangerous Demo. We’ll have more details coming soon.
  • Artificial Intelligence. AI has become a part of many hacks created at TADHack in 2015 and 2016. TADHack is where bleeding-edge technologies become real practical solutions to everyday problems.
  • Open Source contributions. Some hacks focus on using the weekend to make contributions to open source projects. We’re recognizing and encouraging these contributions. Focused on the global sponsor’s open source projects of course 🙂
  • More dev themes will be announced, and we’ll be adding more details.

Go to TADHack Global and register either for a city near you or remotely. Its going to be an amazing global event, where developers, creativity and technologies are celebrated in their ability to make the world we live in better.

We have lots being planned for TADHack Global, including exciting keynotes, a few special visitors to some of the locations. And remember, all hacks are recorded and published on the TADHack YouTube channel so your effort is rewarded with collateral you can use on your resume, at work, or simply to wow your friends. TADHack is for Everyone!

TADHack-mini London, 9-10 April

TADHack-mini London was held at IdeaLondon thanks to the support of University College London. It was larger that last year with 88 people through the door, 18 hacks, with more diversity of people involved, and many more hacks winning that required little coding. This is an important trend; the tools and platforms continue to democratize telecoms so more and more people can use it in their applications, services and business processes. We had a total of $8k to distribute including a Trossen Phantom X Hexapod.

Every time we hold a TADHack, the quality and diversity of the hacks increases, regardless of location. The proof is clear, telecom app development is powerful and we’re only just scratching the surface of what is possible.

We also had some rookie JavaScript developers with us who had just completed a one week WebRTC course organized by Founders and Coders, and ipcortex. They took their ideas and projects from the course and mashed them up with the TADHack-mini London sponsors, who include:

Some of the winners included:
  • Torrey Searle demonstrated the integration of Midori into a Cisco Spark room with many impressive programming capabilities and won the Cisco Spark prize.
  • Steven Bakker, Timo Uelen and Bart Uelen created the hack Babelonio, a mulilingual chat using decentralized messaging. Resources used included Matrix, speech recognition and Google Translate. They won the Matrix prize of a Phantom X Hexapod Mk3, and you can track their adventures in this weblog.
  • Stephen Sale from Analysys Mason created “My First Hack” a primary research automation service using Telestax and Dialogic.
  • Brant Wang & Sacha Nacar created the hack BigBro using Cisco Spark. An anti-cyber-bullying bot for chat rooms. Between IBM Bluemix, Watson and Cisco Spark, they just used webhooks and no coding. They won the Cisco prize.
  • Dalton Scott, 15 years old, with his hack Jerry, using Telestax and Dialogic. Which turns your favorite applications ‘data-less’. He won the Telestax / Dialogic prize for best youth hack. And is the youngest TADHack winner to date. His mother won a prize for her hack, so we also have another first with mother and son winners at the same hack!

There’s so much more covered, plus you can re-live the event in photos, videos and words, at the TADHack-mini London site.

TADHack-mini Uruguay, 10-11 May

TADHack-mini Uruguay took place on the 10th and 11th May (Tuesday and Wednesday) at the Universidad ORT Uruguay (Campus Centro) in the vibrant city of Montevideo. We are grateful for Universidad ORT Uruguay’s cooperation in making this event possible. As at every TADHack around the world the enthusiasm, creativity, and skills are world class. Because of the University rules we could only run during the week, a couple of developers actually took time from work for TADHack, amazing. Telestax sponsored TADHack Uruguay, and Locatrix was a partner.

Hack “Golazo!” by Juan Chomali (17 years old) and Francisco Camejo (19 years old) is an App for football / soccer fields reservations. It shows the football / soccer fields in a map and you can make a reservation through there. The field manager receives an SMS and can confirm or deny the reservation. The user receives a confirmation SMS. They were joint winners of the Telestax prize. This is a locally relevant application, like Tardy Support at TADHack Japan, it had all the Latin Americans in the audience wanting it.

Hack “POLLSTER APP” by Andres Canabarro, Sr. Miguel Ignacio Sica, and Herman Schenck: Do you want to launch any type of survey quickly and efficiently? Do you lack of enough clients to make your survey? Pollster App is designed just for you. Pandemic detection, marketing services and political analysis brought to you in just one click. They were joint winners of the Telestax prize. The guys started 24 hours ago with no knowledge of Telestax, and within 24 hours had created a sophisticated service.

There’s much more covered, plus you can relive the event in photos, videos and words, at the TADHack-mini Uruguay site.