Hacking Solutions at the VERGE Hackathon

THE INNOVATION:

This first GreenBiz Hackathon, or 48-hour development marathon, posed challenges and made APIs and data sets available for software developers to write apps for Vehicles, Energy Efficiency, and Building Management.

Krys Freeman
Web Project Manager, GreenBiz Group

www.GreenBiz.com

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• [VERGE is exciting because] there’s a lot of opportunities to look at radical efficiencies…ways we can reduce our use and find ways increase our bottom line gains.   But also because I’m a tech geek, so I really enjoy… what they come up with in 48 hours,  excited based on things we already have in society -- data, APIs, lots of websites to [provide] examples.  This event was a way to smash that all up into something really cool.
• Hackathons represent the opportunities we have to really just try and look at things, really small items, and make products out of them.   [At most hackathons] a lot of apps that come out of them, that really never live on.  At VERGE, we are trying to create an opportunity, a marketplace, a really focused area to get these apps from ideas, to prototypes, to things that can go on and really make a change.   The way we structured this event… to present challenges that they can hack to.  A couple of our partners, Johnson Controls, OnStar, City of San Francisco a little bit, presented APIs or datasets or both…. JCI in particular just opened a platform called Panoptics which is a development suite,  so [developers] can put [apps] into a marketplace that [JCI] already have, and sell it as their own product, so it’s also a business opportunity [for the developers.]…. Because they are already large companies, they have the broad base to evangelize to for you…
• Code for America was a really gracious host… They let us use their space… they do this work all the time with governments.  We’re doing our event two days before [GreenBuild’s] event.  We’re going to try to push people off into the GreenBuild week -- with love from GreenBiz.
• [Sue:] I love the term VERGE – it’s a con-vergence, and…. It reminds us we’re on the edge of something potentially great.   [Krys:] There’s so many different ways you can look at “VERGE”. We didn’t want it to make it too small. We wanted it to focus on what we were doing with our business model, but we’d look at other things and say ‘This is also a  great convergence, or that’s a great convergence…or VERGE’… it’s pretty fun!
• Advice for innovators?  Find really good partners… [that share your interests, your values, your work ethic and really just expand your opportunities].  It’s always great to work with people, and I think collaboration is such an undersold asset to building things…