Developers, designers, coders, idea owners met at Hackathonist on May 8-11, 2014 and competed to make Istanbul City smarter by the apps developed for Istanbul transportation. Hackathonist was organized by TAGES in the cooperation with Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality within the EU-funded CitySDK Project.
Nowadays, Hackathon events are very popular in the world of the developers where they can develop innovative projects and applications, cooperate together, meet the experts and investors and win awards, of course together with many food and fun. Hackathonist (www.hackathonist.com) is one of these kinds of award winning events organized by TAGES in the cooperation with Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) as an activity of CitySDK Project. After the successful results of the 1st Hackathonist (Nov 1-3, 2013), the 2nd one, Hackathonist 2014 was organized in Studio-X Istanbul on May 8-11, 2014 with great interest of participants.
The event started with the training session & idea creation workshop on May 8, 2014. In the training session, Leyla Arsan, CEO of TAGES, made the opening speech and introduced CitySDK Project and Hackathonist. After her speech, Sercan Erhan, the Map Engineer in IMM, presented Istanbul transportation open data and Rutger Van Willigen from Waag Society in Amsterdam told the use of CitySDK mobility APIs and showed some model applications for inspiration. Besides CitySDK APIs, different API and tools were also provided during Hackathonist. The ImonaCloud Services and APIs were presented by Bahadır Odevci, Founder of ImonaCloud and Windows 8 Development Tools were presented by Burak Bayburtlu, Technical Evangelist at Microsoft. After the training session, Idea Creation Workshop started with the presentation of Aslıhan Kagnici, Projects Consultant at TAGES and Selva Gurdogan, Director of Studio-X Istanbul, also presented some innovative projects carried out by her team for Istanbul City. During the workshop the participants shared their ideas with the other participants and then built their teams to work together during Hackathonist.
On May 9, 2014, Hackathonist officially started at 09:00 a.m. There were 20 participants and 6 teams and they developed their applications during 41 hours, until 12:00 p.m. on May 10, 2014. On Sunday morning, all of the teams were ready to present their application to Jury which was composed of Faruk Eczacibasi, TBV; Ersin Pamuksuzer, Startupbootcamp Istanbul; Fatih Yenturk, IMM; Bahadır Odevci, ImonaCloud; Burak Bayburtlu, Microsoft; Rutger Van Wiilligen, Waag Society; Katalin Gallyas, City of Amsterdam. After jury’s hard decisions and the votes of the audiences, the teams were awarded in 7 categories:
The award of best application created on the CitySDK API, 3.000,00 TL, went to JSON Team (Kaan Uygur, Emre Surk). The team developed a car park application which gives the route of the car parks in Istanbul City and gives capacity, real-time occupancy rate, price information of the car parks. The most important function of the app is to offer the users the mobile payment options.
The award of the Best Application Created on Microsoft, Asus Notebook, went to again JSON Team.
The award of the Best Open Data Potential, Participation to Apps4Europe – International Business Lounge 2015 in Manchester, UK, went to METROPLUS Team (Aziz Ercan, Goktug Islamoglu, Nazlican Lule, Muhammed Balta, Mucahit Aktas, Sevgi Bayraktar). The team developed a metrobus optimization application which gives passenger density per metrobus stops and provides metrobus specific information based on user comfort preferences (arrival time, crowdedness etc.) and the opportunity to the user to meet their friends along the route and travel with them. The team also won the award of the Most Innovative Sensor Based Application to improve their application.
The award of Best idea and/or execution of adding new CitySDK data, 5 Rasberry Pies, went to MACELLAN Team (Faruk Toptas, Ozgur Demir, Emre Balkanli, Gokhan Mandaci) and CityMooD Team (Ömer Kara, Veli Hazar, Furkan Evirgen, Gunes Yerli, Nikitas Gkavogiannis). The MACELLAN team developed an event creation & sharing application for the people who have the common hobbies and interests with the other ones and also for the social responsibility projects. The CityMooD team developed an application which allows the citizens to share their mood in a specific place of the city in a specific time of the day. According to their mood, citizens are provided with options on where to go and how.
The award of the Most Innovative Application on ImonaCloud Platform, 12 months free hardware infrastructure and 12 months free display on ImonaCloud SaaS Marketplaces, went to JSON, METROPLUS, CityMooD, PARK & GO (Abdullah Sarikaya, Enes Akgul) and TAHMINSTER (Gulsah Kucukcan). PARK & GO developed a b2b car park application which finds all of the public and private car parks in Istanbul and also provides the reservation options before arriving to the car parks. TAHMINISTER is an app which predicts the traffic density for any hour in a day in Istanbul.
And the award of the application closest to marketplace, Basaksehir Innovation and Technology Center Support, went to all participant teams.
After the award ceremony, the the winners also met the mentors of Startupbootcamp Istanbul; Gulsum Ciraci, Burak Yaman, Cigdem Toraman, Bugra Pamuksuzer and Cem Kemal Mimaroglu. The mentors advised the teams on how they could turn the apps into business.
It was a really very joyful and successful event. The photos taken during the Hackathonist and interview videos will be published on the website of the event (www.hackathonist.com) and also on Facebook page of the event (https://www.facebook.com/hackathonist?fref=ts) soon.
Here is the Hackathonist 2014 Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nze9paM40oA
Aslihan Kagnici, 03 June 2014
