WTH*** What The Hack!!!
The last week of June, an incredible group of 20 students and developers between 17 and 32 years old came to 112 Avenue de Wagram for a unique challenge. For most of them it was the first time that they were participating at a Hackathon. Girls and boys from 16 cities all around the world flew to Paris to take part at SIGFOX’ first #SummerHack, a full week of Hackathon on IoT.
The aim of this Hackathon was to discover young talents to join the Hacking House program in September this year by challenging them on a few things:
- To work as a team and practice the real team work
- To learn a new technology that they had never knew before
- To solve a real world problem by creating a prototype at the end of the week with available resources
Like a little world: We had participants from 10 countries and 16 cities of: Lyon, Lima, Tallinn, Caen, Eindhoven, Toulouse, Brussels, Bogota, Mumbai, Copenhagen, Paris, Tirana, Madrid, Lanton, Lille, Vitry sur seine.
A brief summary of the week
Thanks Jay for this meme :)
DAY#1: On Monday morning, June 25th, we kicked off the SummerHack. Sigfox’ CEO, Ludovic le Moan did the opening with an inspiring speech. Then Raouti Chehih and I presented the Hacking House and the program of the week.
Aurelien Lequertier made an overview of Sigfox technology and details of different materials. José Garbriel Marcelino and Alexis Susset, two of our badass ambassadors shared their lovestory with Sigfox and what they do.
In the afternoon, we focused more on partners solutions by SimpleHW, ST, and Wisebatt, followed by some technical workshops.
Louis MOREAU from Sigfox Foundation and Antoine de Chassey from the IoT Agency presented the challenge projects.
Then it was participants turn to get the mic and pitch their ideas. They each had 30 seconds to pitch and then needed to join forces and create teams of 3 or 4. Finally 5 teams were made to work on the following projects:
- Sigbeat: an alert device to help people in critical situation.
- Off-Track: a tracker for hikers to stay on the road with gamification
- ForestGuard: a forest fire monitoring solution
- Panoptik: a cheap asset tracking device for trucks
- QuakeRun: an earthquake notifier device
You can find all teams pitch decks here.
DAY#2: The second day was when teams really got started working on the projects and focus on how to solve the problem.
Some of our Toulousian colleagues and partners also joined us to mentor teams on different topics such as Sens’it and SimplePack.
DAY#3: The thirds day’s aim was to create the very first prototype fast and dirty. Christophe Fourtet, Cofounder of Sigfox, and the Radio Mozzart according to Ludovic, mentored the teams.
DAY#4: Fourth day was to finalise the prototype and start working on their presentation. We made a “crash test” for each team to make sure they have not forgotten any important aspect. This included asking them questions on their business model, market opportunity, distribution channels, technology feasibility…
DAY#5: The last day was the most critical one. We had a very tight timing. In the morning we made mock test for teams and gave them feedback. Then we had the tech check to make sure all goes as planed and there won’t be an issue for their demos. At 3PM sharp we started the final pitches and ended the day with a closing ceremony.
Results
After a very tight competition among participants, three first teams ranked as follow:
- First Place: Off-Track, the hikers tracker, who used Snips to add gamification to their solution. They went very far by creating a cool trailer, a website and a nice logo. This was the great job done by Matthias from Belgium, Nassim from Lyon, Jay from Netherlands and Andi from Albania.
Their main strength was a great technical team and a complete skill-set. They managed to do a lot in a short time. They were also the most experienced compared to some younger teams. Even though that Jay needed to leave earlier they stayed focus and nailed it. They won 2000€ plus the access to the Hacking House. I’m very excited to see how many of them will join in September in San Francisco!
“Sigfox Summer Camp made me feel at home in Paris. It is like a family reunion for technology!” , Jay
2. Second Place: Panoptik, a truck tracking device and the only Full French team. While Adrien, who was an entrepreneur and quite busy with meetings, and Maxime, who was working on remote, Esther was mostly arriving early in the morning, working on her algorithm. But the quality of their pitch was so awesome! They actually proved how you can work on Slack and by distance like a real pro! They won 1000€ and a shortcut to the Hacking House application.
3. Third Place: QuakeRun, the earthquake notifier, made it to the 3rd place. This was a real surprise from many aspects that how the youngest team with Cesar 17, Ranak 20 and Saad 24 years old did such an amazing job for their pitch. Although only a few hours before we were all worried about their situation. If fact their secret of success was to keep believing in their idea and stay united together in their team. I’m sure they learned a lot from their experience and that they didn’t come all the way from Peru, India and Berlin without reason! They won 500€ and the shortcut to join the Hacking House program.
“You should never give up, even when you have been defeated”, Cesar.
Jury
We chose a mix jury with Technical, Business and Marketing profiles to cover all the selection criteria:
- Team
- The solution and the level of innovativeness.
- Demo and the presentation
- Technology and the level of complexity
- Number of connected devices
- Market opportunity
Pictures speak better than words
It was a hell of a week! This whole week for sure was not only a challenge for participants but also for our staff. As a confirmed event organiser, for me the #SummerHack stayed very challenging. It was itself like Hackathon as I needed to organise many things in a very short period of time and hacked so many internal and external processes in order to make it happen! But thanks to a great team and exceptional humour of participants it happened at the best of it!
Also some Startup Weekend ice-breakers that I had copied, a Magician friend who stopped by our office, and a bunch of Nerf addict coworkers who have a set of 15 guns around the open space, made a full fun week our of it!
What’s next?
Stay tuned for the opening of the Hacking House in September. If you are around the Bay area, join us to celebrate the kick-off with a great team of “DREAMERS WHO CHANGE THE WORLD”.
To know more about the program: www.thehackinghouse.com
Follow us on social media: @TheHackingHouse
Contact us at hey@thehackinghouse.com.
