My experience at Junction 2017

Rhea Philip
Sep 6, 2018 · 3 min read
Junction 2017 at Dipoli, Espoo, Finland

Europe’s biggest hackathon with over 1500 hackers from 96 nationalities all around the world. I sent my application back in September after hearing the interest from my local entrepreneurship hub — Business Kitchen. Business Kitchen is an amazing collaboration that is setup in universities to promote the startup environment. More coming about that in another post where I will be talking about our collaboration with Nokia (yes, the one-well-known Finnish phone company — now converted into network business)

The hackathon ran from Nov 24–26th, 2017, at Dipoli in Otaniemi, Espoo part of Aalto University in Finland. This is my 2nd time at the same venue, I was here earlier attending DASH 2017 (more about that here).


This was an all expense paid event, thankfully the organizers at Junction arranged transportation for students coming from Oulu and Jyväskylä, as well.

My journey started on Friday, November 24th at 7AM from my university and reaching the Espoo at 4:45PM. During the journey, I met exchange students from Romania, Kazakhstan, Bangladesh, Belarus and South Korea that were studying in Oulu. My bus buddy was a guy from Finland, graduated from Industrial Engineering (just like me!), who is running his own start-up. We had some great conversations over Finnish politics, businesses, taxes and the generic Finnish start-up culture. My plan was to catch up on sleep in the bus, but I was glad we had some interesting conversations.

It was -15 in Finland around that time and while I was freezing my pants, others were walking around with a long sleeve shirt. Apparently, in Kazakhstan temperatures get to -45ᵒC with dry air during winter — that’s why they found Oulu very livable.

Main entrance to the event at Dipoli

I was part of the Finnair- Mobility track. The challenge was to create personalized offers for Finnair’s customers. Finnair is like Air Canada for Finn’s. After speaking further to the representatives involved, they wanted to expand Finnair into Asian markets. Their greatest selling point was the shorter flight times and better schedules.
Our solution to this problem was to create an application that retrieves social media information about individuals using the semantic model of natural language processing (Gavagai API) — view the likes, read comments and posts to extract relevant preferences from the user. Using this keyword search, we can run a keyword analysis on websites such as TripAdvisor and Eventbrite to match the social media information along with the travel destinations.

Obviously, cool idea — but we didn’t have enough time and talent in our team to fully see it through. Thus, we created a minimally viable solution focusing more on the user interface. The idea in hackathons is that you have 5 minutes to impress judges who are not wholly interested in the backend aspect of your application.


Here is where Junction is different, usually you have judges come to your table to hear ideas. But at Junction, YOU have to attract the judges. Moreover, there are ‘hidden judges’ who are and look like students. Be mindful that if you want to be recognized, you have to SEEK the judges.

There was also not a lot of food options during the entire weekend, so be mindful of that. Your best bet is X Burger — a food truck that serves €4 burgers.


Overall, the hackathon was ~meh, not as exciting as I thought. Would have had a better experience if I knew the above. But I met exciting people and learned lots of new things — rate my weekend 8/10.

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