Odyssey hackathon 2019 — Short recap
This was our second time attending Odyssey (formerly known as Blockchaingers) hackathon. Last year we managed to win the track “Digital Nation’s Infrastructure” with our self-conscious house solution. This year, the hackathon was not only focussed on blockchain. AI also played a big role. Because of this and to let more teams participate, the team limit had been reduced to 6 people. We decided to split up into 2 teams. This gave us the opportunity to invite Kurt Janssens from Brainjar to focus on AI and to spread our knowledge and ambition across multiple tracks (challenges).
💻 The hackathon
The Odyssey hackathon consisted out of 100 selected teams this year, spread over 12 different tracks: Fossil free future, Nature 2.0, Digital citizenship, Rethink retirement, International travel, Crisis and disaster management, Inclusive banking, Feeding the future, Scaling ecosystems, Digital nations infrastructure, Future of cargo insurance, Tokenizing the Odyssey ecosystem.
We chose the tracks “Feeding the future” ( sponsored by Nutreco ) and “Future of cargo insurance”( sponsored by TVM ). The track sponsors brought their industry knowledge and we brought our blockchain tool belts. This came together to create 2 awesome solutions.
📚 The preparation
Compared to last year, we actually did some preparations, besides setting up our boilerplates at least. It’s a hackathon so making everything up-front is no fun. But we did do some initial analysis and research on what the problems might be and how we could tackle them. It doesn’t matter how much analysis you do upfront, you only know for sure when you can actually speak with the track sponsors and Jedi’s ( a person with certain expertise walking around at the event) to create a solution perfectly fit for them.
We recently came aware of Spire, a space-to-cloud data & analytics company which has a constellation of 76 satellites in orbit. They collect AIS data for maritime domain awareness, ADS-B data for aviation tracking, and weather data. Since one of the challenges is insuring cargo, it seemed fitting to use their Spire Sense Cloud Vessels API. So, we reached out to Spire Maritime and they so graciously provided us access to use their full product suite which included Predict AI, a machine-learning feature capable of predicting positions up to 8 hours in the future.
👨👨👧👦 Our teams and their solutions
Team insight
Team insight developed a solution to bring supply chain transparency as a business case.
👉 Follow us here, on LinkedIn or Twitter to know when we publish a blogpost about this solution in more detail.
Team insured
Team insured developed a solution to bring premium costs down by focussing on risk management and creating transparency in the liability of cargo.
👉 Follow us here, on LinkedIn or Twitter to know when we publish a blogpost about this solution in more detail.
🏆 The award goes to…
Both teams came up with killer solutions. But so did the competition. Team Insight was able to make it as the runner-up for their challenge “Feeding the future”. Meanwhile Team Insured didn’t quite make it in the final 3.
Admittedly, we were a bit annoyed after our win last year. But we’ll be looking forward to the next challenge.
You can read about the winning solutions here.
Big thanks to the organizers Odyssey for hosting a great event and taking good care of us once again. The Odyssey hackathons are always a unique experience.
Also kudos to TVM & Nutreco, our track sponsors who gave all the info needed to come up with our solutions. Their team of specialists stood by us to inform us about the challenges in their industry.
Last but not least, we would like to thank Spire Maritime who allowed us to use their API during the period of the hackathon. And of course Brainjar for participating in the event with us.
