Image: James Kennedy NI/Shutterstock
Its shipbuilding prowess during the industrial revolution was unparalleled, but can Belfast hack the internet of things? Yes, it can.
Northern Ireland’s (NI) tech community is being encouraged to join forces for a 12-hour hackathon devised to better the region through the internet of things (IoT).
Hack The Hub 2017 will take place on Saturday 29 April at 112 Donegall Street in Belfast. It will be hosted by Xcell Partners at Belfast’s first start-up co-working space, home to NI’s start-up programme Propel and tech accelerator StartPlanetNI, and is powered by Deloitte Digital.
‘Through creating this platform of open innovation, it will allow us to showcase some of the homegrown talent within the tech community in Belfast’
– CONOR GRAHAM
The initiative is being undertaken by Gillian Colan-O’Leary, marketing consultant and organiser of IoT Alliance events, and Conor Graham, a Deloitte Digital developer and founder of Nigma, a student developer community based in Belfast and Dublin.
Building on last year’s success, Hack The Hub will be working with Deloitte Digital, Amazon, Aepona, Microsoft, BDNA, ShopKeep, Totalmobile, Anaeko, First Derivatives and others.
The event will offer more than £5,000 worth of prizes to contestants who will be battling it out by demoing their prototypes to a panel of judges, comprising leading figures from the NI digital sector.
The reward for first place is a cash prize of £1,000.
A smart city has no limits
Last autumn, Hack The Hub attracted more than 80 contestants and 15 teams, with three applying for further funding.
“With Belfast being announced as a designated Smart City, we thought it would be the perfect way for the community to contribute to the pipeline of projects that are being put in place to achieve this,” said Graham.
“Through creating this platform of open innovation, it will allow us to showcase some of the homegrown talent within the tech community in Belfast, with the hope that some of the projects built at the hackathon can potentially be actualised and tackle some of the real-world problems that Northern Ireland faces.”
