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Culture, DevStack

The high value of hackathons

Ed Hintz Ed Hintz
Ed Hintz
June 9, 2015
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Why would successful people travel great distances and give up a perfectly good weekend, only to participate in a caffeine-infused 24 hours of creating, designing, planning, coding and presenting at a hackathon? Why do companies like Bandwidth spend so much time and resources to host a hackathon?  It comes down to the high value of hackathons that innovators love:

  1. Creating new things
  2. Learning new technologies
  3. Building relationships with other innovators.

TADHack 2015 is a specific hackathon being held worldwide June 13-14 and hosted in Raleigh by Bandwidth that brings together communication innovators.  People in this industry love creating software and services to make it easier, more convenient, and cheaper to communicate.  Truly Wireless is one such innovator that was born out of a hackathon.  TADHack provides a place where like-minded professionals can create the next great communications app quickly by using cloud services like the Bandwidth Application Platform.   The Bandwidth Application Platform’s APIs  and Mobile SDKs make it easy to create new mashups of voice and messaging with any web site and mobile application.  Pick from the PHP, Java, C#, PHP, Ruby, Node, Objective-C, or Android SDK’s to create an app using your teams existing language skill set.

Hackathons are also about learning.  At TADHack, the industry best will be on hand to show you how to do things like make phone calls in the browser over the PSTN using WebRTC.  How to setup a SIP client to make and receive VoIP phone calls from a variety of devices.  Learn how to add conferencing, voice mail, and transcription to your app using the Bandwidth Application Platform. You can also learn about privacy that comes from virtual numbers from the likes of AdHoc labs; or the privacy and control you can gain from using a self hosted communication environment like Telestax’s Restcomm.  Need to learn about the latest or upcoming federal requirements for Emergency (E911)?   You can learn that too at TADHack 2015 in Raleigh.

As rewarding as it is to create amazing applications using new techniques we learn at hackathons, the most rewarding part is building relationships with other innovators.  The relationships you build over an intense weekend of creative thinking, planning, coding, and presenting your amazing idea last long after the awards are given.  These relationships help spark additional ideas, business opportunities or partnerships.  They also help us understand our customers better, how we can improve the existing products and build new ones that will take our customers where they want to go.

Innovators attract other innovators.  It is natural that they would go to great lengths to spend time together to create new things, learn new technologies, and build relationships with other innovators.  That is the high value of hackathons and why the best participate.  It is why Bandwidth is hosting and sponsoring TADHack 2015 in Raleigh.