LAUNCH Hackathon and South By GoLab post-show roundup

It has been a very busy last couple of weeks here at the Plantronics Developer Connection!

What have we been up to?

First off, the Plantronics Developer Connection was a sponsor of the first-ever LAUNCH Festival Hackathon! 218 teams and 580 hackers gathered together for 48 hours. The winning hackathon project received $100,000 in development funding, which was pretty exciting. Check out the Hackathon awards on YouTube here.

We had two teams use the Spokes SDK in their solution and competed for the special Plantronics Developer Connection prize at the LAUNCH Hackathon. Congratulations toPooran Prasad for winning the Plantronics prize! Pooran created a Call Center app called Day. Day incorporated the Spokes “Caller Id” function to do a reverse look-up from a database and give a screen pop which included user created notes and other information about the caller. Pooran was a one-person team and did a great job in creating a fully working project in the time allowed. It was also great to see that he was able to use the most excellent “Spokes SDK 5-Minute Quick-start blog!” to get started, um, quick! Pooran also really took advantage of the help that our main man Lewis was able to give out, as Lewis was attending the hackathon to give technical support. Let that be a lesion to all you future hackathon participants. If a sponsor is giving out a prize you are shooting for, make sure to get lots and lots of advice from the folks at the sponsor table. Pooran did this, and it really showed in his final project. Congratulations again Pooran!

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View from our Sponsor Table at the LAUNCH Hackathon.

The second project that came out of the Hackathon was from Mark Erickson, CTO of Creative Worx. Mark’s application was called Use My Words and was designed to capture day to day voice data for later use by Parkinson’s patients as their condition worsens. Mark had a very innovative UI and his application also used the Plantronics Voyager Legend UC to not only capture voice data, but to automatically launch the program when a user was close to their computer by using the Spokes “proximity” feature. Neat!

We look forward to working with both Pooran and Mark in developing their apps further.

Another cool thing that came out of the hackathon was this nifty blog post titled “Plantronics to Firebase integration sample – JavaScript” The good folks at Firebase were at the table next to us, and Lewis decided to take up their “create an app in five minutes” challenge as posted on their site. Next thing you know, he was able to create a little demo which took the worn/not worn events with timestamp and inserted them into Firebase store when user puts on/takes off their Plantronics headset. Check the blog post for the full code sample and details.

All and all, it was a very exciting event for us and it was great to be able to participate in such a high quality and important hackathon as the one put on by LAUNCH.

South By Golab.

Ok, this blog post is getting a bit long! Are you still with us?

I hope so, because I want to tell you about a very cool event the Plantronics Developer Connection sponsored called “South By Golab”

South By Golab was one of those “unofficial” SXSW events you hear so much about these days. The Plantronics Developer Connection was able to partner with Golab Austin, the premier co-working space in downtown, to sponsor a “Smarter Working” party. This event was a huge success and we were able to set up demo stations at Golab to demonstrate all of our Application Partner appsas well as tell folks about the Plantronics Developer Connection site itself. Folks love Plantronics, but not many of them know about the Developer Connection yet, so it was really great to be able to talk to all the techie and developer types that came through that night. Three cheers for Golab Austin and thanks for letting us sponsor your awesome event!

Even though we only flew in for the weekend to sponsor the South By Golab party, we were able to also score a great interview with the hip folks at GoNews Austin at their launch event. Not only that, but we had a nice Sunday Brunch with some Santa Cruz locals who are launching Tomfoolery Inc and on the way to the brunch we did an interview for the SXSW TechCab. Of course the silent disco we stumbled upon late Sunday night was really cool also, but we will have to save that story for another day… Image may be NSFW.
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All and all we had a great time in Austin as well as at the LAUNCH Hackathon! We really enjoyed talking to all the folks we met and showing them the cool stuff we have going on here at Plantronics.

Here are some random photos for you to give you a flavor of our adventures in Austin!