THANK YOU!

THANK YOU!

After months of planning, the Pre-I/O Google Glass Hackathon is finally over, and I couldn’t have done it without the help of a bunch of people.

Sponsors

First, a huge thank you to our sponsors, who made this event both possible, and worthwhile for all of our participants.

Entangled Ventures was the first to step up, and basically underwrite the event. They secured a great venue, as well as contributing prize money. We wouldn’t have had much of an event without Entangled. Thank you, Entangled!

The Google Glass team paid for the food for the event. Having the food covered was a huge help, as it freed up ticket sales to go to other things like swag and prizes. It also gave me some assurance that no matter what the ticket sales ended up being, we would be able to feed people. Additionally, they provided some really cool Glass swag, that everybody loved! Thank you, Google!

Metaio also pitched in for food, taking care of dinner on Friday night and enough energy drinks to plow through the entire 24 hour event. They also offered an SDK as a prize, and gave out an SDK to a participant during the event. Thank you, Metaio!

HTC offered HTC One phones to each of the members of the winning team. In addition to prizes, Dario was on-site to help out during the event. Thank you, HTC!

Wearable Technologies Conference contributed prizes, in the form of two tickets to their conference, as well as a cash prize. Thank you, Wearable Technologies Conference!

GGDevCon offered a ticket to their conference as a prize. Thank you, GGDevCon!

NotionKit gave all of our participants access to their beta tools for prototyping and previewing Glassware. Thank you, NotionKit!

Judges

Next, I would like to thank all of our judges, for carving out the better part of their Saturday to come and watch presentations, deal with technical issues, and work out who the favorites were. Thank you, Kim Jacobson, Josh Salcman, Allen Firstenberg, and Kevin Adler!

Organizers and Helpers

Finally, there is one last group that was instrumental in making this event happen. Without these people, there would have been no hackathon.

Lawrence Wong and Joseph Wei, were the first people who I contacted about the event, and both contributed lots of insight, advice, and connections to sponsors.

Kevin Adler, who was instantly excited about it and started brainstorming ideas with me. He suggested that education technology would fit as a theme, along with Glass. Kevin thought that his company, Entangled Ventures might be a good fit as a sponsor. He also, through Entangled, secured the space, and helped on a lot of the major planning items.

Next, a few standout organizers, Libby Chang, ‘Katy’ Hsin-yi Berg, Trish Whetzel, and Dario Laverde all provided lots of helpful input, connections to sponsors, and were instrumental in figuring out all of the details that end up making or breaking an event. I also need to make special mention of Katy, since she was there for nearly the entire event, and anytime we needed someone to make a food run, or to help work the door, she volunteered. She did more work than I did for this event!

Then we had some people who were more active at the event itself, giving up large chunks of time to be available for helping with either technical questions, or making sure that there was coffee. Allen Firstenberg, GDE for Glass, made himself available to answer people’s questions (and helped as a judge), Shannon Fiume was both answering technical questions, and making sure that we had enough coffee for people, and (Ivan Yudhi)[https://plus.google.com/+IvanYudhi] was also helping out during the event making sure that people had what they needed to be productive for the long overnight stretch. This was in addition to the organizers who I’ve already mentioned, who were all doing lots of work, either staying overnight to help out, or doing food runs.

Both Bruna Maia and Kat Otto from Galvanize made my life easier, by being there for almost all of the event, and helping out with logistics issues like an occasional WiFi issue, keeping the place relatively clean, and making sure there was music or AV help when we needed it.

I also need to mention John Scott and Jeff Bond who were both attendees, but pitched in a lot during the event.

The rest of the participants were also all really great people. We asked them to help us out with a few things and they delivered. There was no drama, no complaints, no hassles, I almost felt a bit guilty that I had it so easy.

A huge thank you to everybody who was involved, and/or participated!