First Vibrant Data PDX Hackathon a Success

Ward Cunningham and Jill Burrows discuss the app, Adaptive Mesh Networks

The first ever Vibrant Data PDX Hackathon drew a crowd of talent to Portland's Thetus Corporation on June 2. About 90 participants, organizers and observers were on hand. After presentations about Vibrant Data and Market Disruption, nine teams formed to create apps. The theme was enhancing the asset value of personal data.

A total of $12,000 from sponsor Intel was awarded to team members on the top 5 teams as determined by the audience and judges Danielle Forsyth, CEO of Thetus, Steve Rosenbaum, CEO of PopArt and John Sherry, Director of Business Innovation Research at Intel. While the judges met, Ward Cunningham talked about his current project, Smallest Federated Wiki.


When deliberations were complete, the winner for the day was Healthy Insights for a mobile app and back end services that allow users to monitor many aspects of personal mood and behavior. Users own their own data and are able to release it to organizations for research and other benefits such as discounts on insurance. The team included mentor Mark Leavitt, a long time participant in Portland's Quantified Self Meet-Up group.

For many it was a first look at Thetus who hosted the event. The company co-founders, Daniell Forsythe and Roy Hall, along with many of their team spent the entire day making the group comfortable while participating as mentors and team members.

A meet-up will be scheduled for the coming month to revisit the apps that continue to be upgraded.

The Apps

In order of presentation the, apps conceived and created were:

Clutch (5th - $1000)

Team: Dave Barcos, Jeff Bunch, Yoan Buch

Clutch aggregates social connections across a user's networks to better find people who have similar interests. It is a more intention-based search service than traditional search.

Healthy Images (4th - $1000)

Team: Daniel Johnson, Justin Barry, Mary Anne Thygesen, Nate DeNiro

This app aims to aggregate health-related images and stories submitted by users to lower cost, improve quality and improve the experience of health care. This team believes citizens are an untapped resource for stories of public health.

Poncho

Team: Aaron Parecki, Amber Case, Anantha Deepthi Uppala, Ashley McCorcle

A team formed around the co-founders of Geoloqi and created a new use for that SDK. It's about staying dry on your bike commute by getting push notified of incoming bad weather. In one day, the team was able to create the app and put it up in an app store. Custom alerts and partnerships with employers are seen as possible upgrades. Thanks to Amber for also serving as one of the event mentors.

Ecommuter

Team: Bill Taylor, Peter Roome

This app connects you with a wider variety of travel partners and energy conscious commuting options. By sharing your personal commuting preferences and travel patterns with fellow commuters, sustainable vendors, and traffic experts, Ecommuter expands your commuting possibilities. Through accurate commuter matching and travel performance tracking, Ecommuter generates trusted recommendations for nearby ride share partners, provides discounts on convenient vehicle sharing services, and generates data to improve public transportation planning for your community. Simply select your preferences and Ecommuter helps you create a better commute and save the planet one trip at a time.

Adaptive Mesh Networks (Tied 2nd - $2500)

Team: Steve Scalpone, Jillian Burrows, Edward Irby

This is an app that would enable protesters to stay organized with via their cell phones outside the cellular network. Using Bluetooth and or WiFi. The technique would be a counter-measure to a repressive government turning of service during an uprising. Users can spread a message through a crowd by bumping their phones together. An initial demo was shown.

EMoo.me (Tied 2nd - $2500)

Team: Brennan Novak, Lisa Kleinman, Nicholas Hallahan

Expanding upon an ongoing project to track personal mood, this app brought in the feelings of the crowd during its demo. The audience shared its feelings during the presentation. Possible use cases could be in shows, classrooms and meetings.

Healthy Insights (1st - $5000)

Team: Amy Dorsett, Hall Harrison, Pamela Harrison, Mark Leavitt, Paul Speyser, Paula Gill, Richard Amerman, Steven Jonas

This is an app with roots in the Quantified Self community. It allows users to record many health related aspects of daily life - exercise, food, mood -- and share the data with friends and family. Users help each other create healthy trends. A possible benefit is to use the data for obtaining discounts in health insurance.

My Future Self

Team:  Dan Vizzini, Ed Borasky, Jason Stafford, Sean Penrith, Whitney Davis, Michelle Liebhardt

A team formed around two employees from EpicOnline.org, a company that promotes creating more effective college students. This app is about getting students in contact with opportunities using a personal database of student diagnostics, social network activity, educational data, workforce and salary data. It allows for employers to find students who fit work needs and empowers students to take on their own future. Ongoing development is planned.

Meebl

Team: Nick Jacobsen, Muki Hansteen-Izora

Meebl is a tool to analyze and view personal browsing history. It helps you analyze and visualize your surfing by time and category of site. It makes use of a public categorization of 30k different domain names. The initial demo showed analysis of one month's surfing.