Put a bunch of innovators, developers and designers in a room, cranking away on fixes to some of the world’s monumental energy and sustainability problems for 30 hours, and what do you get?
The first weekend of April, entrepreneurial-minded Bostonians will band together to take a bite out of the big issues addressing energy, waste, water, transportation, food for the Boston Cleanweb Hackathon.
The three day event, hosted at Greentown Labs, kicks off on Friday at 5:30 p.m. with a party hosted by last year’s champs, CrowdComfort, a startup creating the first crowd-sourced thermostat (they’re debuting the device, too). Attendees will sip and nibble on snacks provided by the event’s generous sponsors – Flour Bakery + Café, Boloco, Legendary Restaurant Group and Union Square Donuts – before a brief orientation, including a weekend overview and opportunity to pitch their ideas and split up into teams.
Come Saturday morning, however, the hacking will be in full swing. Attendees will arrive at 8:00 a.m. and get started creating a web application of their choice that addresses energy and sustainability problems plaguing the world. Teams are at will to use web, data analytics and mobile technologies to create fresh code to be assessed by the event’s celebrity panel of judges on Sunday.
This year’s judges include: Alicia Barton, CEO of MassCEC; Cort Johnson, co-founder of Terrible Labs; Vinit Nijhawan, Managing Director of the Office of Technology Development at Boston University; Barun Singh, founder and CTO of WegoWise.
And there’s a lot at stake. We got confirmation that the pitch prizes begin at $5,000 – a major perk to the ultimate prize of solving an energy problem. But it doesn’t stop there. Sponsors, including MassCEC, EnerNOC, CrowdComfort, Genability, EnergySavvy, WegoWise, Greentown Labs, Hailo, Cleantech Open Northeast, NECEC Institute, Instacart and Enigma, continue to sign on and providing more swag to sweeten the deal.
Want more info? Check out the Cleanweb Hackathon’s site here.
