Newbies Guide to TADHack

TAD-HACK-squareIf you’re new to TADHack, a newbie, this weblog is for you!

Firstly, the sponsors making TADHack possible are: Apidaze, hSenid Mobile, Huawei, Nexmo, Oracle, Solaiemes, Telestax, Tropo, Truphone, Ubuntu / Canonical; technology partners Appery.io, Metaswitch and Voxbone.  Check out the developer resources, there’s lots of free stuff to play with, and on the TADHack weblog they provide useful help and advice.

TADHack is about helping developers add communications into their apps, services or business processes.  Comms is proving quite popular as real time communications service AddLive was just bought by Snapchat, and we’ve all seen the crazy valuations of comms apps like Whatsapp and Viber.  TADHack has brought the whole of the communications industry together to help developers add real-time communications to their projects.

Each sponsor has two $1k prizes to allocate to the hacks of their choice.  Each Satellite also has one $1k prize to allocate, in addition to any local prizes.  And we have one Humanitarian Theme prize of $1k curated by Diggz from GWOB.org.  Bottom-line, there are lots of chances to win, so get hacking on the sponsors’ technologies for your chance to win.

The main event is in Madrid.  In parallel we have satellites running in Chicago in the USA, Colombo in Sri Lanka, Pune in India, Kuala Lumpur in Mayalsia, and Manilla in the Philippines; you can check them out here.  Developers around the world can join in.  AND even if you can not make it to any of any of these locations we accept remote entries for the hackathon.  We want as many ideas as possible.

Check out all the free stuff in the Developer Resources, you can start hacking now, and don’t forget to register.  If you have any questions, just ask the sponsors’ communities, don’t worry they’re friendly and a great help for building your hacks and generating ideas.  Seriously, they want to help you build great hacks on their platforms, so ask them.

Here is the Madrid agenda, the satellites have their own agendas, which run in parallel with that of Madrid, given the limitations of timezone differences.

On Friday June 6th, Day One of TADHack, is focused on presentations AND hacking.  We have great keynotes from Mark Shuttleworth and James Tagg.   The morning session from 10:30-12:30 will be streamed live over the internet for anyone on the internet to view, and will shortly after be available for off-line viewing.  The afternoon sessions in Madrid focus on education, networking, and hacking.

On June 7th, Day Two of TADHack the focus is networking, hacking and then pitching (5 minutes max) the hacks which will also be streamed live over the internet.  The pitches from the satellites and remote entries must be recorded and uploaded to YouTube to get around the time differences and also to minimize risk as we have many hacks to present in a limited time in Madrid.  The Satellites will also have their own local judging and awards.

Once the hacks are pitched the judging will be finalized and the prizes awarded, again streamed live.  Even if you do not win a prize your pitch will still be on the TADHack site for everyone to see.  We have Telcos Supporters Celcom, Telstra, Truphone, and US Celular all looking to trial hacks from TADHack.  The bottom-line is at TADHack we want to create Telecom Application Developer millionaires, and we’re going to try our best to promote you.