Happy New Year! Its just 80 days until our first mini-hackathon of 2017, TADHack-mini Orlando at Catalyst Spaces on 25-26 March. We’ll also have a meetup on the evening of the 24th March (6-8pm) to help people form teams and network before the hackathon. Then on Saturday we’ll hit the ground running. With this hackathon the winners get a chance, if they want, to present at the massive Enterprise Connect event that runs on the 27-30 March. It will be great exposure to most major US enterprises in one place. If you want to accelerate your career or business, its a great opportunity. And don’t forget we also accept remote entries, so its not just in-person hacking, you can be in Africa, Europe, Asia or South America and take part.

I would like to thank Cisco Spark / Tropo, DataArt, Matrix, and Telestax for being the first sponsors on board. We have more in the pipeline, and will be announcing them in the coming months, we’ll likely have a prize pot of between $6-8k.   Being part of TADHack shows the sponsors are confident in their technologies, as they stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their competition in helping people see the power of adding telecoms to their apps, services and business – telecom app development.

Its not just telecom technology companies that get involved in TADHack, its any enterprise.  Just look how successful Carrefour was at TADHack Global in 2016, 24 hacks from around the world! Carrefour is a multi-national retailer, they’re #2 to Walmart.

You can see what we got up to last year in our 2016 TADHack review. And all the content (pitch videos, pictures, and weblogs) can be accessed here for: 2016, 2015, and 2014.

Often people are intimidated by a hackathon, worried about not having a ‘good idea’. In practice most winners do not have good ideas, instead they have a problem and use telecoms to help solve that problem. When I chat with people about taking part in TADHack, an excuse offered is “I do not have good ideas,” my response is always the same, “Do you have problems in your life? (we all do) Just pick one that matters to you and think about how telecoms can help solve that problem.” It really is that easy. TADHack winners range from 15 year old school kids to 50+ year olds with no coding experience.

I want to emphasize, TADHack is for Everyone. Whether you’re a hacker, hustler or hipster (developer, business-type or designer); TADHack has something for you. Please register here, and you’ll learn about adding programmable telecoms to your apps, services or business; be able to share your experiences with others; do some “coding”; and potentially create a winning hack! And by hack we do not mean breaking into IT systems, we mean prototype a solution to your chosen problem 🙂

See you in
Orlando in March when the weather will be warm and sunny.