Reviewing 5 years of TADHack

TADHack is a series of hackathons that run around the world to help people learn about the latest Internet, IT, and Telecoms technologies; and most importantly use those technologies to solve problems that matter to them. In this weblog we review 5 years of TADHack, summing up its achievements from around the world.

To quote Barbara Mikulski, “Each one of us can make a difference. Together we make change.” We’re focused on improving people’s lives around the world using technology, through helping everyone who takes part in TADHack.

One of TADHack’s founding principles is diversity. We were one of the first hackathons to encouraged anyone to take part, not just coders. TADHack has proven year after year that diverse teams win, and then go on to make their ideas reality, and change the world for the better. We’re extending TADHack into support skunkworks projects in 2019, more on that soon, to make it easier for even more people to get involved.

We want to share with you some of TADHack’s achievements in the past 5 years, since the first ever TADHack Global in June 2014 to the recent massive TADHack Global 2018.

We run 2 types of hackathon.

  • Once a year we run TADHack Global were 20-30 locations run in parallel around the world. Usually sometime in October. Over 1000 people get involved. Its an amazing experience to be hacking in Brisbane, and see people on the live video stream from Johannesburg in South Africa, Colombo in Sri Lanka, Popayan in Colombia, Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, Chicago in the US, London in the UK, and many more locations hacking with you. We also accept remote entries, so you can hack from the comfort of your own while watching the live streams. We’ve run 5 TADHack Global’s so far, with exciting plans for 2019.
  • We also run TADHack-minis, these are smaller hackathons of 50 to 100 people, with just one location, normally running just before a large conference. For example TADHack-mini Orlando 2019 just before Enterprise Connect in March. We’ve run 8 TADHack-mini’s do far.

TADHack has run across over 44 countries including: Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bulgaria, Brasil, Canada, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Turkey, UK, Ukraine, Uruguay, USA, Zambia. Sorry if I forgot yours.

And multiple cities in some of those countries, that’s over 100 cities involved in TADHack.

We’ve had over 11,400 registrations.

Well over 1000 pitches have been given at TADHack.

We’ve awarded over $250k in prize money. Plus an additional $100k+ in goodies and vouchers.

84 sponsors have made TADHack possible. And over 150 partners running locations, including 16 Universities.

This has created over 700 YouTube videos of pitches, with 200k+ minutes of viewing, some videos have been viewed over 5000 times.

We’ve had over 1 million tweet impressions.

11 companies have been founded by teams involved in TADHack.

We know of 46 people we’ve helped with their job search. And 100s more add TADHack to their resume and LinkedIn profile.

19 services have been launched hacks created at TADHack.

And people from ages 14 to 85 have taken part!

“Each one of us can make a difference. Together we make change,” by helping everyone involved in TADHack solve problems that matter to them using the latest Internet, IT, and Telecoms technologies.

Thank you to everyone who has taken part in TADHack over the past 5 years. We look forward to working with you in 2019. We’re working on some exciting plans for 2019 to help TADHack reach many more people and have a bigger impact within the countries that run a TADHack.

Best wishes for 2019.

TADHack-mini Orlando is scheduled for 16-17 March 2019

TADHack Global (website coming soon) is scheduled for 11/13 October 2019.