Pictured above is only a tiny sampling of the thousands of dollars worth of Swag: induction mats for telephones, headphones, brain-wave sensors, smart-watches, and all kinds of other sensors and cool gadgets had to be given away to the developers at the AT&T Developer Summit Hackathon.
It's a tough job, but someone has to do it.
TheHackerCIO is willing ....
But it's amazingly tiring: we spent nearly three hours listening to "lightening talks" and pre-qualifying them for the hardware give-aways. The contestants had to "show connection", as the lawyers call it, between what they were developing and the hardware. It wasn't enough to say, "I'm kind of developing something that sort of helps out in some nebulous, undefined way." When we got those, we had to turn the contestants away.
They need to firm up their concept. The Swag is there to support the development effort. Anything left over, would be given away, of course. And some judges were easier going than others. TheHackerCIO was pretty easy. There was another pre-qualifier who was a real bad-ass.
This Hackathon is centered around wearable technology. Sometimes you have to see this kind of thing to catch the vision. Or at least it's much easier. It always seemed toy-like to me, before. But now, I'm starting to get it.
At first, I was startled to see this machine at a Hackathon:
But if you're doing wearable technology, it makes perfect sense.
I Remain,
TheHackerCIO
