January 10, 2014 - Ten Thousand Dollar Hackathon Win

January 10, 2014 -

 

Mark Scheel, president of Digital Construction organized a team of Denver, Colorado engineers who won a Las Vegas, Nevada hackathon, the essay below is that story as told by Mark.

 

Ten Thousand Hours, Ten Thousand Dollars - a story of Google Glass, Robotics, Hackathon wins, fun, friends and more

 

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis immortalize the Malcolm Gladwell concept from his book Outliers in the rap song Ten Thousand hours. In the book Gladwell claims that experts become experts after ten thousand hours of dedication. The Beatles, Wayne Gretzky and other idols of mine are listed as examples. Macklemore, who's music I LOVE sings "The greats weren't great because at birth they could paint / The greats were great cause they paint a lot". The song mentions trigonometry, great artists and standardized testing, its smart, cutting, and frankly, brilliant. So, lets give a pass on some grammatical liberties.

 

Maybe It resonates with me because I have so often been surrounded by brilliance. I went to far away schools where I was never the smartest kid in the room. I grew up in a small town with an unusual soccer team, we had freakish talent and rivaled much larger communities. I was on the travel all star team, but in my bubble, I was not the best. The idea that hard work can prevail against innate talent is a powerful one for me. Like Neo, in The Matrix, I too believe in making my own destiny.

 

It's controversial, but Gladwell's thesis is that we make our own expertise through countless--ten thousand sometimes--hours dedicated to our chosen craft.

 

It was a wonder for me, then, this past weekend to participate in the AT&T M2M hackathon. The event was held at the Palms Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, NV. The team I organized flew in from Denver, CO and there was a performance by--you guessed it--Macklemore! 130 teams gave presentations to a panel of judges, after a weekend of hacking.

 

In many ways our ability to execute was like all those "overnight successes" you realize took years to make happen. This was my fourth time at the event. The Android app was certainly not my first. The Google Glass integration built on expert level training I have done around the country, and my hours and hours of answering questions about Google Glass on Stack Overflow. The robotics magic was built on skills I taught myself in 2013. My ability to talk in front of a crowd, even, is something I used to struggle with. My efforts improving my skill in that area was just another piece of the puzzle--and presentation coaching this year from AT&T and Intel executives certainly didn't hurt!

 

Even the ability to handle pressure, and quickly iterate software forward is something some of the team had honed in countless hours working together on high pressure projects.

 

So many techincal pieces had to fall into place and work for our project to succeed, and when it did, when that Google Glass spin led to a servo motor rotation and the camera stream showed up, our grins and high fives could not have been more genuine.

 

Finally, after we presented, and hours and hours of more presentations, the winners were announced. Tired, emotionally wrenched, hung over even, we waited. Then, Alex Donn of AT&T announced the winner of the M2M hackathon ... Team ReVeAL.

 

We whooped, we high fived, we couldn't believe we had done it. In a whirlwind 60 hour period in Las Vegas. We had come, we had seen and we had conquered!

 

This annual event has become such a special time of year for me, and this year was no different. There were geeky laughs in the soldering tent, hacking all night, and close collaboration with the crew at Axeda and AT&T. The team that organized the 2014 AT&T Developer Summit did an incredible job.

 

A VIP Tiesto experience at Hakkasan, over the top dinners, open bars, and incredible so cheap I'll pick up the tab meals (I'm looking at you Hot and Juicy!) and of course the Macklemore concert. We even got to see our friends (and 2013 M2M winners) from Orbotix at their incredible CES booth, showing off Sphero. 2014 was a blast!

 

I already can't wait for the AT&T Developer summit of 2015.

 

Happy New Year to all, may you find a passion this year, pursue it and have fun in the process.

 

Some pictures below ...

 

 

This is ReVeAL (Remote / Vision / Assistance / Language) ... its a robotic camera that can pan and tilt in two axes. You control the movement with the tilting of your head while wearing Google Glass. In addition, our project uses AT&T API's to convert Speech to Text and send Text Messages. We also did language translation. Our primary use case was a well worker in Latin America getting support from an engineer in Texas. The engineer can control a remote camera, dictate instructions in English and they arrive in Spanish on the worker's cell phone, in seconds. The stream of the camera can be seen in Google Glass. Special hat tip to J3 who made the TRON-tastic interface that overlays the camera stream and helps the user re-position the camera with head movements. It's incredible!

 

 

 

About to go on. We had some bad A/V luck and finally our third presenting station worked. Third time was the charm! This was the stage Macklemore later played.

 

The early bird gets the worm, after a couple hours of sleep in the suite, back at it, before almost any other teams had arrived (special hat tip to Orbotix who did have engineers working through the night on their project)

 

Late night in the soldering tent, night owls get worms too.

 

 

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